Over on Queer Ideas Mark has a nice model for analysis donation (or sales) data.
He cateogrises three file types:
- Nails: most people give once and then don’t give ever again. They shouldn’t even be classed as your donors.
- Carrots: files decline slowly over time due to a lack of continuing engagement
- Upside down beetroot: only a tiny minority haven’t given recently and most have given something in the recent past.
I really like this model because I think it clearly illustrates how recency is important to engagement. But also like it because I think it can apply to broader engagement, and particularly digital engagement.
How many times have you seen people claiming “outstanding” results for digital engagement campaigns that are little more than hollow numbers. Digital is measurable – you can see how many people are following you on twitter, or how many fans you have on facebook. But how many organisations ask themselves the difficult questions – how many of these people are actually engaged with us? I think many “successful” organisations would be surprised.
But all is not lost! In digital engagement you need to ask people to do things – and regularly – otherwise you’re just talking at them, and that’s not what social media is about. When you ask supporters to do things, you can track their actions quite effectively. This needs to be recorded and analysed, just like any other CRM database. Then you can work on turning your nail into a juicy fat beetroot. Organisations who do this will reap the benefits in the future.
I’ve been reading a bit recently about See The Difference, a new web venture nicely summed up on Bryan Miller’s blog. Essentially, it is a new charity aggregator which promises to revolutionise the charity market through it’s use of video to recruit and feedback to donors.
I think it will fail for 2 reasons:
Some are making comparisons with Kiva. But there is a fundamental difference between this venture and other already existing charity aggregator sites, such as Global Giving. Kiva facilitates the interaction between individuals. The old addage is as true today as ever. People give to people. People do not give to projects. They don’t give to “funds”. They give to make a difference to people. Kiva knows this and does this very well. Charity aggregators haven’t done this very well so far, because they focus on aggregating projects – not on aggregating individual need.
Secondly, video online isn’t new. Other charities are out there already using it to excellent effect telling their stories in real time. Charity:water, child’s i foundation and learnasone are all using video to tell stories direct from the field. They’re broadcasting their message across multiple platforms of twitter, facebook, blogs and other social media. They don’t need See The Difference. All it could ever be to them is an expensive shop window, but looking at the success of charity:water, charities can do perfectly well without this extra layer getting in the way.
Tags: charity, charity:water, child's i foundation, learn as one, principles of fundraising, see the difference, social media
International development, charity, digial, social media | admin | 
May 7, 2009 2:43 pm | 
Comments (0)
The 5th Summit of the Americas (a regional diplomatic conference for the Americas, surprisingly) is using a digital town hall (on the howcast platform) to connect with citizens across the Americas. People can submit questions for Hilary Clinton to ask in a live video cast, follow the negotiations live via video streams, as well as reading blogs and following tweets.
So far, so good. I think the idea of connecting ordinary citizens with a diplomatic event that can feel very removed from their everyday lives is commendable. I think the execution lets it down.
What we’re getting are the same old ideas for participation, over and over again. Instead of just typing questions for Hillary, how about using the wisdom of the crowd through a Wiki to set some of the agenda for the politicians (they are supposed to be democratically elected, after all). Or what about bringing the citizen into the conference through holding live citizen participation forums, which contribute to and influence the political debate?
By focusing on the tools, the US State deparment (who is behind this) are missing the point of what the tools enable: democratic participantion. It would have been nice if they could have made some of these things happen.
On the up side, this sort of thing has many applications beyond politics: how about running e-conferences, government departments running digital seminars/lectures to disseminate the latest knowledge, charities creating a platform for widely-dispersed beneficiaries to come together to access services, or a small organisation to hold an agm? On these smaller-scale levels, greater participation by the general public is much more achieveable.
Hugh Jackman is using twitter to “auction” a $100k donation to charity. People have to convince him, in 140 characters or less, why their charity of choice is worthy of the money.
I do feel this is a bit popularist and not exactly the researched and considered way that we’d all like to see people making their decisions about donations. It also fails to promote a commitment to a cause - focusing instead on a one-off, attention-seeking kind of approach. But I suppose if it reaches to a new audience then that’s not a bad thing.
—UPDATE—
Charity:water have moved really quickly, getting children in Ethiopia to hold up signs to Hugh, asking for the money. They then posted the picture on twitter.
Came across this good twitter feed from Wildlife SOS India.
I think it’s good because:
- It’s from the field
- It’s from a field worker – you actually get to hear the voice of someone who’s at the coal face, i.e. it’s got a personality
- It’s lively and written passionately
- It’s updated frequently – they’re busy, they don’t need to stop to tell me about the need, I can read it in almost every post
- it’s teaching me about something I didn’t know about before – i.e. I’m engaged.
I think most charities can learn a lot from this. Twitter isn’t just another way to broadcast your latest press release or organisational line. It’s social media. You need to use it to tell a story and that story has to involve people – in the narration or the subject matter or both. Charities have no greater stories than what happens every day in the front line. Twitter lets you uncover these hidden gems, as long as you give the right person the twitter account.
I love this from digital agency Poke. It’s a little machine that they’ve build for their local bakery. When freshly-baked deliciousness is ready, staff just have to twist a dial, press a button and then a message is published to twitter - Letting everyone know that freshly baked bread and cakes are ready for buying.
A really excellent application of the technology.
More from Iain Tait.
Image of superman by Adrià garcía
A bit of a shameless plug for ActionAid’s Mega Mouth campaign. Go and get involved!
But not too much of a shameless plug, because it’s really good.
A real life super hero, Mega Mouth, is walking around London in the run up to the G20, gathering messages that he is then going to shout out at the Put People First rally this weekend.
People can submit messages for him to shout on the ActionAid website or via Twitter. The Twitter campaign is really good – there’s an almost constant stream of updates as Mega Mouth walks about and they make a real point in following everyone who follows them and sending them a message encouraging them to get involved.
What’s even better is the use of Qik to show Mega Mouth’s progress around London – live! Qik is a video broadcast service that lets broadcast, in real time, footage you shoot on your mobile phone.
I’ve had a play around with it and it’s really good. Only problem I found was that it did take a while to stream and it kept having to buffer the content that I was viewing, but I’m sure they’ll get this sorted.
It really opens up a lot of opportunities – especially for citizen journalism and the ability for people to publish their own content. The boundaries between traditional broadcast media and the “new” communications tools are being broken down even further.
Great content from Rubber Republic for the Today programme. Almost the definition of content that makes a good viral.
Facebook have announced changes to their fan pages, which essentially mean that they increasingly become more like friends. Ian Schafe explains in more detail what the changes are on his blog.
As Alan Wolk says on his blog, this will be of limited use to most brands. Those brands that customers only have a limited relationship with, like most FMCG and service brands, will probably struggle to make this work in a meaningful way without annoying those people that they’re trying to make a relationship with. Do you really want your toilet roll popping up in your home page feed all the time? Probably not.
However, as Alan notes, there are a limited number of brands that can make this work. He calls these “prom king brands” – those brands that people do have a real connection with. Luckily, I think charities can fit into this category. Charities – because of the nature of our work and the connection we can make with people’s values as a result – do have the possibility to make a meaningful connection in social spaces.
The move by Facebook can only be a good thing for charities, as it gives so much more scoping for developing meaningful relationships on the platform.
They may be disgusting balls of sugar and food colouring but Skittles have really embraced social media with their US site.
The home page is a twitter fall-type page which shows real-time comments from people about Skittles. The product listings page takes you to the Skittles Wikipedia entry. Videos takes you Skittles on You Tube. Photos takes you to Skittles on Flickr. Click on “friends” and it takes you to the Skittles Facebook fan page.
This is simultaneously innovative and boring.
It is innovative because it relies on minimal marketing spin and really puts social media at the heart of the campaign. It leaves no where to hide and puts users at the forefront of the experience – their comments, input and connections are truely driving this campaign.
However, coming to this cold, I find the lack of narrative a bit of an issue. Without any thing driving a story it just seems to be a collection of different bits of the internet being dragged into one place without a purpose. It’s not pushing me further along a narrative with Skittles, it’s just like a directory listing.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I haven’t seen the offline campaign so don’t know how this site fits in. Also, FMCG always find it difficult to offer added value online. Their online campaigns normally stretch to a flash-heavy site with some sort of mini-game. If this is just a small part of a big ATL campaign then this might work well – encouraging people to simply talk about/interact with the campaign and the brand to multiple the offline impact. If this is the case then it might work well. However, I do think that Creme Egg have done digital cross platform campaigns better in the past (though this year’s campaign is looking a bit lack luster).
Congratulations must go to Skittles though for having the confidence to do this.
Subscribe