Giving 1 Million Followers a Purpose

By now, most of you have heard about the original @Drew auctioning off his Twitter Handle to benefit the Live Strong Foundation. I’m sure you’ve also heard about & Drew Carey and his series of increasingly generous bids – now potentially reaching $1,000,000 – should Mr. Carey’s Current Account Accrue a total of 1,000,000 Followers – Effectively Attributing a $1 Value to each person.

You can check out Mashable’s Coverage of #BlameDrewsCancer & the surrounding story, as well as CNN’s take on the situation.

I’m not breaking any news here – but I would like to make a comparison, even if it’s an obvious one. If you recall, it wasn’t too long ago that Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, and a slew of other celebrities pathetically riding their diamond studded coattails, joined the ranks of Twitter Personas, despite some vehement protesting that they do (and still do) nothing to add value to the community. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t celebrities who DO engage with their followers, ala The New York Jets, Dave Matthews, Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon…and others

However, it takes but a quick look at Mr. Demi Moore Willis’ recent posts to see he’s just broadcasting, adding little to no value, using twitter no differently than he would any other medium.

This is also not to say that he’s using twitter any differently than 90% of the rest of the popular platform’s patrons. However, he made a point to garner followers and attention, ‘racing’ CNN to reach 1 million and make the history books – and has since done absolutely nothing with that accomplishment, or his fan/follower base. All that influence – just going to waste.

Meanwhile – Drew Carey’s going to get a million followers (probably, maybe?), and even if he can’t interact with each and every single one – he’s still engaging, adding value to the community by validating their existence, giving them a reason to follow him other than to voyeur on mundane celebrity activity – he’s giving them VALUE – $1 to be exact. Thus enabling every single one of his followers to contribute to a charitable cause just by lifting a finger and without even having to donate any money themselves.

And what does Mr. Carey get out of this? He certainly doesn’t need the additional attention any more than Kutcher, the guy hosts “The Price is Right.” Sure he gets some added PR and a bit of an ego boost – but it’s costing him up to a million dollars.

This whole situation begs us to compare the two and their respective endeavors to reach one million followers – Ashton’s was vain, self serving, and ultimately pointless. While Drew Carey’s is clearly altruistic, not only donating his own money for a good cause but also rallying the masses and facilitating their involvement in charity, in the simplest possible way, through both traditional and new media. I think we have a winner here.

This then begs another question – how will Mr. Carey’s actions impact nonprofits and charitable organizations in their use of social media? Initiatives designed to raise attention for a given cause can elevate a charity from relative obscurity to a zeitgeist phenom with people dedicating their Facebook statii to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, en masse, or Greening their twitter profile picture to reflect the political situation in Iran.

Further, Microdonation campaigns have used the Twitter ripple effect and apps like Facebook causes to refocus attention from low quantity, high volume donations from philanthropic giants to relying, instead, on individuals, average Joes & Janes, donating in small increments but also in great magnitudes.

Now a new method makes the foray into the fray – something of a spin on celebrity endorsements and PSAs with a bit of 90’s domain squatting thrown into the mix, albeit with a more benevolent agenda in mind.

Back on the Ides of April ’09, CNN set what could have been a terrible precedent when they purchased the CNNBRK account, potentially opening the doors for malicious squatters to register for brands’ preferred social media profiles and hold them for ransom. [Note - @cnnbrk has been ridiculously inactive of late – wonder if CNN is regretting that decision]

Personally, I’m curious to see if Mr. Carey’s Actions will catch on – is auctioning off popular twitter accounts a viable means of raising money or is this a one-time deal?

It also calls into question the role of celebrities on Twitter – how should they be using twitter? If they can accrue a vast number of followers with relative ease (or $) do they have a responsibility to activate those followers?

Thoughts Please!!!!

Fundraising on Facebook

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Paul Levy – The chart above is from an article on CrunchBase about Facebook, showing the growth in subscribers since the service was opened up to the world beyond students. Amazing quote: “Facebook users’ passion, or addiction, to the site is unparalleled: more than half use the product every single day and users spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook. Facebook is 6th most trafficked site in the US and top photo sharing sidte with 4.1 billion photos uploaded.”

I became intrigued with the idea of using the Facebook cause feature as a possible fundraising tool for our hospital after I saw that a neighboring hospital had raised over $50,000 for one of its cancer programs in this manner. So last weekend I set up a cause, called Healing Music, to raise funds for our harp player and other musicians and sent a notice to some friends. It is has been fun to literally watch the viral marketing that results. I don’t know if it will raise much money — although it is a good cause and you should feel free to donate! — but it is also an excellent way to inform people about a worthwhile feature of our hospital and to share a nice idea with other medical centers as well. (By the way, the fee taken by the people who run the fundraising application, less than 5%, is very reasonable, especially since it costs nothing at all to set up a cause.)

But, beyond this, the wall-to-wall conversations on Facebook can be really entertaining and illustrative of important cultural differences throughout the world. Here, for example, is a post-Super Bowl note from a Boston-bred relative to her good friend in New York:

You know what?! Fine. You won. Good playing. Catch a ball on your head and all that crap. But sending me an invite to join the “Giants fan club”? Not cool.

Source: Crunch Base, Paul Levy

Once you have the basics of a modern online fundraising strategy in place, the basics being (1) a website, (2) an E-Newsletter, and (3) a social media plan, you are ALMOST done.

It is often overlooked, but without adding ANY cost to your operation, you can put in place an analytic program that measures everything that happens on your website, your donation page, your E-Newsletter, as well as in the social media stratosphere.

Not only can you measure the obvious stuff, such as where your traffic is coming from (Twitter? Facebook? Some crazy guy’s blog?), but you can also analyze exactly what all of your donors have in common.

For example, with a good analytics program, you may learn that every single person who chooses to make a donation to you ALSO happens to stumble upon an obscure section of your web site.  Once you know that info, you may choose to zero in on that obscure section, and pull it out and put it right at the top of your homepage.  Then, once you do that, you can measure whether it helps persuade more people to become donors.

Or you may learn that a high percentage of your new donors are finding you through Facebook.  And maybe instead of devoting a huge chunk of staff time to an E-Newsletter that (your analysis tells you) is producing very few new donations, you should carve out a meaningful amount of staff time to maximize the benefits you’re accruing from Facebook.  Or you may learn that the opposite is true, and your E-Newsletter should get more attention to live up to its potential.

The point is, you learn.  And then you can make decisions accordingly.

Twitter hit the big time in early 2009 and is the latest large-scale social media tool. It’s popular for business networking and for individuals.

Some charities and have also made good use of Twitter, reaching out and talking to their supporters on a more personal level. Fundraisers are using Twitter to promote their fundraising events and even persuading celebrities such as comedian Bill Bailey to pass on, or ‘retweet’, their message.

Some examples of fundraising tweets from Everyclick charities and fundraisers:

@GoodcontactUK “Supporting UK charity for blind children while using this FREE search engine www.everyclick.com/visionaid Pass it on please.”

@Waterstones “Our friends at Dyslexia Action are raffling a car. Worth a punt for a good cause! http://www.everyclick.com/dyslexiaaction“

@SOGreatBritain “Help Special Olympics Great Britain raise much needed funds, just by using this link www.everyclick.com/specialolympicsgb as your homepage.”

@TBAlert_charity “We raised nearly £400 in just a few days in the everyclick small car draw. Thanks everyone who entered and good luck for winning that car!”

@HMStella “Another tenner donated on everyclick.com/serena-sardi – I am super grateful – and inspired to go running first thing in the morning!”

Why don’t you sign up at Twitter and see if reaching out to more people could give your fundraising a boost?

Tweet your, or your charity’s, Everyclick homepage link and encourage people to donate.

* You can follow Everyclick on Twitter at @Everyclick_news
* Create your fundraising page to collect sponsorship online.
* Please note: the small charity car draw has now closed.

Proctor & Gamble, currently the world’s 8th largest corporation and over 170 years old, was the first company to put a toll-free 1-800 number on all of its product packaging.  The first year after doing so, it received 200,000 phone calls from customers offering ideas or complaints.  For a company like P&G, which spends hundreds of millions of marketing dollars aimed at identifying and locating customers, it was a breakthrough to simply turn on a channel that allowed its customers to reverse the process and cheaply initiate the outreach.

Nonprofits, schools, and companies can think of social media the same way.  Just turn on the channel (with a blog, a Facebook profile, Twitter, YouTube, or a specialty service like AlumFi), and let your donors, volunteers, and customers find you.  Take their messages seriously.  Respond to them over the same social network with which they contacted you.  You’ll have richer communications, better relationships with your base, and a better year overall than you would otherwise have had.

Here are the top four reasons people give you money:

1.  They sincerely believe in the mission of your organization.

2.  They have a relationship (or had a relationship in the past) with your organization, either as a beneficiary of your services, or as a staff member or volunteer.

3.  They want public recognition for a gift to you.

4.  They have a personal relationship with the person who is soliciting them for a donation, and they want to help that individual.

Because this is about why people give money to you (and not why they give money in general) there is no need to talk about the tax-deduction i­­­ncentive, as well as some other reasons that may motivate general giving.

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The most important thing (if you are trying to grow your donor base) is to focus on why your current donors chose to give in the first place, and how you can effectively expand your capacity in that area without neglecting the reasons why your current donors choose to make repeat donations year after year – which is another topic.

When you break this list down, you may find that you are doing quite a bit to advance Reasons 1, 2, and 3, and that Reason 4 provides the most real leverage for growing your donor base.  Many schools and nonprofits find themselves asking (a) what can we, as an institution, expect to gain from social media tools?  The answer is simple: you’ll get a larger number of new donors who were identified by one of your current donors, and therefore, you’ll get more donors overall.

Of course, a solid social media plan will result in better communication among ALL types of donors, which will boost overall gifts to your organization.  But in order to focus your plan you should think mainly about that fourth category of donations.  There are many people who are waiting to make donations to your institution, but they’ll never make the leap to become donors if they are not solicited by someone they know.

Caroline McCarthy just wrote an article entitled Crowded Roads Ahead for Charity 2.0 (which I saw via Beth Kanter’s blog), in which she says the following:

“As the Web is flooded with more and more charity initiatives…problems can arise. At best, donations could be spread too thin, rendering many organizations less effective.

Of more concern is the fact that the influx of charities and nonprofits to platforms like Facebook and Twitter could result in noise, congestion, and outright apathy. Spreading awareness of a good cause grows difficult when that good cause starts to seem like spam. If one tweet after another is seeking donations, people might just get fed up.”

In my view, this is both exactly right and exactly wrong.  On its face, it is certainly true that social media can be abused the same way that direct mail, telephone solicitations, and E-Newsletters can be abused.  And donors will certainly tune out anything that is (a) spam or (b) simply irrelevant to them.  But that isn’t something that could happen if the social media sites get more crowded – it is something that happens every day already when nonprofits and schools treat social media tools as a means of simply maximizing the number of eyeballs on their message.  The healthiest thing you can do is tune out the fact that Facebook has 250,000,000 registered users, and that you have a Board Member who wants you to get 2% of those users to give you a dollar.  Because it’s not gonna to happen.

Here’s what you do need to know: The reason why your nonprofit will succeed and become one of the social media success stories is because you will engage the people who love you the most so that they can help you identify the people who still love you, but love you just a little bit less.

If you have a great relationship with Facebook exec Dave Morin and Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, then perhaps they will help you raise $965,000 using Facebook and Twitter, just like they did for Charity Water.  But if you don’t have a relationship with either of them, you can still engage the person who just donated $50 on your Web site, and politely ask that person to tell her personal network about her passion for your organization.  Her actions will cut through the clutter and reach her friends and loved ones better than any paid ad.

There’s a very special charity raffle underway to specifically benefit the Virginia-based “Paws4Vets” foundation, US military veterans and associated nonprofits.

Retired USAF Colonel Mike Turner remarks “Join me in helping paws4vets(TM) match trained Service Dogs to soldiers returning home with PTSD, brain injuries, blindness, physical disabilities and burns. In over ten years as a fundraiser for non-profits, I’ve never seen so much value added at every point in an altruistic program. Our wounded vets are thrown a lifeline to find their way back to their loved ones. The dogs, often rescued from certain death, are restored to health, cared for and loved for the rest of their lives. The prison inmates training the dogs for our soldiers get self-esteem and post-prison job opportunities for the first time in their lives. And this revolutionary way for all of us to support our vets also gives you extraordinary odds to win hundreds of prizes up to $1M.”

Simply visit the Paws4Vets veterans charity raffle to buy raffle tickets, and support these worthy causes.

If you represent a Veterans charity or nonprofit of some kind, and want to learn more about raising money through nonprofit charity raffle fundraisers, contact I-raffles.org nonprofit fundraising solutions.

Min veninde gennem mange år Sara har startet en indsamling i samarbejde med Kræftens Bekæmpelse. Indsamlingens penge går til at støtte kampen mod brystkræft.

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Støt ved at klikke her.  (Et nyt vindue med kampagnen åbner)