After several years of amazing growth, data from Hitwise last August suggested that Facebook use was starting to slow here in the UK. Not at all surprising given that there are now around 30.25m UK users – equating to almost half of the whole country’s population signed-up to the site. So it must be approaching saturation point. Hitwise reinforced this observation with data released earlier this month showing Facebook’s share of all UK visits to social network sites falling by 7% December 2010 to December 2011, while YouTube’s share grew by roughly the same amount.

Falling market share or not, in the week that we’re due to see Facebook go public with a $10bn share offering I don’t for a moment foresee that we will see a slowdown in interest in the site any time soon. However, what I do think we will see over the next year is a growth in the maturity with which Facebook, and Social Media in general, is viewed within the fundraising world.

After five years of seemingly ever increasing fundraising expectations, I sense a change in attitude towards the role that Social Media has to play in online fundraising. A change beautifully summed-up in the slide above, from the presentation given by Beate Sørum at the International Fundraising Congress in Holland last October.

Fundraisers are increasingly coming to acknowledge that while Social Media undoubtedly does offer unique benefits that secure it a key role in online fundraising programmes it is not a “magic faucet of free cash”.

With this understanding, they are then freed from a myopic drive to “make Facebook* fundraising work” (*or Twitter, or Google+, or Pinterest, or whatever) and can instead consider where in their donor recruitment, engagement, and retention programme the various flavours of Social Media can best be applied. While at the same time considering where they should focus on improving their use of good old email and effective website design.

If I’m right, then we should see a growing number of integrated campaigns drawing together strong fundraising propositions and storytelling through blogs (and promotion through bloggers), with Facebook and Twitter enabling sharing and conversation, well designed transactional pages capturing donations and donor data, and email being used to keep donors informed when there’s a new chapter to the story they’re interested in – rather than ‘single strand’ Twitter or Facebook campaigns. Time will tell…

This is the tenth of twelve 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 Back to Website Donation Basics, here.

As I’ve been highlighting throughout this series, the wealth of developments in digital commerce and communications emerging at the moment offer a host of potential new opportunities for fundraisers. However, as mentioned in Monday’s post about Email fundraising, in a year when many supporters are likely to be under increasing financial pressure and all fundraisers should be looking for opportunities to increase their effectiveness, I think some of the biggest opportunities will actually come from focusing on getting the fundraising basics right.

When it comes to online fundraising, there’s nothing more basic than your website donation pages. Which makes the introduction to the ‘Creating the perfect donation experience’ report released this week by User Experience Agency Nomensa rather shocking reading – highlighting as it does the stark fact that 47% of donors give-up before they have made the donation because the online journey is not intuitive and engaging.

That’s almost half of the people who make the effort to visit a charity website to donate giving-up because the site just makes it too difficult, or too boring, for them. In the light of this, no wonder research suggests that online giving made-up less than 4% of UK charitable donations in 2010. We’re leaving at least half of what donors want to give us on the table, thanks to a lack of focus on basic website journeys, fundraising messaging, and simple transaction pages.

The Nomensa report is based on research into the websites and social media presences of the three leading cancer charities in the UK, but their findings and very clear recommendations will be of use to online fundraisers in organisations of any size and any country. So, well worth clicking here to download the report and reading it as a spur to review your own website – and to see what can be done to ensure you’re helping far more than half of the potential donors visiting your site make it all the way through to actually giving you their money.

This is the ninth of twelve 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 Contactless Payments, here.

According to the people at Visa Europe, 2012 is going to be the year that ‘contactless payments’ take off here in the UK – heralding a new era when we will all be purchasing low cost items (£15 or less) with a wave of our payment card or NFC equipped mobile phone. No need to type-in a pin number – just ‘wave and pay’.

The technology to enable this has been available here for a while now, with Barclaycard launching their ‘OnePulse’ card using Visa’s contactless system back in 2007 and partnering with Orange to launch the UK’s first NFC mobile phone payment system in May last year. But it seems that a combination of lack of consumer trust and lack of bank and retailer interest has kept the take-up at a pretty small scale to-date. Two thirds of the UK population are currently unaware of which banks offer the service and only 20% of people with suitable payment cards have ever actually used them, according to recent YouGov research.

However, this is apparently all set to change – with Samsung and Visa capitalising on their sponsorship of this year’s Olympics here in London to make it “the world’s first contactless games”. Plus a growing number of retailers joining early adopters like McDonalds with the introduction of suitably equipped tills; and Transport for London planning to equip all buses and Tube stations with contactless payment units by the end of 2012. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but certainly on that basis it looks like you won’t be able to escape the Contactless Payment trend if you’re anywhere inside the M25 this year.

If all this takes off, then we will be running to catch-up with the US where the introduction of Google Wallet and the launch of a number of NFC-equipped Smartphones (no sign of an NFC iPhone as yet though) have led to contactless payments growing apace. Although, in turn, they are some way behind the world leaders in contactless mobile payment – who are the Japanese, where over 10% of the population were already making NFC-based mobile payments by the end of 2010.

What’s in all this emerging ‘wave and pay’ technology trend for fundraisers? Well, it offers a very simple additional form of mobile donation opportunity beyond the current SMS or web-based transaction. While I guess it won’t offer the equivalent contact data collection, thanks to the simplicity of contactless payment perhaps at last we could see the cash collection tin come into the digital age – with street and event fundraisers able to take ‘wave and pay’ card or mobile donations at a rather higher value than the traditional coin in the bucket? This Christmas the Salvation Army in the US started accepting card payments using Square card-swipe readers attached to Smartphones as part of their seasonal red kettle collections, to overcome reductions in the number of people carrying cash. So an NFC red kettle can’t be that far away!

Depending on just how the NFC reader technology is implemented, we might also be able to have donations made through charity show windows (good for emergency appeal donations) or by waving a phone across a suitably equipped poster or in-store fundraising point.

This is the eighth of twelve 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 Getting Smarter With Email, here.

As pressure to deliver on income targets in these increasingly challenging financial times results in a return to getting the fundraising basics right, I hope we’re going to see a shift towards making far better use of email this year – thereby capitalising on what is all too often a sadly under-performing opportunity area.

Despite continued excitement over the potential of Social Media, the fact is that email remains the most effective way for most fundraisers to engage directly with the majority of their online supporters – and seems likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, most charity email programmes I experience seem to comprise a monthly newsletter containing whatever information happened to be to-hand, rather than anything approaching being relevant to me and my donation history, or random cross-sell emails for fundraising and campaigning opportunities that are equally irrelevant. This might explain why most email fundraising, while looking great in terms of ROI thanks to minimal direct costs (best not mention all the days spent creating the eNewsletter, fiddling with data, and getting the things out), doesn’t actually contribute large amounts towards annual income targets.

I know that for many, if not most, organisations email marketing is not nearly as easy as the uninitiated might think it should be. The sort of hurdles that need to be jumped to get a smart email programme in place include the common lack of data integration between website subscription page, main supporter database, and email system; the inability to report on email responses so that their effectiveness can be properly evaulated; and the reliance on overworked Comms Team members to develop the email for you.

However, these are the same problems that we’ve been faced with for many years now. So this year, when we should all be looking for opportunities to refine fundraising programme effectiveness, it seems like a pretty good time to focus on how you can do email better – whatever it takes. Even if achieving this will require a plan spanning the next couple of years – as, sadly, data issues don’t get sorted overnight.

To help get you started along a smarter path, here are a few areas that you might want to think about…

Getting smarter with data and segmentation It never fails to amaze me that organisations will go to great levels of detail on their direct mail segmentation, and see significant benefits in terms of net income generated across the whole mailing base – yet when it comes to email all of this is forgotten as they hit the button on a ‘one size fits all’ broadcast campaign. If your email programme is still based on this approach then take a while to think about just what a mix of supporters you have email addresses for and what related response data exists that could form the basis for a smarter segmentation. This is well worth spending some time on – running data audits, investigating the untapped segmentation potential of your email system, examining how well online and offline transaction data is integrated – because it will form the foundation for everything else you do, from selection and creative testing to campaign evaluation.

Getting smarter with evaluation Thinking about evaluation – just how well do you really evaluate your email activity? I come across many cases where basic response data is measured and reported upon, but little really smart evaluation of the type that can provide solid insights to help improve effectiveness is undertaken. Start by considering the real purpose of each of the elements in your email programme and what the related measures of success should be, and then determine what data you need to evaluate this success. Direct mail fundraisers can only dream of the sort of engagement insights that a smartly measured and evaluated email programme can deliver – yet digital fundraisers rarely seem to make the most of this.

Getting smarter with programme, content and creative Once you’ve made the decision to move away from using a ‘one size fits all’ approach to such a wonderfully personalisable channel, and have your smarter segmentation in place, then you can think about what online/offline contact programme, content and creative presentation might deliver you the best results from different segments. Once again, there is masses of learning that can be transferred from ye olde direct mail with regard to building robust testing programmes, yet the speed with which you can test, learn, and roll-out make the refining of campaigns a far more immediate activity. And don’t just test around the edges. From the outset get testing in place to determine whether the core elements of your programme – like those monthly eNewsletters – are actually working for all segments. In many cases I suspect this advice from Thomas Gensemer back in 2009 will still hold true, about a well written simple email with a clear call to action driving better results than an eNewsletter – and costing a fraction of the staff time.

Getting smarter with mobile With ever more of your supporters reading and responding to your emails through mobile devices – Smartphones or Tablets – it is becoming all the more important to ensure that they are designed to be read on these devices and that any sites you link to for response are also optimised for mobile browsing. Take a look at this handy infographic for a summary of ideas of how to make emails more mobile friendly.

Getting smarter with deliverability With everyone looking for opportunities to engage more supporters in their fundraising in a low-cost manner it is likely that many will dig around to see what un-used email addresses they have stored around the place to swell the numbers receiving eNewsletters and eAppeals. What they may not realise is that continuing to email people who don’t open or click through could have a serious impact on their reputation as a sender and thus the overall deliverability of all their emails. As recipients are increasingly responding to unwanted email by Spam flagging rather than unsubscribing and ISPs increasingly use inactivity as the basis for blocking careless bulk email senders – as highlighted in a recent study by digital marketing service provider Responsys.

This is the seventh 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 eBooks, here.

Back in November 2007 when Amazon kick-started the eBook market with the launch of its first generation Kindle, suggestions that they could ever come close to replacing printed books were typically treated with disbelief and distain. However, the chart above, presented by Amazon’s CEO last September, tells a pretty clear story about the growth of eBooks since then. In short, it took just four and a half years for Amazon to reach the point where it was selling more eBooks than print editions.

Of course, Amazon isn’t the only print or e-bookseller around. But their competitors have also released reports on the incredible speed at which eBook sales are growing and by the middle of last year eBooks were reported as making-up 13.6% of the US adult fiction market, with growth still accelerating. Barnes and Noble, the largest book retailer in the US, say that this digital transformation is happening even faster than they are seeing with music and movies.

So, whether or not we like the idea of the comforting, multi-sensory experience of reading a printed book (got to love the smell of a newly opened book) being replaced by a StarTrek-like world of digital tablet readers, there is no escaping what the sales data is telling us. In the same way that my great 1980s double cassette tape and record deck got consigned to the attic when CDs came along; and my CD collection now gathers dust as the whole lot fills a puny percentage of my MP3 player’s memory; so we are witnessing here an inescapable shift towards eBook reading.

I admit it is difficult to imagine the sale of printed books drying-up completely (although, of course, we have seen that happen with vinyl records over the last 20 or so years). However, I can fairly easily imagine a significant proportion of the printed versions of ‘throw away’ publications like newspapers and magazines being replaced by interactive digital versions – and that’s where I think this trend starts to look interesting for fundraisers and other charity marketers.

My doormat stands as a testament to the fact that even when a donor engages with a charity online the way that most will respond is primarily through printed and posted materials. These include a range of supporter newsletters and magazines which I’m afraid, despite the obvious time and money invested in them, all too often seem to me the ultimate ‘throw away’ publications. Those organisations who are more serious about online communications send me ‘e-newsletters’, which is better. But, even when they are well designed, these are still really more ‘email’ than anything else – so tend to be read when I’m reading other email and as a result receive at best a quick browse.

Meanwhile, a growing proportion of my ‘real’ reading is now done using a mobile digital device – especially when I’m travelling, as I will often take along my Kindle or read an Ebook downloaded onto my smartphone. That’s proper immersive reading – so immersive that I missed a Tube stop the other day because I was so deeply into a book on my phone (I couldn’t have said that a few years ago).

Importantly, this sort of activity can no longer be brushed-off as only seen amongst a small number of early adopters. Pew Research reported last year that the percentage of US adults with an eBook reader doubled in the six months between November 2010 and May 2011 to 12%, and based on the incredible Christmas sales volumes being reported I wouldn’t be surprised if this doubled again in 2012. [Update 23/01/12 - Latest Pew Research says US eBook reader ownership reached 19% by early January 2012]. Other countries are lagging behind the US, but seem likely to catch-up pretty fast. Here in the UK, YouGov Research reported that 2.5% of UK adults received a eBook reader this Christmas – with those aged over 55 twice as likely to receive one as those aged 18-24. Add-in the massive growth in Smartphones, iPads and other Tablet PCs, which can also function as eBook readers, and the potential market of eBook reading charity supporters starts looking really interesting.

All of which leads me to think that there must be an opportunity emerging here for non-profits looking to offer these digitally-equipped donors a more engaging read than is possible through a traditional e-newsletter. Depending on the platform you choose, think copy, photos, videos, audio, web links, interactivity, even augmented reality – all consumed in a ‘reading’ rather than traditional ‘computer browsing’ mode.

Clearly not all donors will be interested in the option to download a digital publication, and it may be more relevant for subscription publications (if your content is good enough, perhaps that offers you a new income stream?). But as eBook adoption continues apace, it seems likely that a significant number of those who choose to give to you online might find this type of donor communication of real interest.

To-date the only UK charity I know of who is testing this is Epilepsy Action, who have made their Epilepsy Today magazine available for the Kindle. While the Museum of London recently launched an App-based monthly subscription serialised graphic novel to tie-in with their Charles Dickens exhibition, entitled ‘Dickens: Dark London’.

If you know of any other non-profits testing the addition of Ebook content in their donor or member communications then do let me know.

This is the sixth 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 Mobile App vs Mobile Web, here.

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.

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:

• Round-up Schemes – which allow you to round-up your transaction to make a donation to your chosen charity, like Pennies; Give Change make Change; Beanstalk Giving; Swipe Good; and perhaps with the greatest income potential of all eBay checkout donations (over £5m raised since launch in 2008)

• 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.

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.

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.

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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.