The incredibly fast adoption of Social Media over the last couple of years has left many, if not most, organisations in something of a spin – as, in very short order, something that was at first dismissed as the preserve of the young and the geeks has become an unavoidable key component of mainstream communications.

With this recognition has come the need to better understand and manage the use of social media by organisations – including charities and other non-profits – leading to the desire to develop social media guidelines to help ensure that everyone across an organisation works together to get the most from this new technology. However, this is not as easy a task as it might sound. Where do you start when trying to write guidelines for something that is, at its heart, often about engagement through spontaneous, unstructured conversations?

Well, one very handy place to start is Chris Boudreaux’s Social Media Governance website, where he has very helpfully collated links to social media guidelines from over 70 different organisations – including the American Red Cross and Easter Seals, as well as a diverse range of other corporate and public sector organisations.

While the very organisation-specific nature of Social Media usage means that it’s unlikely you’ll find an exact fit for your own guidelines – reading how others have approached the same challenge should certainly help you set off in the right direction.

There has been a growing level of discussion here in the UK fundraising sector over the last couple of months about the much awaited launch of video-based charity project crowdfunding site See the Difference – added to just this week by a resounding endorsement in an open letter from UK Institute of Fundraising CEO Lindsay Boswell, which you can read on the Institute website.

As I outlined in my post about this exciting initiative back in May, the See the Difference team includes an impressive line-up of corporate backers contributing time and resources to launch a site that will offer videos of funding opportunities from a wide range of different charities, supported by social media sharing technology and the promise of specific video updates when projects are completed.

At first sight, this might just look like a video-based version of any number of existing fundraising websites already available – like GlobalGiving and PifWorld. However, what I find particularly interesting about See the Difference is just how they describe their vision for the site.

On their introductory video, Stuart Hamilton, one of the founding team, shares the vision for See the Difference by explaining “We might start seeing the See the Difference logo in all sorts of unexpected places, the logo appearing in all of the different places around the world where projects are going on. So See the Difference could ultimately become the standard way in which people choose and express the things they care about and the differences that they want to make to the world”.

This is a very exciting ambition for the See the Difference brand – and also very interesting from the point of view of charity fundraisers.

Put simply, if See the Difference grows the way that it hopes to then it could ultimately replace individual charity brands as the owners of relationships with online donors who fund their projects. Why give a regular donation to an established charity for them to use however they see fit, when you can instead choose specific projects that interest you from a wide range of different charities through See the Difference – and receive your updates and future giving opportunities through them too? In effect, See the Difference becomes my ‘Charity Choice Consolidator’ – and, thanks to them, I am free to switch my giving whenever I feel like it to any other organisation represented on their site.

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing – as this type of model fits very much with the way I believe fundraising needs to evolve if we are to capitalise on the opportunities Web 2.0 offers us to provide the choice and engagement that younger online-savvy potential donors are demanding. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that if we don’t evolve to offer such choice and engagement then we are in real danger of losing-touch not only with young donors but increasingly with those currently at the peak of their earning capability, who are typically less than enamoured with the traditional fundraising approaches used by most charities.

But what fundraisers – and the charities they work for – need to get to grips with is that the idea of charities no longer owning the long-term relationship with those people who fund their work is a real game changer. At the ultimate extreme, if donor relationships become the responsibility of a third party then there is no longer a need for the supporter database and direct marketing teams in every charity across the land to continue to be employed. In this new fundraising future, the key in-house fundraisers skill will be in packaging the work of their charity such that it will sell well on a Charity Choice Consolidator site.

There are, of course, alternatives to a single brand Consolidator-driven fundraising future. For example, SocialActions has taken a different route to providing online supporters with a means of choosing financial and non-financial support opportunities from a wide range of different organisations. They maintain an ever growing open source database of what are termed ‘micro-philanthropic opportunities’ – which can either be directly searched at SocialActions.com or used to ‘push’ opportunities specific to a particular cause or area out to any other website which wishes to publicise them. And, of course, there is still ample opportunity for charities themselves to engage directly with supporters online.

The truth is that for the foreseeable future I expect to see online fundraising evolve to embrace a mix of charity-specific approaches, open source aggregation, and big brand charity choice consolidators – with supporters choosing how to engage based on whether they have a specific link with an existing charity brand or are more interested in a variety of support opportunities.

What is for sure is that fundraisers need to be preparing right now for this evolution – understanding the new opportunities on offer and what implications each of these might have on the way they work, and developing strategies and staff training programmes that will equip them to maximise their online fundraising income in future.

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.

Back in March I wrote about the launch of YouTube’s ‘Call to Action’ feature enabling UK and US organisations in its Non-profit Partners Programme to place overlay ads linking direct to their own websites from their YouTube videos for free – basically turning YouTube videos into simple interactive video ads.

While this feature was good, it was also somewhat restricted – as the Call to Action link could only be placed in a banner at the bottom of the video, and if the video was embedded outside YouTube then the feature didn’t work at all.

The great news is that YouTube has just announced a much improved form of in-video interactivity based on enhancing its existing interactive ‘annotations’ functionality, which previously only allowed links to other YouTube videos, with the ability to link to external sites. What’s more, these interactive annotations will work when YouTube videos are embedded in any site – your own website, a supporter’s blog or Facebook profile, wherever…

This means that Non-profit Partner organisations can now easily add clickable buttons anywhere in their YouTube videos that will link the viewer direct to any other website they want them to visit – and these interactive videos can be shared through any site or social network profile and the interactive functionality will still work.

Take a look at the demonstration video above to learn more – and if you belong to a UK or US non-profit which hasn’t yet registered for the YouTube non-profit programme then go here and sign-up.

Some pretty shocking data for UK fans of the social networking site MySpace was highlighted last week, with the news that traffic to the site has now dropped behind that of microblogging site Twitter.

On one side, this is just more evidence of the amazing rise of Twitter in the UK (leading to London being described as the “capital of Twitter” by its CEO, Ev Williams) – and these site traffic stats actually only tell part of that story, due to the number of people using third-party applications to manage their Twitter accounts.

However what is more significant is such clear evidence for the apparent collapse of MySpace over here.

With the pace of change in the Web 2.0 world over the last few years, it’s easy to forget just how dominant MySpace looked in the UK market back in the early days of the online social networking goldrush. As a reminder, I dug-out a blog post I wrote ‘way back’ in early June 2007 – when it was Facebook that was the freshfaced newcomer showing what would now be described as ‘Twitterish’ growth…

Amazing to think that back then MySpace was sitting pretty on over 100m users worldwide, compared to Facebook’s mere 25m. The story since then has of course been dominated by Facebook – with it’s active user numbers reaching 250m by July this year, while MySpace growth has stalled such that even its dominance in the US social media market seems doomed.

All in all, a useful reminder never to take the social networking world for granted. It is still a far from mature marketplace and there is pretty well constant change going on out there, whether related to new functionality, shifting user demographics, or the simple departure of users altogether. All of which makes it essential for any marketers or fundraisers responsible for social media activity to keep an eye out for data that helps them understand just what’s happening, so as to help guide where to invest time and budgets when looking to engage with supporters online.

On the back of the phenomenal growth in usage of the Twitter microblogging service, there has been much discussion over the last year about the potential for its use by charities and other non-profits for both supporter communications and fundraising.

The case for using it as an addition to your online supporter communications now seems pretty clear – if your supporters are users of the service and you have someone available in your organisation who can manage your day-to-day Twitter communications (monitoring tweets relating to you and fielding the inevitable questions that will start to come through if people actively engage with your Twitter feed).

Quite how best to raise money direct from Twitter is less clear at present. Micro-transaction initiatives like Twollars are interesting but have not, as far as I know, yet started to deliver significant income for anyone, and few organisations are as yet showing real income coming from other Twitter-specific testing.

However, where it certainly is proving itself as having a fundraising role is when used to bring people who are usually only connected online together offline for a ‘real world’ fundraising event – known in Twitter parlance as a Twestival.

The first ever Twestival – entitled Harvest Twestival – was organised in September 2008 by a group of Twitter users here in London and set the form for future events – being organised entirely by volunteers, in a very short timescale, using Twitter as the primary communication and co-ordination mechanism. Originally intended for 30-40 people, their event ended-up attracting 250 and raised money for a central London homeless charity called The Connection.

After such a great start, the first Global Twestival was held in February this year with people from over 200 cities worldwide taking part and raising some $250,000 for charity:water.

Building on this success, a second international Twestival is taking place next month – from 10th through 13th September. But this time, rather than all events around the world focusing on a single charity, it is being described as Twestival Local with groups of volunteers voting for the charity they would like their local city’s event to raise money for. There’s a Google Maps mashup on the site showing all of the registered city Twestivals and their chosen charites – with the London Twestival raising money for the children’s charity Childline.

This is a fantastic example of online community fundraising in action – with freely available social media tools being used by groups of volunteers to run events on behalf of specific charities that they select as being most worthy of the resulting funds. No involvement from community fundraisers employed by specific charities. Just Web 2.0 empowered volunteers doing it for themselves, in the way that works best for them, and with all money raised going to their chosen charity.

So, do take a visit to the Twestival Local site; see where your local Twestival is taking place next month; and have a think about what this type of Community Fundraising 2.0 initiative might mean for the future of fundraising as it continues to grow in popularity.

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.

Back in May last year I wrote about the ‘Hype Cycle’ devised by technology research company Gartner to illustrate the adoption, maturity, and business application of specific technologies, and I specifically considered where on the cycle various online fundraising initiatives lay.

So with the release of the the 2009 Hype Cycle Report, I was interested to compare where things are now (see the chart above) compared to where they were last year (see the chart below).

There are certainly some interesting shifts here from the perspective of the digital fundraiser.

For starters, Microblogging has swept over the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ and on towards the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ in just one year – thanks essentially to the phenomenal rise of Twitter. However, this doesn’t mean that all the Twitter nay-sayers have been proved correct – because if Twitter adoption and application continues at this pace then it could just as well whizz up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ towards the ‘Plateau of Productivity’ by this time next year. It certainly seems to be moving towards mainstream adoption far faster than Gartner predicted in 2008.

Web 2.0 can be seen to have started this migration towards general acceptance already, moving from the ‘Trough’ in 2008 to the start of the ‘Slope’ now. Driven forwards by its increasingly widespread adoption, but at the same time probably held back by the challenge of effectively monitising the massive interest in Web 2.0 applications. Likewise, Corporate Blogging can be seen to have moved on at much the pace predicted by Gartner.

Noticeably lagging behind in the progress stakes are Public Virtual Worlds, like SecondLife, which fell rapidly from an high ‘Peak of Expectations’ back in 2007 (anyone else remember the Pet Shop Boys ‘playing’ at Secondfest?) and now seem stuck down in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ with minimal progress over the last year. I guess that makes last month’s Second Life Relay for Life, raising over $270,000 for the American Cancer Society, an even more notable success.

You can read more about Gartner’s Hype Cycle here.

Yesterday Ofcom, the independent regulator for the UK’s communication industries, released its latest Communications Market Report – providing up-to-date information on the nation’s use of all communications technologies from Radio and Television through to the Internet.

Free to download, at 334 pages it is rather a lengthy read – but you can easily skip through it on screen and it does provide some very useful data for anyone looking to keep track of how Internet access and usage is changing in the UK (or indeed any form of communications usage).

A few highlights, just to whet your appetite…

• Overall, between home, work and other connections, 74% of UK adults now use the internet
• 65% of UK households now have a fixed line broadband connection – up from 58% last year
• Mobile broadband is growing rapidly, with over 250k new pre-pay mobile broadband connections in May 2009 alone. Overall some 12% of UK households have a mobile broadband connection, but 75% of these also have fixed-line broadband
• 23% of UK adults with home internet access watch catch-up TV online
• 38% of UK adults have set-up a social network profile – up from 21% last year, and with the fastest growth in the 35-54 age group
• The average UK Facebook user spends nearly six hours on the site each month

V – the UK charity that aims to inspire youth volunteering has just launched a fun new site called The Favour Farm to encourage young people to do favours for those around them in everyday life.

These favours can be as simple as giving a friend a hug or cooking breakfast for their family through to taking part in a charity campaign and, as you’ll see from the video above, the site lets you record these favours in the form of small fluffy animals that live on the farm. Friends doing things together can gather their animals into flocks and there’s a competition for the largest flock, with prizes of festival tickets and the like.

Created by digital agency Ralph, it’s certainly a great looking site with plenty of interactive animated content and features including a comments tickertape and a GoogleMaps mashup to show where favours are being done. Each favour recorded also links to a related V volunteering opportunity – to illustrate the type of volunteering the favour creator might be interested in trying-out.

It’s an interesting youth-focused take on the ‘random acts of kindness’ idea that has been promoted online for a while through sites like actsofkindness.org, helpothers.org, and random-acts-of-kindness.co.uk and hopefully will get more young people thinking about ways they might volunteer their time in the future.

I believe it only launched this month and as I type there are 628 favours down on the farm – which seems like pretty good going in such a short time. However, to keep the numbers growing and so achieve much of a reach within the youth market I’d imagine they’re going to need quite a bit of online and offline promotional activity to make young people aware of the site and sufficiently interested to get involved with it. There are apparently plans for promotion at festivals over the summer, so it’ll be interesting to watch how the site progresses after this.