SEO strategy for charities

There are a few ways you can approach SEO.

If you’re a big company trying to sell something boring and uninspiring like an insurance policy then you’re going to have to do expensive things like hiring a big PR firm to try and create news stories that get you in the press (and on their websites) and running expensive affiliate and link building programmes.

If you’re an interesting charity with interesting things to say then in many ways it should be easier (and cheaper).

The graphic above shows a positively reinforcing spiral. At the centre is great content that interests people. Encouraging people to link to the content and inviting comment on it then starts to build online buzz. Bigger sites pick up on the buzz and link to the content. The bigger the site, the higher the quality of the link and the more importance Google then gives to your site. This pushes you up Google’s search results, sending more traffic to your site and kicking off the whole cycle again.

SEO doesn’t have to be hard or mysterious or expensive. It just needs you to be saying something interesting and then the hard work to start and nurture those online conversations to start this whole process.

12 days of xmas email…

First up, who is this email from? The lack of Christian Aid branding and an obvious mention of the organisation is really stark to me. Their supporters will have to be well aware that Present Aid is their sub brand for virtual gifts. No logo and only mentioning the organisaiton deep into the body copy will have people reaching for delete until they discover it’s from an organisaiton they trust.

Secondly, I think this email is a bit confused about what it’s trying to get me to do. Is it selling Present Aid? Is it a feedback (I haven’t bought from them before), is it content about their celeb’s trip to Tanzania? I’m confused! A clear call to action and a single minded proposition is an absolute essential in an email – more so than any other communication. What needs to happen should be clearly marked above the fold, but there’s nothing here doing that (fold indicated by black line of image below).

present aid email with graphics enabled

Thirdly, copy errors in the final paragraph make this seem very sloppy and slap dash. Proof reading before pressing send costs nothing.

Finally, the data opt out is to opt out of 12 days of Christmas emails. What if I want to opt out of all communications? Or all present aid ones? What happens to communications from Christian Aid if I opt out here? I think they’ve tried to give the supporter choice here, but without a crisp explanation this just adds to more confusion.

I do like the creative look. It feels quite clean and simple – not over designed. I also like the header copy before the link to the html version – this introduces a bit of the content of the email and gives it a bit of intrigue and CTA to open the email, rather than just “click here if you can’t see the images” which tells you nothing about what’s inside.

An experiment…

Email marketing is one of my bug bears. The channel can no longer be described as being in its infancy – yet there is an incredible amount of bad practice in email marketing – especially in the charity sector.

Email is a very powerful and profitable medium and it is only going to carry on growing so it’s important charities learn how to use it now. There is so much expertise in the sector for direct mail, but so little for email – this just seems crazy to me and leads to common mistakes and error being repeated over and over again.

So I’ve decided to do a bit of an experiment (as part of an effort to make me blog more) and monitor and comment on emails that I receive from various charities. I’ll comment on the good and the bad and I won’t hold back from identifying organisations and poor practice. I’ll also try and look at things like targeting and frequency and see if these are being optomised. I hope that this will come together to be a resource for everyone to see a bit of a snapshot of what charity emails look like now, as well as helping people improve their email marketing.

I won’t be posting about creative from my organisation. Not because I think it’s perfect but because it’s unfair on my colleagues and also because it’s not very professional of me as I should be highlighting my concerns internally to the relevant people. Also, as a disclaimer, nothing I post is a malicious attack and I don’t claim to know the ins and outs of every organisation or their marketing plan – this is just my subjective opinion as someone who’s approaching this a member of the public.

So to start…an agency email I got recently.

I know this isn’t in the exact spirit of what I’ve just written, but as it’s a charity agency and it’s incredibly poor practice I thought I should highlight it.

Xmas party email from a charity agency with images turned off

I have blanked out the name of the agency to protect their modesty (aren’t I nice?).

As you can see, this is what confronts you when you open up the email. A load of empty boxes with red crosses. What am I possibly going to get from that?

This is such an incredibly common mistake – relying on images to do the work where html text should take over. Lots of lovely images may make the email look nice, but unless you’re a trusted sender of the recipient they’re not going to get a chance to see your email. Trust me, having a load of blocked images like this does not add intrigue.

Making an impact with words is incredibly vital as it’s the difference between your email getting deleted or people taking the time to download the graphics, read it and respond.

For balance, including my name in the subject is a good touch to increase open rates.

What does this email say to me about the agency who sent it? They don’t have much of an idea about email marketing, and I certainly won’t be beating a path to their door for an email campaign. So whilst the email is trying to build client relations by inviting me to a party, it’s actually ended up scoring a bit of an own goal.

Which? charities

A bit away from digital, but I’ll follow this up with a digital focused post in a while.

An article in professional fundraising says that intelligent giving has ambitions to turn itself into a Which? for charities. It wants to measure effectiveness – the impact that a charity has – so that it can say which organisation an individual is best investing in.

One of the main ways it proposes to do this is by talking to beneficiaries, as well as experts in the field.

Despite the obvious methodological difficulties of any study, this may be achievable for the UK. But such a system is completely unrealistic for international development.

Is Adam Rothwell really advocating that he will fly around the world, speaking to thousands of beneficaries in hundreds of countries about how charity x or charity y has improved their lives? The time needed to assess an organisation like Oxfam is mind boggling.

Even putting aside the resources required, there are good reasons to suggest a survey wouldn’t be valid, because poverty covers not just material wealth but also social capital. It’s not just a case of counting schools and talking to happy community members – issues are complicated and involve rights and social development with intangible things, like confidence.

In my job I was lucky enough to visit work in Malawi and speak to a community where the charity was phasing out its work after 10 long years. Big changes had been made, a new school, a well, a co-operative for food production. But when I spoke to the community members they were scared. They didn’t want the organisation to leave because they felt they weren’t ready – they had never had to run a community co-operative on their own before, and be truly in charge of their own development. The organisation’s staff were confident that the community could go it alone – like a bird learning to fly they just needed to take the plunge. But to an independent observer, who do you trust in this situation? The community members who are scared, or the organisation’s staff?

Intelligent giving’s aspirations are admirable – trying to see which organisations are effective is really important. But this idea seems pretty half baked to me.

the future of charities

It’s struck me recently how many of the recent “rising stars” of charity brands aren’t charities in the sense of what people automatically think – namely, that the organisation you donate to does the work. The “charities” that are gaining prominence at the moment are little more than charitable foundations which fund the work they’re focused around.

Charity:water, for example, much praised recently for being the beneficiary of twestival, Hugh Jackman’s donation, and Youtube’s trial of overlays. But it doesn’t go to the actual trouble of getting to Africa and installing wells itself. Instead, it gives the money it raises to other charities to deliver on its promises in its marketing materials, leaving it to focus on raising money and its profile.

Similarly, Help for Heroes, which has been partnered by the Sun newspaper to reach its target of £20 million has had a big boost for the coverage around major Phil Packer. But again, Help for Heroes delivers its work through giving grants, rather than carrying out the work itself.

I think we’ll see more of this. Brands are so important in charity marketing. The diversification that charity:water and Help for Heroes are taking advantage of helps them focus on their brands and their fundraising. By leaving the difficult job of delivering the work to specialists they can avoid having to reinvent the wheel and can make sure they’re able to make a difference straight away.

And a diversification of brands and service delivery can help open up new markets and new audiences. Many charities find it difficult to connect to younger audiences. That’s why charities like Christian Aid have started youth brands like Ctrl Alt Shift. By playing down the charity and focusing on the audience, the ctrl alt shift is able to connect with its audience. With the democratisation of communication tools through social media, I think that we’ll start to see charities focusing on targeted and niche audiences starting up which are simply fundraising brands, giving the money they raise to the organisations that are most able to carry out the work.

Anyone know of any other fundraising brands that don’t do the work themselves?

See the difference – gimmick or revolution

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.

Perfect pitch

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.

Good tweet

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.

The long-tail of giving

Social Actions is an aggregator which brings together thousands of charitable actions (from signing a petition to giving money) in one place through the power of search. The aim is to go beyond the larger charities, reaching right down to small causes and niche interests.

This is a classic aggregator, which is exposing the long-tail of causes, giving and campaigning. Places like this make it easier to find things to do that really interest people and fulfil their needs. This is taking power away from “hit” charities and putting it in the hands of smaller organisations.

They’ve even released a widget which brings up the most relevant actions depending on the content of the web page that it is situated on.

However, they could improve it even further by developing recommendations based on what you have done, along with showing what the most popular actions are for certain search terms. This will really help the niche grow.

Hat tip to Bryan Miller

What you shouting about?

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.