Giving in a digital world

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

Social Actions team launches Social Entrepreneur API

Posted by Bryan on September 11, 2009

Social Entrepreneur API

Last week an interesting new initiative was launched by the team at Social Actions – whose open source database of microphilanthropic opportunities from over 50 different non-profits I wrote about in April this year.

This time they have brought together data from a number of different social enterprise funders to create the world’s first open source database of social entrepreneurs who have who have won fellowships and awards. The idea being to make it easy for philanthropists, investors, journalists and others involved in similar non-profit work to make contact with formally vetted social entrepreneurs – and so facilitate easier collaboration, future funding, etc.

The social entrepreneurs on the database range from representatives of non-profits to individuals working within their own communities, but all have in common the fact that they have been formally recognised for their work by the organisations that have contributed the data. As with the Social Actions microphilanthropy database, this unique dataset can be searched based on keyword, location, cause area, etc. but has also been specifically designed to enable any third party to access and re-publish the data through their own web applications.

For more information visit socialentrepreneurapi.org.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Spezify visual search engine creates amazing online mood boards

Posted by Bryan on August 12, 2009

Spezify

I just came across the recently launched visual search tool Spezify thanks to a RT from my old Rapp colleague @riksta.

Spezify is essentially a search engine that provides its results in a range of different visual ways – with the end result that you get a fascinating ‘mood board’ presentation in response to whatever search terms you enter.

Go-on… visit the site and type-in your organisation name (in “commas” to get a full word search) or any subject you’ve been trying to come-up with new creative approaches to and see what a rich range of things it fills your screen with.

But don’t blame me if you’re still ‘testing’ it in a few hours time – as it is strangely addictive.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

A very happy third birthday to Kiva!

Posted by Bryan on October 24, 2008

This month marks the third birthday of the fantastic person-to-person, micro-lending website Kiva – and what a three years it has been since their launch. From raising $1million in its first year, to $10million by year two, and an amazing $40million by the end of year 3! It just goes to show what incredible things can be achieved when visionary fundraisers embrace the benefits of the internet to enable donors to support life-changing projects in a truly engaging and personal way.

According to the latest Kiva stats (updated nightly) over 350,000 individual lenders have now supported projects in 41 different countries through Kiva, and it still seems to be growing as fast as ever.

While the micro-lending business model is very different to traditional fundraising (you can get your money back once the projects you’ve funded have repaid their loan – if you want to – although most supporters just ‘re-invest’) there is still a wealth of learning to be gained here for others looking to grow their online fundraising. If you’ve never visited the site, then get over there and take a look. Or, if you’ve seen the site but haven’t been there for a while then take another look, as they’ve added some interesting things like Kiva lending teams – which fits perfectly with the key trend of online community fundraising.

(Image and Guy Kawasaki quote from the Kiva Blog)

Posted in Fundraising, Online fundraising, Social networking, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Two twitterers keep the tweets flying thick and fast at the International Fundraising Congress

Posted by Bryan on October 16, 2008

I’m over at the 28th International Fundraising Congress in Holland right now, nursing a bad cold with lots of Lemsip and relaxing a bit after giving a couple of morning sessions back to back on The Future of Fundraising in a Networked Society.

One of the great things about conferences like this is the opportunity to catch-up with folks you just don’t get the opportunity to see much the rest of the year, a case in point here being my catching-up with Howard from fundraising.co.uk and Jonathan from Justgiving – who I usually only talk to online. The two of them are apparently the only delegates out of some 950 folks here from all around the world who are microblogging their experience at various sessions using Twitter. I only found this out when Jonathan mentioned that he’d been twittering away in the back row of my second session this morning (including mention of the ‘dubious’ Dutch language ‘are you lonely’ Facebook ad that appeared in my profile when I was using it to illustrate a point – see above!-).

You can follow the full results of their marathon twittering here.

Btw – for anyone who attended my sessions who is wanting to get the presentation downloads – I’ll post details of the IFC web address where you can get these as soon as I find-out what it is.

Time for another Lemsip now.

Posted in Blogging, Facebook, Fundraising, Online fundraising, Twitter, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Second Life Relay For Life 2008 doubles previous record, raising over $210k

Posted by Bryan on September 7, 2008

Bit of late news here I’m afraid. Due to the last couple of months being pretty busy with my moving jobs I missed this year’s Second Life Relay for Life, held on July 19th and 20th in support of the American Cancer Society. However, the great news is that they more than doubled the $100,000 achieved last year, raising a grand total of over $210,000 through the combined efforts of 85 teams made-up of 2,230 avatars – plus all the volunteer designers and other organisers.

This is the largest amount yet raised by a single fundraising campaign within the virtual world and represents a wonderful example of what can be achieved when a specialist community becomes enthused with an innovative opportunity to raise money for a great cause.

For a feel of what a sponsored run within a virtual online world looks like, take a look at the video above compiled by Jovana Qinan.

Posted in Fundraising, Online fundraising, Second Life, Sponsored events, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

What is the future for membership organisations within our networked society?

Posted by Bryan on September 7, 2008

If you’ve read any of my earlier posts about the future of fundraising and the importance of understanding how relationships between consumers and brands (both commercial and non-profit) are evolving, then you’ll already have come across the concept of the ‘networked society’. Where consumers are free, in ways unimagined by previous generations, to choose their own personalised networks of connections and influences in place of traditional sources of information and authority.

The internet is clearly a key facilitator of this, but the societal changes that underpin it actually began long before we had the World Wide Web – resulting from the new wealth of opportunities and expectations that came with the dissolution of traditional social constraints such as class, gender, and ethnicity; along with the richer world view that came with global media access, increased education levels, and widening opportunities for travel.

With these changes has come significantly increased consumer sophistication and, as a result, increasing mistrust and cynicism with regard to traditional marketing and fundraising communications. Consumers are increasingly looking for alternative sources of trusted information to help guide their purchasing and donating decisions – equipping themselves with personally tailored networks of friends, family, and other non-traditional information sources to help them navigate the baffling range of brand choices now available.

The overall impact is that, while most brands continue to try to engage with their target consumers in much the same ways as they have for well over a decade, our networked society consumers are increasingly refusing to play along.

Directly related to this, but addressing an area that I hadn’t previously thought that much about, I recently came across a very interesting ‘open source’ project initiated by folks from the RSA and NCVO Third Sector Foresight Unit – exploring how networked society consumers may engage with membership-based non-profits in the future.

Co-ordinated through a multi-user blog at commonspace.org.uk, anyone with an active interest in the subject can share their thinking and collaborate on the consideration of such questions as what the impact on membership subscriptions might be now that Web 2.0-savvy consumers can get information and share ideas without the need for a traditional mediating organisation.

It’s early days for the project yet, but well worth a look if you’re interested in this subject – and if you’re from a membership organisation of any kind then you should be!

For a quick primer, take a look at the post by Megan Griffith on the underlying trends driving the future of membership.

Posted in Blogging, Online advocacy, Social networking, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Which charity will be first to make use of YouTube Annotations interactivity?

Posted by Bryan on June 5, 2008

Earlier this week YouTube released a new feature called ‘Annotations’ that allows you not only to annotate your uploaded video with captions, but also to create links within the video to other video clips or to your YouTube channel.

Easy captioning is a handy function, but it is the interactivity offered by the embedded links that makes this new feature particularly interesting. There are several simple demonstrations of what’s possible already on the site, including one involving the good old ‘pick a card trick’ shown above (which jumped from 300k to well over 2m views in a day – showing the level of interest in the feature) and a ‘find the shell’ game (keep going to the ‘hard’ video and just see where it leads you;-).

Interestingly, the annotations seem only work on YouTube and not when the videos are embedded elsewhere – which is unfortunate (and presumably why embedding on the ‘pick a card’ video has been ‘disabled by request’).

Ever since YouTube took-off I’ve had countless discussions about how best to use videos on the site to engage with consumers beyond simple viewings, comments and ratings- other than just including a URL for them to type into their browser. While still restricted to links within YouTube, this new feature does offer a new level of interaction which has the potential to be used in interesting ways by non-profits. For example as the basis for a personally guided, interactive video presentation of your work or support opportunities.

Thinking ahead, if links out of YouTube are added then the potential becomes even greater. Allen Stern at CentreNetworks suggests that external links could offer a new way for YouTube to monetize – through a small fee being paid to link products in videos to the product owner’s site or ecommerce sites.

Many non-profits are already making use of YouTube – so who will be the first to get into YouTube interactivity?

Posted in Social networking, Uncategorized, Video, Web 2.0, YouTube | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Causes App celebrates first birthday – but surely there is more potential for Facebook fundraising?

Posted by Bryan on May 30, 2008

Last Saturday was an important anniversary in Social Networking terms, marking one year since Facebook launched Facebook Platform, the toolkit that enables the development of 3rd party Applications (Apps) that integrate directly with Facebook user data. The sudden explosion in Apps resulting from this was a significant driver of the site’s massive growth in popularity throughout 2007, and according to Facebook stats site Adonomics it has led to the release of almost 27,000 Apps to-date.

The same day was also the first anniversary of the biggest non-profit Facebook App, ‘Causes’ from Project Agape (now also available on MySpace).

A runaway success from launch in terms of installations, Project Agape marked the anniversary with the release of statistics on its first year’s activity. Apparently they now have a total of 12 million registered users (95,886 daily active users when I just checked) supporting over 80,000 US and Canadian non-profit organisations. Other countries are still being considered for inclusion, but in a post on the Causes discussion board earlier this month it was explained that “Supporting donations to UK-based charities is still a project we’re interested in, but we are strapped for resources and cannot provide a date”.

80,000 non-profits being represented on two of the world’s biggest Social Networking sites is undoubtedly great news, with the App clearly tapping into a widespread desire amongst site users to share their support for charitable causes.

However, when you look at the figures released in terms of hard cash it seems like Causes still has some way to go before it becomes a significant income generator for the organisations involved. Over the last 12 months, $2.5 million has been raised through Causes for 19,445 organisations – equating to an average of just $126 per organisation. No donations at all have been made to 75% of the 80,000 organisations being ‘supported’.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think Causes is a great initiative and I do understand when other commentators have observed that this is $2.5 million that these organisations would not have had otherwise. However, I wholeheartedly believe that supporter engagement on Social Networking sites has the potential to deliver massively more in fundraising terms than what currently appears to be the equivalent of an online small change collection tin.

Perhaps it’s simply that the Causes ‘Digital Badge’ approach to supporter engagement just doesn’t lend itself to generating higher levels of financial engagement? Is it just too easy to install the App and choose a few organisations to support by putting their badge on your profile and that’s it – job done?

By contrast, those Apps which extend the tried-and-tested sponsored challenge fundraising approach to Social Networking sites seem to better illustrate the real Community Fundraising potential of sites like Facebook. For example, Justgiving.com (which enables individuals to set-up fundraising pages in support of their sponsored activities) has seen significant uptake of its Facebook App (see their latest stats here) and identified Facebook as its second biggest referrer after Google – a trend confirmed by Hitwise UK.

Anyone else got any examples of where organisations are managing to raise significant amounts on Social Networking sites?

Posted in Facebook, Fundraising, MySpace, Online advocacy, Online fundraising, Social networking, Sponsored events, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Age Concern launches online personal information storage

Posted by Bryan on May 18, 2008

Age Concern, one of the UK’s leading charities working on behalf of older people, launched a new online service last month. Called LifeBook, the service is intended to help users more easily manage their affairs, by providing online storage for all of those details that tend to go missing just when you need them – from renewal dates for insurance to friends’ birthdays. There is also a section that records the user’s final wishes, and promotion for the site notes that the information held could be invaluable to a family member or friend in case of an emergency.

This is not dissimilar to a commercial service I blogged about back in July 2007, although in that case the company – YouDeparted – was rather more up-front about the ‘case of emergency’ benefits of their service, which they described as “a personal organiser with a death benefit”.

While the opt-out boxes that form part of the LifeBook registration process make it clear that the charity hopes to use the service as the basis for cross-selling, they are undoubtedly responding to a very real need experienced by their constituents – which makes this a good example of the type of value exchange that is increasingly proving effective in engaging with potential supporters.

It’ll be interesting to see how they develop the service over time – perhaps to include the opportunity to upload video messages for loved ones as a more contemporary way to share final wishes?

Posted in Legacy fundraising, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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