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.
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!
I doubt if there can be many fundraisers out there who would claim that online fundraising does not represent a significant opportunity for income growth (if they do then I can only assume that they’re intending to retire within the next 5 years or so). Even those in the most sophisticated organisations generally admit that they are only just beginning to tap into online income potential. However, I do meet quite a few – particularly from smaller organisations – who admit to holding-back on online fundraising because of a lack of experience, resources, or budget (or all three).
If this is you, then don’t worry – you’re not alone. Research undertaken this year by sector think tank nfpSynergy revealed that only 41% of UK charities with under £1m turnover actually have the facilities to accept online donations. Given that the majority of the UK’s c200k registered charities raise under £1m, that’s a lot of fundraisers missing-out on the opportunity to generate income online.
Fortunately there was some news earlier this month that will hopefully generate some discussion amongst the missing 41% and help motivate more of them to think about fundraising online. Everyclick, the UK search engine that donates 50% of its revenue to UK charities, has launched a new online fundraising platform adding personal sponsorship fundraising pages, ecommerce, and eVouchers to its secure online donation and search fundraising services.
Of the three it was the personal sponsorship pages that I was most interested to see, as they enable charities of any size and level of experience to offer online donors the ability to set-up their own fundraising page to raise money from their friends and family – and so tap into the growth of Community Fundraising 2.0.
Unfortunately, I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed by what they’re offering. Given the length of time that such services have been available from competitors such as JustGiving and bmycharity I had hoped that Everyclick might have taken the opportunity to leapfrog them and offer a richer fundraising environment. Perhaps with such things as video and blog functionality to really help individuals engage with their personal networks. Instead, the pages only provide the basic minimum of functionality, with tabs for the fundraiser, their charity, and a list of people supporting them. Embed code is provided for a simple widget and search-related income can be allocated to individual pages, but that seems to be it. Have to admit it all looks a bit old fashioned and seems like a missed opportunity for Everyclick – especially given that they’re the company who launched the innovative Santa Swing video campaign last Christmas, providing personalised video cards (with your friends dancing as Santa or an Elf – still live and well worth a look).
Financially, the heart of Everyclick’s competitive proposition is that more of the money donated goes to the chosen charity, thanks to their charging a 4.8% all-inclusive transaction fee which it claims results in its charities receiving £12.20 from a £10 credit card donation with Gift Aid compared to £11.93 from “a leading competitor”.
Clearly when comparing the different companies providing these types of service, transaction fees are an important consideration. But both the functionality and look and feel of the pages that can be created are also very important – increasingly so as people get more used to creating their own rich media online profiles at social network sites. So I’m really surprised that none of the UK companies providing these services has yet broken-away from the basic ‘electronic sponsorship form’ page style.
However, at the end of the day the fact that such services are available to all charities with no set-up costs and no specialist experience needed remains a very good thing – and hopefully the coverage achieved by the Everyclick launch will not only benefit them but also the sector at large as more small charities wake-up to the range online fundraising opportunities now available to them.
At the moment it seems like there’s a new niche social network launching every couple of weeks, and this week its the turn of UK animal welfare charity The Blue Cross to enter the Web 2.0 world with a re-launch of its existing All About Pets information website as a new social network site. Developed by DVA, the site offers most of the basic community site features as well as providing access to the wealth of quality pet care information the charity produces.
The Blue Cross is a client of the agency I work for and as part of the site launch we’ve developed them a fun viral campaign that lets pet lovers upload photos of their pets (or use the cute ones provided), animate them to say any message they want to type in, and then email their talking pet message to their friends or upload it to their Facebook profile. Just click on the image above to see what I mean – and go to talkingpets.org to send your own messages (remember to turn your volume up).
Added to this we’ve also developed what is apparently a world first for online advertising, with ad units that scrape the web page they appear on, identify the H1 tag, and from this make the animated dog in the ad read-out the headline from the main story on the page. Readers can then type their own message into the ad to see the dog speak again before clicking-through to the talkingpets.org microsite.
All great fun and, from the first few days data, a campaign that is certainly resulting in a whole lot of talking pet emails flying into people’s in boxes – and hopefully lots of pet lovers signing-up at the All About Pets site.
I must admit that usually when I hear that a charity is developing a ‘viral campaign‘ I’m a bit sceptical, as for every great example that spreads like wildfire (like Macmillan’s virtual coffee morning) there are a great many that never get far beyond the charity’s staff and their closest friends. The truth is that providing the type of content that lots of people want to send to lots of their friends just isn’t that easy for most charities – given that, in the main, the viral momentum generated through generating shock or offence simply doesn’t fit with most charity brands. In the case of talkingpets.org it’s a combination of surprise, fun, and an extremely high level of personalisation that lie behind the strength of the campaign – or viraliciousness as JWT’s Colvyn Harris describes it in his post on what makes a viral ad.
If you’ve worked-on or seen any other really effective charity viral campaigns then do leave a comment to let me know about them.
I spotted an interesting post by Shiv Singh at interactive agency Avenue A|Razorfish the other day, about the seven key attributes they have defined as characterising ‘digital brands’ (meaning brands best equipped for our new digital consumer world), and it occurred to me that the same criteria could be handy when examining charity brands and the way they engage online:
FRESH – does it inspire a feeling or emotion?
ADAPTIVE – does it respond to your involvement?
RELEVANT – Is it useful or appealing to you, specifically?
TRANSFORMATIVE – Does it raise expectations of the brand or the web?
SOCIAL – Is it worth borrowing, sharing, or contributing to?
IMMERSIVE – Do you lose track of time?
AUTHENTIC – Does it seem genuine?
The presentation above provides some examples of this as well as comparing top scoring ‘digital brands’ to Interbrand’s traditional top brands list. While in Shiv’s post he provides a handy interactive Excel ‘Brand Gene Scorecard’ with which you can have a go at comparing how your own online brand presence rates against your competitors in terms of digital engagement.
Contrary to the countdown on the Finerday holding page – which when I took the screen shot above seemed to suggest that it won’t be live for over 106 years (they’ve since fixed it) – this new social networking site aimed at ‘older people and their families’ is apparently all set to launch next Friday, 4th July.
Endorsed by the charity Age Concern, Finerday will be a free to use site and, rather than simply following in the footsteps of the UK’s other over 50s social network site SagaZone, its focus is clearly stated as “linking all of your family, whatever their age”. This ‘linking’ is supported through easy uploading and sharing of family photos (which seems likely to be a key function) plus integration with Facebook, Bebo, Skype, GMail, and Yahoo! – and seems like a sensible move, as it offers older users a reason to engage with social media that they may not have had before.
From the sneak preview of the site (developed by social website specialists Kwiqq) it looks to have a nicely designed, simple interface with enlarged icons to help less frequent users of keyboards and mice keep up with their more computer-savvy younger family members.
Added to this, post-launch Finerday are apparently intending to market the site bundled with a broadband service and a low cost computer adapted for older people – which illustrates a real commitment to their vision of engaging older consumers with social media.
Here in London we’re experiencing a rare combination of happenings this week – it’s the start of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships AND the sun is shining!
One year on, when you stop to look back, you realise just how much Second Life hype there was and just how it has died down as the whole subject of virtual worlds has slipped into the Hype Cycle’s Trough of Disillusionment.
Their market forecast predicts that over the next ten years some 22% of broadband users world-wide will have registered with one or more virtual worlds. In commercial terms, they believe this will equate to a market of some one billion virtual world consumers worth around $8 billion of ‘in-world’ revenue.
While acknowledging that less than 10% of virtual world registrants currently become active users, they expect this to rise to 27% by 2017 as the technology improves and new virtual worlds emerge providing more social and educational applications.
Call me a geek, but I remain convinced that we will see virtual worlds becoming an increasingly important online fundraising environment over the next decade. However, these figures do help frame just where they might lie in the future fundraising mix. If the Strategy Analytics valuation turns-out to be accurate then it doesn’t look like virtual worlds will be delivering the lions share of your online income in 2017.
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?
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?
Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, a weekly blog carnival drawing together some of the best nonprofit news, advice and resources on offer across the blogosphere.
Each week a different host blogger sets a topic for this carnival and other bloggers submit posts on that theme – with the best seven being highlighted on the host’s blog. This week it’s my turn to host and the topic I chose was ‘Insights, tips and tricks for online fundraising’.
So, without further ado, here are seven online fundraising insight, tip and trick posts for you…
3. And still on websites, for anyone at the early stages of website planning Jason King has posted the handy presentation he gave at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane on Planning your non-profit’s website.
4. The Care2 folks over at Frogloop have reported on a recent survey that suggests that ’51% of donors are not at all interested in Social Networks. However, apparently around a third of donors are somewhat or very interested in keeping-up with nonprofits through Social Media – rising to 40% for high level donors. Handy insight for social network fundraisers.
That’s it for this week. You can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it travels around from site to site by subscribing to the Carnival feed.
