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12 digital fundraising trends for 2012 #5 Mobile App vs Mobile Web

Posted by Bryan on January 17, 2012

It was back in September 2010 that Wired featured the cover story  ‘The Web is Dead – long live the Internet’, explaining that the traditional means of engaging with data on the Internet by browsing pages on the World Wide Web was fizzling-out as we increasingly turned to Apps to make the connections and access the information we want. This demise being driven by the incredibly rapid adoption of Smartphones – with finger-driven smaller screens on which traditional web browsers typically offer a less than ideal user experience. More heat was added to the debate just last month when the CEO of Forrester Research presented an interesting argument at the Paris LeWeb conference for why the shift from Web browsing to what he termed ‘App-Internet’ is the next natural evolutionary step for all computing.

Based on the sustained hype around Mobile Apps over the last couple of years, including in the non-profit sector, you could easily be led to believe that this evolutionary step has already been made and that if you don’t have a Mobile App at the heart of your next digital campaign then you really can’t be taking digital engagement seriously.

However, the truth is somewhat different and, looking ahead to a year when supporter engagement through mobile digital devices will continue to grow in importance, it is important for non-profit marketers and fundraisers to understand that Apps aren’t always where it’s at for all of their digital engagement needs.

Mobile App use has certainly soared over recent years, but announcement of the Web’s demise remains somewhat premature based on the mobile usage data available. The first signs of the two approaching parity only came at the end of last year, when comScore released data showing the numbers of US mobile device subscribers using Apps just passing those browsing the Web on their device – at 44.9% (up 3.3% in 3mths) vs 44.4% (up 2.3% in 3 mths):

Interestingly, this data was taken by many of those in the App world as evidence that the war was over and Apps had won. But I read it somewhat differently – as the two are both still growing faster than any of the other uses listed (as an aside – you’ll see that texting is still growing apace too, so fundraising growth opportunities continue to be available there). For those interested in the equivalent data for Europe you can read comScore’s EU5 Mobile Benchmark Data for Sept 2011 here – which shows a similar picture

Examining other data helps shed some light on the growth seen in both mobile Web and App use, as it appears that at present consumers are actually using them for somewhat different activities:

If it’s online shopping (the closest category to donating) that you’re into then Mobile Browsers still apparently dominate, as they do for Search. It’s when it comes to users communicating with each other in the ‘Inform’ and ‘Connect’ categories that Apps take the lead (e.g. Twitter and Facebook Apps). This will undoubtedly change over time, with retailers launching App-based catalogues at the same time as HTML5 offers more mobile-friendly options for browser-based UIs – but for now there seems to be a clear Browser/App divide between Spending and Connecting.

With this in mind, when you reach the point of considering mobile opportunities and requirements in your digital fundraising planning this year – don’t just be led off blindly to invest your time and/or money on another charity App to add to the pile of rarely downloaded and even more rarely used vanity apps created over the last couple of years (I know there are some exceptions to this – but I’ve found them sadly few thus far). Stop to think about just what role a mobile Website might play in your strategy as compared to a Mobile App.

It may be that you need one, or both, or neither.

Because, of course, it’s also useful whilst in the midst of the whole Mobile Web vs Mobile App debate to remember that while both are growing apace, Mobile browsing still only makes-up a small proportion of all Web browsing – still under 10% according to recent data from Net Applications:

So perhaps you should begin by focusing on getting your main website and key landing pages performing better – and once that’s underway come back to the question of Mobile App vs Mobile Web?

This is the fifth of 12 posts that I’ll be publishing throughout January on trends I think will prove to be important for digital fundraising in 2012. You can find the previous trend post, on Microdonations, here.

Posted in Online Consumer Insight, Online fundraising, Smartphone Fundraising | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

12 digital fundraising trends for 2012 #4 Microdonations

Posted by Bryan on January 16, 2012

Last November marked the first birthday of Pennies, the microdonation scheme run by The Pennies Foundation enabling UK retailers to offer their customers the opportunity to round-up the price of a purchase to the nearest pound as a donation to one of a selection of charities. The date was marked with the news that Pennies had raised just over £250k in its first 12 months, through one million ’round-to-the-pound’ donations. At the anniversary celebration the Pennies Foundation Chief Executive was quoted as saying “Clearly it’s early days, but we believe that 2012 could prove a real turning-point for microdonations” and their confidence can only have been added to with the news earlier this month that they had passed 1.5 million donations and £366k by the end of 2011.

Incase you haven’t come across the term before, in this context ‘microdonation’ is a low value donation ‘embedded’ into activities or transactions that consumers are already undertaking. This type of fundraising is certainly nothing new but the growth in payment card use for ever lower value offline transactions, combined with the massive growth seen in ecommerce, is seen as offering the potential of a significant new voluntary income source based on a small proportion of the countless millions of transactions that happen every day having a small donation attached.

Certainly the UK Government believes that microdonations have real potential, with specific mention of it in their Giving White Paper released in May 2011 to showcase a range of initiatives aimed at helping stimulate a step-change in giving in the UK. In this they highlighted what they called ‘Round Pound’ schemes, such as Pennies as a key way to make it easier to give and “help overcome some of the biggest barriers to giving such as lack of spare time or money”.

By my reckoning, there are currently three different types of fundraising which seek to encourage embedded micro-donations in slightly different ways:

  • Affiliate Buying Schemes – where rather than you making a donation, a proportion of the affiliate premium earned by the shopping portal site you have chosen to shop through is given to the charity of your choice. Examples include the UK’s Give As You Live, which has raised over £2m since launch
  • Personal Nudge Schemes – this is a new example of microdonation fundraising that I came across last year when I read about Snoball over in the US. In this case you choose what event triggers your microdonations. It might be every time you go to your local coffee shop (triggered by a Foursquare check-in) or every time your sports team wins a match (using live links to sports stats), or whatever else you like. Then once you’ve set-up your triggers you can tell your social network about them, with the idea being that they’ll set-up the same triggers and the cumulative donations made will ‘snoball’

With the ongoing desire across the sector to find new ways to raise money online I have no doubt that interest in these schemes is going to grow this year. However, the big question for me is just how much the income generated is really going to grow over the next few years?

On its website the Pennies Foundation illustrates the income potential based on half of all UK payment card holders giving 8p per week – adding-up to over £89 million per year (not sure how they came-up with 8p/week). Certainly at that level microdonations would be a valid and very welcome addition to the UK’s annual donated income (which was estimated as £10.6bn in 2009/10). But it does feel like we have an awfully long way to go from the low £millions currently being achieved if we are going to see this sort of income coming through.

Clearly the technology exists to make microdonation giving one-click simple, and the ever rising volume of online customers shows that the potential market of donors is there (80% of UK internet users ordered goods or services online in 2010). But it doesn’t seem like the two are simply going to spontaneously combine to generate tens of millions in income without someone doing something to really get things moving.

Any bright ideas to help make microdonating really take off in 2012?

This is the fourth of 12 posts that I’ll be publishing throughout January on trends I think will prove to be important for digital fundraising in 2012. You can find the previous trend post, on Augmented Reality, here.

Posted in Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

12 digital fundraising trends for 2012 #3 Augmented Reality

Posted by Bryan on January 12, 2012

I came across this fun awareness campaign by youth breast cancer charity CoppaFeel! last month and it caught my eye, not just because it was described as “The world’s first augmented reality 3D boob billboards” but because it was one of the first examples I’ve seen of a charity making use of Augmented Reality in any shape or form.

Augmented Reality is a live view of something in the real world that is augmented by some form of computer generated overlay when it is viewed through a digital device, such as when viewed using the camera on your Smartphone or Tablet. The overlay might be an image, a video, data, or even an audio track.

In the case of the CoppaFeel! campaign when you view the poster through an iOS or Android device running the Blippar App, the image ‘leaps-out’ at you in a simple 3D form and you see, overlaid on the poster, buttons that you can use to interact with the ad. In this case it offered you the opportunity to give each of your boobs a name and then share them thus labelled with your friends on Facebook or Twitter – all in the interest of reminding women, in a fun and memorable way, to check their breasts on a regular basis.

To give you an idea of the resulting experience, you can see the original poster (left) and the ‘augmented’ poster (right) below (as viewed on my iPhone using the Blippar App). Or, for the full experience, just download the Blippar App to your smartphone and use it to view the original poster on the screen.

If you haven’t yet seen some form of augmented reality campaign it is highly likely you will do this year, as digital marketers capitalise on the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones to augment everything from billboards (pizza anyone?) and press advertisements (e.g. for Commonwealth Bank in Australia), to guide books (like this App from the Museum of London) and games (use AR to hunt invisible monsters!), and even coffee cups (like Starbucks  Christmas Cup Magic) and your humble pint of beer (Guinness in this case).

In a market research report released last month by US business research company Visiongain, it was estimated that use of Mobile Augmented Reality will increase exponentially over the next five years – to the point at which 25% of all App downloads will incorporate Augmented Reality functionality.

The potential for digitally augmented fundraising? Well what about a WWF poster where the snow leopard leaps out at you to get you to sponsor it? Or a Third World disaster press advertisement where you can see an overlay of a field clinic in action and interact with virtual buttons to donate? Or how about turning your supporter newsletter into an interactive 3D experience along the lines of the AR pop-up books developed by Helen Papagiannis?

Got any other great examples or ideas of how Augmented Reality can be used by fundraisers and non-profit marketers? Do share them by leaving a comment below.

This is the third of 12 posts that I’ll be publishing throughout January on trends I think will prove to be important for digital fundraising in 2012. You can find the previous trend post, on Strategic Blogger Outreach, here.

Posted in Online advertising, Online Campaigning, Online fundraising, Smartphone Fundraising | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

12 digital fundraising trends for 2012 #2 Investment in Strategic Blogger Outreach

Posted by Bryan on January 10, 2012

Over the last few years, charities have increasingly got to grips with establishing a branded social media presence and starting to collect and engage with ‘Followers’ of various types. However there is a significant gap in the majority of non-profit social media strategies, and that involves how fundraisers can effectively engage with some of the most powerful influencers in the online social media world – bloggers.

One reason for this gap may be that Blogger Outreach is managed by the Communications or Media Relations teams in your organisation. If this is the case, then offer to get the relevant person a coffee and book some time with them to talk through just what the Blogger Outreach Strategy is and how well fundraising is integrated into it. More likely, your organisation won’t have a properly developed Blogger Outreach Strategy. In which case work out who should have developed it, get them a coffee, and sit down to help them – ensuring that support for fundraising is baked-in from the outset.

Either way, even if you have to throw-in biscuits with the coffee, make sure you consider investment in strategic blogger outreach as part of your fundraising planning this year. If you don’t then you’re potentially missing some great opportunities to inject new momentum into your online fundraising and campaigning programmes.

One great example of what can be achieved through strategic blogger outreach was shared by A.J.Leon at the International Fundraising Congress in Holland last October. He told the story of his work with Global Hope Network International on a project to fund the provision of clean water for a Kenyan village called Ola Nagele, by getting 100 donors to join the ‘Extended Village’. Sounds like a typical project crowd funding appeal. But, in this case, rather than promote it through traditional online or offline channels, all promotion was by one professional mommy blogger who visited the project personally to share the experience of bringing water to the village with her 250k monthly readers.

You can see more about the project in AJ’s presentation here. But in short, the whole thing was funded before the blogger left the village to head back to the US. The key take-out from the story: As a donor the blogger could be worth $50/mth to the charity. But as a blogger with 250k monthly readers she could offer far more valuable support for its work by sharing the opportunity to donate with her readers in a uniquely compelling way.

Another example comes from Save the Children UK with their 2010 #Blogladesh initiative. This involved taking three of the UK’s leading mummy bloggers out to visit projects in Bangladesh to see for themselves the work the charity is doing and to report-back to their readers in support for the charity’s preparation for the UN MDG summit in New York. The Tweets, videos, photos, and blog posts sent live ‘from the field’ resulted in a 10m reach on Twitter, thousands of blog hits, 63k people signing Save The Children’s ‘Push for Change’ petition, and two meetings with Nick Clegg, the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister.

The charity followed this up in 2011 with #Passiton, where three bloggers followed the journey of a vaccine from a warehouse in the Mozambique capital right to the point it was given to a child in a field clinic. This time aiming to raise awareness and put pressure on the UK Government prior to the Global Vaccination Summit, and again with great results – 27m Twitter reach, over 200k YouTube views, and support from hundreds of bloggers globally. You can read more about it on Liz Scarff’s blog here.

I hope to hear of a lot more such examples over the coming months as fundraisers around the world see the potential of investing in strategic blogger outreach and come-up with ever more creative ways to work with bloggers as a way to engage online audiences with both campaigning and fundraising opportunities.

However, do note I use the term ‘strategic blogger outreach’. By which I mean properly planned outreach to specific bloggers with properly tailored content and engagement opportunities, and specific objectives that you can achieve together with them and their readers. If all you plan to do is email appeals to bloggers and ask them to say nice things about you then for both your and their sakes you’d probably be better off investing your time elsewhere.

Before you do anything blogger-related, for a fun take on how to avoid blogger outreach failure have a read of this post and related comments on Jay Dolan’s The Anti-Social Media blog.

This is the second of 12 posts that I’ll be publishing throughout January on trends I think will prove to be important for digital fundraising in 2012. You can find the previous trend post on Truly Personalised Video Thanking here.

Posted in Blogging, Online Campaigning, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

12 digital fundraising trends for 2012 #1 Truly Personalised Video Thanking

Posted by Bryan on January 9, 2012

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2011 was a bit of a quiet year here on Giving In A Digital World, as a combination of client work and house renovations took-up all the spare time I normally spend researching and writing posts. However, in response to a number of folks saying that they missed my occasional updates and ideas (which was really encouraging) I’m officially planning to get things back on track this year. Starting with what I hope will be a thought provoking short series on what I think will be 12 important digital fundraising trends for 2012. I’m aiming to post a few of these each week throughout the month of January – then we’ll have the whole of the rest of the year to see just how wrong I was!

First-off, something that I started to see fundraisers doing last year but which I think we will see a whole lot more of in the future: Truly Personalised Video Thanking. As an illustration of what I mean by this, take a look at the video above about charity: water’s 5th Anniversary donor thanking initiative, which has to be the gold standard in the art of digital thanking.

Of all the ways in which charity: water’s staff and volunteers personally thanked their supporters – telephone, letter, email, and video -  it is the YouTube thank you videos which have the most exciting potential to have impact beyond the immediate 1-to-1 thank you. Because when they’re done in such an authentic, enthusiastic, and fun way they become perfect shareable digital content. The sort of thing that I’d imagine lots of their supporters shared with their friends on Facebook, with the result that not only did the donor receive a uniquely personal experience of the charity: water brand, but so did everyone within their online social network. Great for driving both brand awareness and consideration.

The creation of these 250 short personalised videos clearly involved a lot of effort. But it is the True Personalisation that results from this investment of time and creativity that really makes them stand-out in a world where data-driven ‘mass-personalisation’ now just looks like so tired. And it’s this personal stand-out that makes them into content worthy of being shared through supporters’ personal social networks. Far more so than the sort of generic, well meaning but typically rather worthy videos that most charities send to their supporters.

Interestingly, telecomms. provider O2 also jumped onto the Truly Personalised Video trend this Christmas with their #o2santa Twitter and YouTube campaign. In response to a Tweet to @O2 with the hashtag #02santa, you received a completely personalised – and well adlibbed – YouTube video message from The Man himself.

To see what I mean, and how great Santa’s ad-libs are, here’s the Tweet I sent (I was prepping a workshop for WWF at the time, so they were front of mind) and the video message I got back:

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Now, by highlighting this form of supporter thanking I’m not saying that you should all grab video cameras or smartphones and make a fun personalised video for everyone on your database. However, there are some types of your supporters for which this might prove especially effective – perhaps if they are involved in sponsored events or community fundraising and so can share your video to thank all those who supported their personal fundraising activity.

At the very least, before releasing any form of online video content do think about whether it is likely to be something that your supporters will be keen to share more widely through their own networks, by asking yourself the following question:

Does it make good use of the digital opportunities available to really bring someone closer to your work; help them understand the impact their support will have; motivate them to give again; and make the experience of supporting such that they want to share it with their friends?

One last example to end with – which isn’t personalised beyond being originally sent to thank donors to a specific appeal, but which is wonderfully authentic and ticks all the right boxes – from child’s i foundation:

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If you come across any other good examples of other organisations using Truly Personalised Video Thanking do share them by leaving a comment below.

Posted in Online fundraising, Video, YouTube | Tagged: , , , , | 5 Comments »

UK online giving up 85% over 3 years – but still only 3.7% of charitable donations?

Posted by Bryan on September 20, 2011

Over the last few months a combination of client workload, a shoulder op, and a house renovation project have unfortunately left me no time at all for blogging. However, I have been keeping-up with my report and research reading, and last week’s release of the latest eBay/MissionFish report ‘Passion, persistence and partnership: the secrets of earning more online’ has finally got me back to my keyboard.

At 50 pages this free report is a lengthy but worthwhile read, combining recent research into general UK internet usage as well as online charity activity, together with advice on how to make best use of online opportunities and some thoughts on how things are likely to develop in the future.

What makes it all the more interesting is that it represents an update of a report first released in 2008, providing some insight into how things have changed over the last three years. Naturally a lot of the change reported relates to the explosion in Social Media activity seen over this period, but it is also good to see more organisations reporting that online activity is moving from the sidelines towards the heart of their supporter engagement programmes.

The one piece of data I was particularly interested to see was the proportion of charitable donations now reported as coming online, as this is a common question amongst organisations reviewing their fundraising activity and robust benchmark data is typically difficult to find.

Based on the nfpSynergy ‘Virtual Promise’ research data quoted in the report there was an 85% increase in the percentage of voluntary income that came from online between 2007 and 2010.

Now, 85% is a significant increase – even in the digital world where things tend to increase a lot, very quickly. However, this actually represents growth from just 2% to 3.7% of overall annual voluntary income – which somehow doesn’t seem quite so impressive.

For comparison, according to Blackbaud’s 2010 US Online Giving Report online giving in America represented around 7% of all voluntary income in 2010 – which is better, but still not an especially high proportion given the effort invested in promoting digital fundraising over recent years.

I suspect one reason for these disappointingly low contributions is the fundamental challenge of measuring the true financial contribution of all digital activity. Measuring one-off online donations made through your website should be easy enough, but what about direct debits started online. How many organisations allocate the subsequent years’ regular giving income back to their online income lines? Then there are the increasing volumes of donations made on other sites, from sponsorship income collected through JustGiving, MyDonate, etc. to the emerging growth of microdonations through sites like eBay (eBay checkout microdonations amounted to c£1.5m over the last two years) which might simply not be included when organisations report their ‘online’ income because they are not monitored by the main online fundraising team.

What do you think? Are charities under-reporting online giving or is online really providing less than one twentieth of all the UK’s voluntary income?

Posted in Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

GuideStar acquires both Social Actions and Philanthropedia

Posted by Bryan on March 18, 2011

Long-time subscribers to Giving in a Digital World may remember my previous posts about the online microphilanthropy initiative Social Actions (which aggregates thousands of microphilanthropic opportunities through one open source data set, making it easy to find opportunities to act in support of any cause you’re interested in) and the expert non-profit review and recommendation system Philanthropedia.

Between them, they represent two of the best examples of online philanthropic thought leadership in action that I’ve seen in recent years. So, it’s no surprise that non-profit information specialist GuideStar just announced that it has acquired both of them to add to its “growing knowledge base of tools, data and information designed to advance transparency within the nonprofit sector”.

Social Actions founder Peter Deitz revealed the next step in the Social Actions story on the Social Actions blog yesterday, explaining that “Feature enhancements that we previously described as ‘possible with sufficient resources’ will be developed, tested, and deployed more rapidly and integrated seamlessly into GuideStar’s existing toolset, resulting in a robust platform capable of leading many more people to meaningful and high-impact action on the causes they care about.” Exciting stuff! And well worth keeping an eye out for the next level of Social Actions activities over the next few months.

Philanthropedia’s network of experts and innovative proprietary research methodology, developed to help guide funding to high-impact organisations operating in specific cause areas, is also to be integrated into the GuideStar solution set so as to enhance the services it provides to donors in the US.

For more information on the acquisition you can read the full GuideStar news release here.

Posted in crowdfunding, Online Campaigning, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Beautiful Greenpeace crowdfunding site lets you buy a piece of the new Rainbow Warrior

Posted by Bryan on February 20, 2011

Crowdfunding websites that let you contribute to specific projects are nothing new, but anewwarrior.greenpeace.org launched by Greenpeace to generate funds for their new Rainbow Warrior has lifted the bar to a new level in terms of on-site experience.

The site opens with a great full screen video telling the story of the current Rainbow Warrior and the need for a replacement. Then you can take a look at the planned new vessel through an interactive 3d model and browse through detailed blueprints of the new ship to select items that you’d like to ‘buy’ to help fund its construction – anything from a Survival Suit at €800 to a €10 Toilet Roll Holder. All donors will receive a Certificate of Purchase and have their name added to a dedication wall on the ship itself.

Elsewhere on the site you can see personal stories from the Rainbow Warrior crew and view video of the latest stage of construction via a webcam at the dry dock in Germany. Social sharing opportunities are provided through Facebook and Twitter share buttons.

Overall, it’s a great user experience. Right down to the soundtrack becoming muffled if you drop beneath the surface of the sea to view the underside of the ship!

The only thing they don’t seem to have got right is the search strategy to help drive traffic to the site. I first heard about it on Twitter (thanks to @101reinier). But then when I wanted to show the site to someone else and tried to find it using Google it was nowhere to be seen. Even typing ‘New Rainbow Warrior’ didn’t bring-up the site, although it did return a wide range of news stories about the ship being built and a range of other Greenpeace fundraising landing pages like this one.

Posted in Uncategorized, Online fundraising, crowdfunding | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Haiti one year on – the view from an online donor’s doormat

Posted by Bryan on January 27, 2011

A year ago this month, along with millions of others world-wide, I donated online in response to the terrible earthquake that hit Haiti. However, rather than chose a single charity out of the wide range running appeals I decided to give £20 to each of the UK’s ten leading relief and development organisations to see just how the experience of being an online donor varied across the different brands.

And vary it certainly did. In some cases I was treated to truly engaging online updates on the way my donation was being used (particularly well done UNICEF and Oxfam), plus some fun and interesting new opportunities to engage (nice one ActionAid – for both your PoverTee day and Happy Bubble stuff!)

However, in other cases I’ve ended-up on the receiving-end of a seemingly endless series of direct mailings that might, at a push, appeal to my mum but frankly don’t do anything for me. I honestly don’t need a cardboard bookmark, or an Easter card, or a diary. I certainly didn’t need the twelve mailpacks that one charity has now sent me in less than twelve months – I’ll not say who you are, to spare your blushes, but you’re big and you should know better than just bunging a £20 online emergency donor into every cash appeal going!

To help illustrate the range of donor programmes I’ve ended-up on the receiving-end of, I’ve summarised the year’s online and offline communications in the following simple chart. It’s anonymised, but somewhere in there are each of the following: Oxfam, British Red Cross, Save the Children, Christian Aid, World Vision UK, Action Aid, Tearfund, CAFOD, UNICEF UK, and Plan International:

Now it’s not that I expect only to be communicated with online. Just because I subscribe to nice, fast broadband doesn’t mean that I’ve nailed-up my letterbox, and a few of the mailings I received were actually well targeted and effective. Like the three I’ve been sent by UNICEF: two about Haiti and one other emergency appeal. But I have to admit that I find few things more annoying than seeing a big A4 colour supporter magazine lying on my doormat, especially when it’s stuffed with irrelevant cross-sell materials like mail order catalogues. Having grown used to watching videos of the work I’ve helped fund and then clicking through to read the latest news in the project leader’s blog, an expensive looking magazine really doesn’t make me feel good about my donation – and don’t get me started on those raffle tickets!

Anyway, this is not intended to be a rant against charity mailings. I know first-hand just how wonderfully effective direct mail can be – when sent to the right people. I also know just how frustratingly ineffective email can be when you’re trying to generate donations – even from people who have started by donating to you online. However, what my experience over the last year has clearly highlighted is the vast difference in ways that ten charities, all essentially offering me much the same opportunity to change the world for the better, have chosen to develop a relationship following my first online donation.

So, from this unexpectedly diverse donor experience I’ve distilled a few key thoughts that anyone responsible for managing emergency online donor supporter journeys might just like to consider before the next disaster comes along:

  • Don’t immediately assume that emergency donors are particularly interested in your work beyond the emergency they’re responding to. They might be, or might grow to be over time. But in the first instance keep the focus of your communications on what you know to be their area of interest and only then see if you can get them to reveal what else they may be interested in hearing about. You might test emergency postal appeals, but don’t just mark them down for every mailing going in the vain hope that you might hit lucky. You just end-up looking wasteful and reducing the likelihood of them responding even when another emergency comes along
  • Do offer online donors the opportunity to receive their Supporter Updates or Newsletters electronically – and extend the same offer in every printed copy you send. It’ll save you print and postage and the engagement and response options are so much richer online anyway. However, I wouldn’t advise offering the opportunity to opt out of all postal communications – as well timed and targeted mail appeals can still work, even with hardened onliners like me
  • Do remember that many online donors are very willing to further their relationship with an organisation through some form of simple click-to-campaign advocacy action. But Don’t just hand over your emergency donors to your Campaigning team without ensuring that they have the opportunity to indicate whether they are interested in campaigning and/or opt-out of things they’re not interested in. One organisation in particular (again no name, but not the same as the bulk mailer chastised earlier) has an especially active Campaigns team who seem to delight in sending me emails about all sorts of things they are clearly very enthusiastic about – but who have never once stopped to ask me if I’m interested in what they do
  • Do consider how you might learn more about online donors at the point of their first gift and then use this information to guide their subsequent communications. Not necessarily through asking too many questions at the point of donation (although a strategically selected few might be useful) but simply through using your website tracking data more effectively. For example, one organisation I know has found that donors coming to them through Bing have a better repeat donation and upgrade profile than those from Google (I’m guessing because those who stick with Bing as the default on their IE browsers are perhaps older/less tech-savvy than the norm?)

Now, after an ‘interesting’ year on the receiving end of all of these donor communications I think it’s time for me to make a few calls – or preferably send a few emails – and see if I can get myself off some of these direct mail lists. It’ll certainly reduce the amount of recycling I have to do.

Posted in Email, Online Campaigning, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

AliveandGiving.com and a timely reminder about the importance of online reputation management

Posted by Bryan on November 14, 2010

I spotted a report in Third Sector, the UK nonprofit sector news weekly, that reminded me of discussions I’ve had recently with several organisations about the challenge of brand reputation management in our ever more online-informed consumer world.

The Third Sector report was about charities asking to be removed from a new online fundraising site called aliveandgiving.com, which launched last month and describes itself as follows:

“AliveandGiving.com is an innovative charity fundraising and comparison website that helps you find charities that you can trust. You can search for and donate to thousands of registered UK charities and easily access their financial information via their profile page, so you can be sure that your chosen charity is transparent and effective. The idea is not only to help you find a charity that you want to support, but also to reassure you that your money is accounted for.”

Central to the site’s proposition is that the profile provided for each charity listed also details the % of donated funds spent on the cause – based on data sourced from The Charity Commission for England & Wales. On this basis the site aims to deliver its users the promised comparative data through which they can find charities they can trust.

Straight-away, this seems likely to give experienced fundraisers cause for concern. Because not only is calculating % funds spent on cause in a sufficiently standardised way to allow true comparison a serious challenge, there is also not necessarily a direct correlation between this single metric and a charity’s actual performance and impact on the ground. Yet surely true cause impact is a key factor on which any trust and effectiveness comparison must be made? For example, is it really true that Save the Children with a claimed ‘Charitable Spend’ percentage of 90% (on a stated £208m total spend) is less effective in the ‘Overseas Aid / Famine Relief’ category than The International Save The Children Alliance Charity who scores an cracking 98% (on a £5.6m spend)? Well, if I’m a consumer more used to searching comparison websites for competitive insurance quotes than thinking about the relative cause impact of charities then it could well appear so.

Therein is a great example of one of the online reputation management challenges fundraisers face today. Because in these days of open data sources and APIs it is ever more easy to collate data into an easy accessible format and to set-up a very impressive looking comparison site. Add to this integration with social media and you’ve got very authentic-looking, but potentially completely misleading, information being spread through the newsfeeds of well meaning donors to their whole social graph.

And all of this is probably going-on without you having any knowledge of it. This is certainly the case with aliveandgiving.com who, rather than letting the organisations it lists know that they have a comparison profile on the site, seem to have simply launched with a listing for every charity on The Charity Commission register – which led to the Third Sector story on what seems likely to be the first of many de-listing requests.

Now, the purpose of my writing this is not to have a go at the people behind aliveandgiving.com – who I’m sure aren’t consciously setting-out to mislead potential donors. Nor is it in any way to cast doubt on the idea of helping inform potential donors such that they can make more assured, and hopefully more frequent, donations to charities they believe to be doing great work. I absolutely believe in this, although I do think that achieving it requires more sophistication than giving-out a single financial performance metric – perhaps more along the lines of Philanthropedia’s formalised effectiveness assessments.

All of this is meant simply as a reminder that the days when you had complete control over what is said on behalf of your brand are now well and truly behind us. Such control is never coming back and fundraisers and marketers alike need to accept this and adapt the way they approach reputation management to at least try to keep track of what is being said in their name online. There are a growing range of tools available to help you rise to this challenge, but as a first step it’s worth simply taking a look online to see just what is being said about you by people you don’t know – starting with some searching through Google and the search engines on the major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Then you can at least begin to assess the level of reputational risk your specific organisation may be facing – and you may well also find a whole online supporter community that you didn’t know you had.

(First published on my Strategy Refresh Blog)

UPDATE: Third Sector now reports that following concern being raised by charities about donations being taken by aliveandgiving.com without their consent, the  site has been modified to remove the ‘donate’ button from all charities listed other than those from who approval has been received. It will be interesting to see how many do give approval to be represented on the site – and whether this will leave aliveandgiving with sufficient donations to keep running at their current 5% commission rate.

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