The Translator

IOF Scotland Conference 2009

2009-11-11T18:54:00Z

Attended the IOF Scotland conference today at the Glasgow Hilton hotel. It was a great day and will continue tomorrow. Some of my highlights from today -

The day started with the opening plenary by Young Dawkins III from the University of Edinburgh. His speech was pretty inspirational and he finished off with a rousing reference to his young baby who may rely on the orgs in the room during his upbringing. One interesting stat that Young gave was that the average UK Higher Ed spends around 37p for every £1 they raise. Edinburgh spend 18p so they are doing well.

The first full session I went to was by Jon Duschinsky from bethechange. His session was entitled Window on the world and he had some great examples of innovative fundraising from around the world. Interesting fact from his session was that Starbucks are doing more for good causes than most NGO's. His session ended with us all doing a Happy dance! Honest!

Jon's quote of the session - 'Bring a child to your next board meeting and give them chocolate every time they ask 'why?'

I then went on to see Howard Lake talk about 'New Media on a shoestring' his session had many highlights but the main thing that I had never heard about was ipadio which is a phone blogging tool that howard has been using at UK fundraising. Fundraising.co.uk has set up a live blog which aggregates all the twitter quotes over the conference. You can access this here.

I spent the first session after lunch giving a video interview to Howard Lake for publishing on Fundraising.co.uk - Which was one of my most nerve wracking experiences...ever!

Final full session that I went to was by Jon Parsons from the Woodland Trust where he talked about the work they are doing down there. They are doing some seriously impressive stuff but the thing that impressed me most was the way they were using trees attached to blue tooth transmitters so that the trees in the woods could, literally, talk to the folks walking through the trees. Even better was the fact that the tree itself was powering the transmitters!

Final plenary of the day was by Jon Duschinsky who was talking about Quantum fundraising. His point was around the fact that people are worth more to a charity than money. Lot's of people coming together to make change happen. Quote from the this session - 'People are the new money'

I've not done any of the speakers proper justice but it was a great day and people seemed really enthusiastic about the new ideas they have picked up during the day. Follow the live blog tomorrow here.

10 Tips for Online Challenge Event Fundraising

2009-10-22T09:43:00Z

At the Blackbaud Relationship Management conference I discussed Challenge Event Fundraising and the best ways to get the most out of these events. I'd like to share some of the findings but first some background. The average UK gift is around £10 (Source CAF) with the average Challenge Event gifts around the £34 mark (Source Justgiving/Bmycharity) so events like this are a pretty effective means of fundraising. So why is the average Blackbaud gift for this stuff in the UK sitting at £69 for 2009? Well there is so much more you can do with these if you optimise your output and ask in the right way.

So I've taken part in a Challenge event or two in my time and you'll see from the video clip below (See me at the beginning of the video...looking breathless) but I've also worried that we could have raised more with better tools at our disposal and have spent the last year since climbing Ben Nevis looking at different ways that we could get more from it. Have a look at my earlier post on Challenge Event fundraising as a whole.

Click here to view the Ben Nevis Challenge Video.

So here are my ten top tips, in no order, for successful challenge eventing.

No 1 - Let People tell their story

Give your eventers the correct tools to explain what they are doing, why they are doing it and let them keep their donors and friends up to date. Great tools for this are blogs, videos, twitter, facebook etc.

No 2 - Learn from other people's successes and failures

If you have previous challenge eventers then give them a voice. Let them pass on tips and hints and especially contacts. Don't have your eventers constantly reinvent the wheel but don't let this stifle innovation. Your previous eventers gave a lot when they took part in their event and hopefully they've built an affinity with you - take advantage of that fact.

No 3 - Constant updates keeps folk interested

Static info on a web page is boring. Encourage your eventers to give regular updates. Let them share the pain of the late nights training in the pouring rain. This encourages repeat giving where someone may give a gift but then see how much effort your eventers are putting in and give a little more.

No 4 - Video Helps

Video is a very powerful tool. The above video gave huge amounts of publicity for the event and if you search on You tube for 'Ben Nevis Challenge' you'll find loads more from various media agencies. You Tube has some great tools for Not for Profit orgs to use. Check out a fabulous article by Frank Barry on the NetwitsThinktank on this subject.

No 5 - Competition is important

Give people a goal that is not just financial. Get them competing against each other. Create hierarchies so that companies, families, friends etc can compete against each other. Create league tables. Have a look at this great example from Oxfam Ireland. They actually exhibit a number of these tips right on this page. Have a look at some examples of a typical hierarchy you can build (above).

No 6 - Family can get involved

Never under estimate sibling rivalry but also don't under estimate the fact that if one family member is fundraising for you, especially if it's in tribute to someone, then another may as well. Give people the ability to create sub pages from a main fundraising page so that a son can have their own page where they can fundraising for their parents. This is a great way of building a family unit which will fundraise for you.

No 7 - SMS is a powerful tool

Use SMS to speak with your eventers but also to help them fundraise. MS Society used the Blackbaud SMS tool to great effect during last years London Marathon. The SMS feels like a far more personal tool and is less likely to be ignored as spam.

No 8 - Make sure you thank the right people

Offer thanks to everyone who takes part. Thanks should go from the organisation as well as the individual. Learn about the donors. Find out if they are giving because it's an event or giving because they feel an affinity for the cause. Ask questions of them - Your friend did it? Why don't you?

No 9 - Social Media is very important

This is vitally important nowadays. Offer your eventers the chance to twitter their achievements. Offer some instruction on this. Can you offer video? Do your bloggers know each other and actively encourage traffic? Get people talking...and keep them talking. Brian Solis' fabulous image - The Conversation is great for looking at the different platforms you could be using.

No 10 - Are you helping them achieve their physical goals?

Helping and nudging them with training plans and recommended training techniques really does help. There are plenty of sites dedicated to achieving physical goals and if you look at the Oxfam site again they have some excellent training tips as well as route maps etc. Encourage people to work together to achieve these goals and create a network. Some free tools like SportsTracker are excellent for building a network around this stuff and it keeps everyone motivated.

Using these tips can really help to build a great online strategy for challenge eventing and helps to encourage fundraising, networking and builds the profile of your event.

I'd love to hear if anyone else has other tips for this type of thing?

Relationship Management Conference 2009

2009-10-08T09:11:00Z

So the Blackbaud Europe conference is upon us once more (starts Monday 12th). It's been rebranded this year as the Relationship Management Conference and has some excellent speakers.

Keynote this year is Paul Williamson, head of ticketing for the 2012 Olympics. Looking forward to that. How he plans to fill millions of seats for the whole of the Olympics will be fascinating. We also have plenary sessions from Chuck Longfield, Blackbaud's Chief Scientist and Shaun Sullivan, Blackbaud's CTO.

Personally I have a busy time scheduled. On day one I am doing a session on Challenge Event fundraising. Looking at some pretty interesting numbers and giving out 10 top tips to maximise this type of fundraising online. We've been pretty much coasting with this stuff in the UK and I think next year would be a perfect time to bring it up a notch and really get the most out of this superb method of fundraising. I'll also be running a demo session on our SMS product at lunchtime that day. If you are going to conference then pop along to see how this works...I think you'll like it.

Day two will be one of my busiest ever at any conference. I start the day doing a PCI compliance session with Emily Cunningham, our UK market Product manager. This session will look at what Blackbaud is doing to make sure we help our users become PCI compliant. After a short break I'll be presenting a Cool Tools presentation will will highlight some nice tools that you can use to get the most out of your social media use. This will look at tools to help build a strategy and then monitor how useful it is afterwards. I've completely rewritten this session recently as I've done it at a few other conferences this year and I hope it goes down well. Then after another demo session at lunch I am doing a Deep Dive into Blackbaud Netcommunity where I'll be looking at the product and what it can do plus a sneak peak at our plans for the future of the product. Should be informative and if you are interested in what the next big thing will be with BBNC then you should definitely come along.

After all of that I think I'll retire upstairs for a well deserved (hopefully) beverage!

If you are coming along to conference then why not check out some of our social media vehicles for the conference this year - Facebook, Twitter, Conference central.

Blackbaud Netcommunity 6.10 makes an appearance

2009-08-28T08:44:00Z

I'm excited that BBNC 6.10 has released this week. It went up on our website on Wednesday. It has some superb new features and functions. I've already spoken about the changes we've made around Gift Aid in 6.10 which should free up some much needed processing time for the UK end users. If you are a UK BBNC user and haven't seen this then I'd recommend having a read before you upgrade because I suspect you'll like it.

So what else have we added in there...well loads. 6.10 has had extensive work done around PCI compliance which is very important but is maybe not as eye catching as some of the other new features such as :

Tag Display
With the Tag Display part, you can now include words or phrases related to a page’s content as hyperlinks on the page. When a user clicks a tag, a search results page that lists all pages with the tag appears, so the user can quickly access related content on your website. You can also display all tags in use in the program so users can navigate to specific areas of your site. (See image for details)
Email Merge Fields
For acknowledgment emails, eReceipts, custom confirmation messages, and notifications, you can now add new merge fields to messages for donors who pledge gifts to be paid in installments. You can include the Number of Installments, First Installment Amount, Frequency, Starting Date, and Ending Date. From the Merge Fields menu in the HTML editor, expand Installment Schedule to view the merge fields available.
Email Conditional Content
The Insert conditional content option appears on templates, messages, newsletters, and appeal messages. You can add conditional content to messages to customise them for different types of recipients. For example, you need to send a message to alumni and parents of current students. Most of the message content is the same, but there are sections in the message you want customised for the two groups of recipients. Using conditional content blocks, you can create a single message that generates the two versions of content you need. A conditional content block works as a container that holds different pieces of content and determines where the content will appear in the message. Within the content block, you add “conditions” which are chunks of content associated with a query or email list of recipients.

For more details check out the Connector blog for all the up to date BBNC info.

The Internet is no longer the Wild West - 3 Cautionary tales from online

2009-08-25T07:51:00Z

The information commissioner in the UK stated that up to 5 million young people have profile updates on a social media site that could adversely affect education or job prospects. So are you monitoring who is saying what and how online?

Here are some cautionary tales about why we are not anonymous online anymore and why we shouldn't be.

(Click on the headers for links to the original stories)

Tale Number 1 - Should folks be anonymous at all times?

This was a recent story of a blogger in the US who wrote some alleged defamatory stories about a Canadian model. The model took Google (who owned the blogspot site involved) to court to reveal the name of the blogger for legal purposes - which Google relented to when told to do so in court. Ironically the blogger is now suing Google for invasion of privacy. This is a classic case of someone thinking they are bullet proof online because they are not making their names public. So do you allow people to post anonymously? Is there a reason for this? Are you covered legally for people adding things onto your website? Have you updated your Privacy Policy or terms and conditions lately? (Do you have a terms and conditions?).

Tale Number 2 - There is nowhere to hide.

This tale concerns a seemingly standard blog around a new Intel security advert. The blogger (Beth Granter) had built the blog around the repetitiveness of the advert and how it looked after a while like animal cruelty. She had some general comments then a fairly aggressive comment made by an anonymous blogger. After this she got a comment form the advertising agency involved thanking her for her comments and taking on board her opinions. This would have all stopped there and the agency would have come off pretty good...if it wasn't for the fact that your IP address does not hide you from the world. Beth checked the IP address of the aggressive guy and the Ad agency...and funnily they both came from the same office. Major egg on the face there.

Tale Number 3 - Make sure things are in Context.

This one is much closer to home. What happened here was that I had made a comment on twitter about the whole #boycottscotland debate which was in regards to a group in the US stating that Scotland should be boycotted due to the Lockerbie bomber being released. Now I'm not getting into the politics of the issue but there was a strong push back from people in Scotland who equally disagreed with the release but felt that boycotting the entire country and that country's products was a little knee jerk. However I made a comment and a former Blackbaud support person who worked with us for years replied with this tweet -

@robmcallen is Blackbaud HQ now boycotting the Support team in Glasgow? Right enough you wouldn't get an e-mail or phone call telling you

So in context this tweet was just a former colleague joking around. However as we have a great listening strategy here at Blackbaud this tweet flagged up to our marketing folks who thought something was rotten in Denmark between the departments and this external person had gotten wind of it. Hilarious but a cautionary tale of things being taken out of context online. So trying not to use ambiguous language is important...text on a page is easily misconstrued.

Just a short one today.

UK Credit card giving up 18%

2009-08-14T10:15:00Z

So it's the middle of a recession right? doom, gloom, despair...etc...etc..etc...So here is some good news - People gave more last year than the previous year and the trend seems to be going up...not a little more but 18% more. That's a reasonable figure. This is according to the UK cards association who showed that giving to plastic cards reached £1.19 billion in 2008 up from £1.01 Billion the year before. People are giving more on debit cards which is up by 16% (c/c by 9%) but one of the more interesting findings in this report was that although more and more of us are giving by debit card we're still inclined to give MORE by credit card.

The cards association does expect this gap to narrow as it has done in the retail sector. However currently people like to give more. £639.2 Million on Credit cards and £546.9 million on debit cards last year alone. The number of transactions rose too (16% on debit cards and 9% for credit cards). Charity Affinity credit cards also saw a rise £6.7 billion being spent on these card and roughly £16.7 million going to charities.

Now here is another piece of good news - more recent figures (First 4 months of 2009) have also seen an increase on 2008 (24% on debit cards and 11% in credit cards). So this is definitely the time to be working smarter to get a bigger slice of this pie.

This is a trend we're seeing at Blackbaud too. The average UK gift last year according to CAF was between £11 and £15. Challenge event fundraising had an average gift of £34 (Source JustGiving and BMyCharity) which is mainly credit card based. Blackbaud's average online gift is higher still at about £64 for our UK charities and about $154 for our US ones (Source: Blackbaud). So optimising the content and taking the gift by card certainly helps to up the average gift.

So the question I'd ask is why?...well the card association thinks it's because it's easy to pay by card and easy to pay online and I'd be inclined to agree. So even more reason to start to monitor not just who is coming to your website but also what they are doing...and why. Usability is so important on websites nowadays and if you make it difficult to give - folks will go to someone who makes it easy. So make sure you can take gifts online, make sure you know why people are coming to your site, make sure they know what you are about, get to know them so you know why they came...and, most importantly, why they'll come back. Get this right and you should be able to get a bigger slice of the one ray of sunshine in these gloomy times...more to come in the following weeks on how to do some of this stuff...

(Source : All figures from the UK cards association except where stated).

#welovethenhs

2009-08-13T10:06:00Z

I saw something yesterday that made me realise the amazing power of the social network and felt that I should really talk about it. Graham Linehan, an Irish TV writer, made a comment on Twitter about another comment that some right wing folks in the US had made around the UK health service. He then tweeted the hashtag #welovethenhs. His call to arms was as simple as this -

Please retweet all your NHS love using the hashtag #welovetheNHS

and so it began...

This was tweeted at around midday yesterday and by the end of the day was the number one trending topic on the Internet. On twitter alone there were literally hundreds of pages worth of tweets all commenting on why they loved the NHS (personally it saved my life in 1994 - that's why I love it). Then it broke out from there. It made frontpage news in some mainstream newspapers and even had people building pages around it and posting pictures. I sat at my desk yesterday having seen the first post and watched as it took off wildly. Hundreds of thousands of tweets later and it's still the top trending topic on twitter and is spawning much chat. It made it onto the radio too and Mr Linehan was talking this morning on Radio 5 Live about it apparently (didn't catch the piece as I am working). It even went to the Prime Minister...although I think Mr Linehan was not best pleased about that. Someone has even kicked off a we love the NHS twibbon.

For Mr Linehan I'd be worried I could have the power to kick off something like this (although wouldn't we all love it?) but it shows that if you have the right message and if people believe in it then these things can really take off. It was also a particularly British reaction - No matter how we personally may criticise our own health service - 'woe betide' anyone who does the same from foreign shores.

Measuring success online - Is this internet thing worth the effort?

2009-08-10T10:19:00Z

I've been away for a while and for that I apologise! Since my last post I've been holed up for a few weeks in our Charleston office strategising around our online products and preparing for work we're going to do next year...all top secret but very very exciting!

Anyway one thing that has been bothering me lately is the amount I've been talking to folks about their online success. So many people I've spoken to lately are not measuring how successful online has been for them. In fact in a recent NFP Synergy survey (Virtual Promise 2008) 49% of folks said they don't measure this stuff at all! With another 20% declining to answer this. I though it might be time we talked about this stuff in a bit more depth.

So here's what I propose. I'm going to look at different areas of this stuff over a series of blog posts and see what we come up with at the end? I've started today by embedding a video in my blog for the first time. I think this is an incredibly powerful set of stats brought together by Erik Qualman who is promoting his new book Socialnomics. Some of the stats in here are incredibly interesting - how quickly the social media phenomenon took off and when the barriers to entry are lowered (Such as letting people join up for free) how much quicker people will sign up.

A few choice stats from in here -

96% of Gen Y have a social media account
Facebook gained 100,000,000 users in 9 months
Qzone in China has over 300,000,000 users
The fastest growing demographic area on Facebook is 55-65 year old women.
Currently there are over 200,000,000 blogs (and rising every day)
34% of bloggers post opinions on brands on their blogs
78% of people trust peer to peer recommendations.

So let's look at that again. If 34% of the 200,000,000 blogs post opinions on brands - is someone posting about you? Do you know who they are? Do you know what they are saying about you? 78% of people trust peer to peer so if they are saying something nice then it's good...but what if they are not? What if they are saying your charity is doing a bad job and you don't know about it?

So given these numbers can 49% really afford not to measure their online success or otherwise? I'd say that's a 'no' right?

This is just one area of how to measure success and we have lots more to cover but hopefully that's enough for today and it's whetted your appetite for future posts.

Some new cool tools from DigitalLeap...

2009-06-19T13:43:00Z

I was speaking this week at the Digital Leap conference in the ICO in London. Firstly a superb venue for a bunch of geeks as everyone had their own desktop mics with buttons to raise their hands with so the toys endeared the place to this particular audience! Second, and more importantly, we had speakers from across the NFP tech community. The focus of the conference was on Social Media and the benefits of this to a not for profit organisation.

One session that really caught my eye was run by Beth Granter and Roger Jones from TwentyFirst and Reuben Turner from the Good Agency. The session was entitled 'Someone is talking about your organisation but do you know who they are and what they are saying?'. The idea behind this session was how do you know that social media is doing you any good if you are not monitoring this.

'Social Media is not a broadcast Channel' - Reuben Turner

They used an example of the work that they had been doing with Compassion in World Farming where they stripped their users down into groups and segmented their targeting accordingly. They had some pretty good results in increasing traffic and increasing coverage using things from Facebook ads through to blog postings and some more excellent tools which they used for gathering numbers.

I thought I'd share some of these tools on here -

Addictomatic - Creates a custom page which will give you instant real time info on any topic you choose. Check out the Blackbaud info here. Incredibly powerful. This is a superb way to find out who is talking about you...and what they are saying!

Crazy Egg - Gives you the ability to create tests for users of your website and who they are using it. Including the ability to create Heatmap images of your website showing how often click on certain areas etc (Like the image on the right here).

Qdos - is a way to measure your internet status and manage your on-line profile. To calculate your internet status, QDOS measures your digital footprint - how active, popular and impactful you are on-line. Create a profile to calculate your QDOS - and compare your internet status to your friends, families and celebrities.

Pipl.com - A superb individual tracker...if a little scary for those of us who live way too much on-line. This will track all sorts such as blogs, twitter etc to give you a run down of what people are saying about you.

So some great tools for measure your success - thanks guys. I would say that there were a few items I didn't agree fully with such as there is no good way to track social media currently (OK just being a little argumentative with that one). The Netcommunity stuff we are currently working on will allow for much stronger integration between CRM and social media sites (we already offer some nice out of the box integration) so we're getting there and these things won't forever be different. In an ideal world we'd be able to hook up our supporter database to the social media sites and tailor/optimise content to the user. Then we'd see the real power of social media. Did I really just say that the power is when we can further manipulate it? ;-)

Overall the conference was excellent and put a lot of like minded people together to share ideas, techniques and opinions. I was very glad to be part of it. Finally if you didn't make it along and would like to know some of the things we talked about - We had a delegate liveblogging from the venue click here to see the excellent results from Jennifer Jones. Howard Lake of UK Fundraising was also reporting live from the event so see the another side of the conversation here.

Recording Gift Aid electronically

2009-06-12T10:12:00Z

Some exciting and potentially extremely useful information around Gift Aid and version 6.10 of Blackbaud Netcommunity. We are looking to launch the latest version of the software later this month and although the biggest ticket item will be the level of PCI compliance (or to be strictly accurate PA-DSS compliance) in the release. (I'm sure I or one of my fellow Blackbaud bloggers will talk in depth about this and the other great new items in 6.10 (targeted email content...no...I've said too much ;-))). I'd like to take a look at a small change we've made which I believe will make a huge impact on the process of recording Gift Aid.

When we started work on Gift Aid in 2000 there were pretty much two ways to record - Written and Oral. This was relatively simple and when we launched Netcommunity in around 2004 we spoke to lots of folks who advised that our online declarations should be recorded as oral (makes sense as they could then be tracked and audited easily). However it has been brought to our attention that HMRC would now like us to record these as Electronic. I spoke with them and got the following response on the subject -

Under the Gift Aid regulations (S.I. 2000 No 2074) a gift aid declaration can given by a donor to a charity;

In writing
Orally; or
By means of electronic communication e.g. via a website.

Written confirmation that a declaration has been given by a donor only has to be sent when a donor who makes an oral declaration.

So another method which is excellent. However...how do we audit this? Well apparently we don't really need as much as we needed before because (also from HMRC) -

Our auditors are familiar with the process of making a Gift Aid declaration via a website, they will look at the information presented to a donor on the website, they will review the process of recording the data given by the donor and they will carry out checks to ensure that only donor’s who ‘Tick’ the Gift Aid box are included on the charity’s claims and that donors who do not tick the Gift Aid box are excluded from the claims.

So, brilliant, no need to send oral declaration info to the donor (or incur the postage cost!). So in version 6.10 of Blackbaud Netcommunity we're no longer going to process online declarations as oral declarations but now as Electronic. This isn't a change to the way HMRC are doing things just a reinterpretation so a small tweak but it saves money on letters and saves time on having to process the declarations...plus you can claim straight away without the Oral cooling off period. Win win for everyone I'd say.

More to come on new BBNC functions very soon...lots of exciting new stuff coming up.

Choosing the right medium

2009-06-03T11:30:00Z

So we at Blackbaud have been running a marketing campaign for quite some time now called 'Giving your supporter the choice'. The idea behind this was that no matter what the message - delivering it in the right way will help to get across your point in a much stronger and more forceful way. I've been monitoring work done online by various folks in Twitter, Facebook etc and a campaign that caught my eye was one being promoted by Bullying UK. Now Bullying UK is a very small charity people wise but they have a strong online prescence by utilising some excellent online tools (I've spoken about them before on this subject).

They are currently taking part in a CBS outdoor competition which would win them 100 pieces of advertising space on London buses. They are doing really well in the competiton and at time of publishing had captured nearly 10% of the online vote. The campaign is what I am really talking about in this blog. The great thing about this is that it's a bus campaign that has the tag line 'Bullies, you hide all day and three come along at once'. The thing is buses are a place that bullying takes place every day so not only is the message getting across but it's also getting across to the people who are being affected by this right at that moment.

So a great example of using a media which kills two birds with one stone but gets across the point in a way that is accessible to the people being affected by the issues. Sorry not much in the way of technology with this blog I just liked the campaign.

This blog post is part of Zemanta's "Blogging For a Cause" campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Why is SMS in decline for fundraising?

2009-05-26T10:28:00Z

I came across two pieces of info last week that I hadn't seen before from the guys over at NFPSynergy that I felt needed looking into further. Firstly the latest installment in their Virtual Promise Survey which was taken last year. In here the percentage of not for profit orgs who are looking to use SMS and mobile technology as a communication tool has dropped from a high of 57% in 2006 to 27% in 2008 - so why the apathy you might ask? Well further research by NFP (due out very soon) states that 72% of orgs see mobile phone company charges as a barrier for entry into this field. The research further goes onto say that 70% of charities had not tried fundraising by text message.

However there is an easier answer I believe than trying to get the blood out of the proverbial with the mobile phone providers (not that we should stop trying to pressure them!) but why not embrace the technology already out there and cut out the middle man? I've been pushing for a while now a way that you can use our technology to effectively force the mobile phone company out of the loop. Now - don't get me wrong - it's not as easy as sending a text message and a small charge (usually £1.50) is taken from your mobile phone bill but it could be a simple way that could mean that the donations are larger, you get more buy in from the donor and you capture more info...all at the same time.

Using SMS as a means to provide a link to a mobile Internet site which could collect donations would be the solution to this age old problem. What it also helps with is that the donor is not obliged to give one set amount and can opt to give more from their credit card and the charity is not losing money. Sending a thank you by SMS shortly afterwards will help also. It is a far more personalised medium in the eyes of the public and users are far less likely to be spammed so sending via this medium does not rely on people opening their email and can be delivered straight to their pockets. Donations in realtime at events can also be especially useful using this method. All it takes is proper set up of a mobile internet page (less graphics, easy simple forms etc) and the org is ready to go in some cases it's actually just setting up CSS on their pages that can be used on a mobile device. There are so many benefits to this media that it's foolish of us to dismiss it because of one roadblock. I know I've gone on about this before but it's something that is very important and very simple and a recent Nielsen survey showed that 23% of mobile phone users who accessed the Internet online (2 Million people in the UK!) are accessing social networks through their mobile phone which is an increase of 249% in the last year.

So maybe some orgs are shying away from mobile technology because of the costs but the public certainly are not and where the public are is where we in the not for profit industry want to be - right? So why don't we try another way of using the technology for fundraising instead of stopping and waiting for the mobile phone companies to relent.

Stick it on Facebook

2009-05-14T15:18:00Z

Figured I'd go back and look at some of the functionality we've added to BBNC which may have been overlooked in the razzmatazz of other releases. I found one piece that I know I've not been pushing and haven't seen others pushing much in the UK either...so for the UK audience can we talk about estickers?

This function is a fabulous way to get your organisation known online by giving your supporters a tool that they can easily use to tell their firends about your cause and then you can track who has drummed up the most support quickly and easily! Sounds simple and nice so why haven't we talked about it before...well it was launched in the behemoth that was NetCommunity version 5.5 and I'm afraid it got a little lost for us simple UK guys.

The Dogs Trust and the Pink Ribbon Campaign are using estickers in their fundraising efforts on Facebook and when you make a donation they give you a free esticker that you can place onto your facebook page to tell your friends that you have donated. It shows you care and encourages your like minded friends to do the same. Dogs Trust and Pink ribbon are not using Blackbaud software to do this but we're offering similar functionality in NetCommunity and have been for quite a while so I wanted to give it some kudos. Those of you who have Netcommunity now will not doubt have seen this piece and wondered what it was for.

Well you will wonder if you are like me and refuse to read a user manual and find out what it's for (it's more fun testing and trying...)! This check box adds some options below a formatted text and images part in BBNC that will allow you to copy and paste the HTML of that part straight into Myspace, Facebook, Your own web page etc etc. It gives you an online sticker that can be used by your supporters like the one on the right here (I admit I'm no designer!).

Importantly though at the bottom of the sticker here you can see that the code is available for others to copy and paste into their Myspace page, Facebook or even into their own websites. These can be used in all sorts of areas including in email signatures etc. Just like in the 80's where charities gave out badges by the million we achieve the same thing but encompass a much bigger audience for a lot cheaper! Spreading awareness and brand thru volunteers and supporters.

So OK we then put this online and give people the ability to stick it onto their pages. Then just use the inbuilt Google Analytics functionality in order to track who clicks through from where and we're tracking the links from potentially hundreds of referers online. Make sure you thank the people who are referring the most people to your website!

I'd recommend a small idiots guide to adding the code into the most used places like Facebook etc as a link on the page also and keep it simple.

There! A nice piece of functionality which really helps and has been cruelly overlooked. Please don't comment on how poor my attempt at an esticker is and just think of the potential.

Raising awareness and funds online

2009-04-09T15:03:00Z

So it's getting up to Easter time and everyone is heading out on an extended weekend here in the UK. I know our US cousins don't get this weekend so I expect to come back to a massive number of emails...especially as I've decided to take a few days off at the other end as well. However before I go I thought I'd share a couple of things that I've seen recently on-line that I've really like around raising awareness and raising funds using social media.

Having moved onto Twitter a few months ago and immersed myself in the wonders of the media I've found it incredibly useful in finding out new info and keeping abreast of all sorts of things but importantly by following the correct people I've found some folks doing some great things on-line that we can all learn from.

First on my list is the work being done by Bullying UK on all sorts of social media and on their own website to increase awareness and get people bought into their message. It's really about taking part. These guys have really embraced the new wave of social media in earnest and have kept themselves abreast of many changes, updates etc. They have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Flickr and their website is all about being up to date and interactive. Not least of which is their anti-bullying poster application (my poster is on the left here - creative huh?) which allows you to go on-line and create your own anti-bullying poster and print this or send to a friend. An excellent viral little tool which can be used by children and adults of all ages (well over 20,000 posters had been created when I published this blog). A great learning tool and it seems very helpful in raising awareness of the plight of people being bullied. Click on the link above to see the other great stuff they are doing across differing media it's a fantastic example of good ways of using social networking tools to help promote your message.

My next excellent example is from Dog's Trust. These guys once again have lots of differing options when it comes to social media and that is important - giving people the choice of how they want to interact with your org. They have a great Facebook application which can take funds on-line. Now as some of you will already know we can't take funds on-line in Facebook (no secure pages) but what this application does is gets you to pledge the funds on-line on Facebook then takes you very quickly out of Facebook in order to confirm and get the sensitive data (credit card numbers etc) then send you straight back to Facebook to say thanks and then lets you have a Dog's trust sticker for your profile so that you can let your friends know that you've donated and that they can donate. Suggested amount of £1.50 is nice and low to encourage folks to give and not even think about it. Click here to have a look at the application.

OK so that's me for a week or so as I'm going to be working hard doing lot's of DIY around the house but I hope you found this useful and if you are interested then feel free to follow me at Http://twitter.com/robmcallen.

I honestly tried to keep this one short! ;-)

Thanks and have a great holiday weekend.

Twitter hunting!

2009-03-30T10:04:00Z

So it's Monday...and I'm very tired after a very long weekend. Why - You might ask are you so tired? Well I spent most of the weekend Twitter hunting around the Isle of Arran! For those of you who haven't heard of this idea - it's basically a treasure or scavenger hunt which is run through the social networking/micro blogging site Twitter.

I work very closely with the Glasgow based support team here at Blackbaud (we're based in the same office so they can't get away from me) and they kindly asked me to help out on their quarterly away day. These days are great team building and training exercises where Blackbaud takes them away at the weekend and gets them up to all sorts of high jinks!

So I don't pertain to being an expert on Twitter hunting but I thought I'd share the experiences we had on the day.

We separated the team into 3 groups who each had a Twitter account to use throughout the day. I was in a fourth group who were setting the clues and bonus items.

In preparation for the day I set up all of the accounts on Twitter and made sure they were all working with Twitpic also. You don't need to register a separate account for twitpic as it uses your twitter credentials (which saves time). Twitpic was used as most of our hunt items involved getting a picture of someone at a certain location on the Island.

We all met up in Glasgow early on Saturday morning where we had to get a train to Ardrossan then a ferry over to Brodick on Arran. The ferry took a little detour as a memorial to HMS Dasher which was sunk on that day in 1943 (more details here). After a short ceremony we were back on our way to Arran. On the ferry we handed out instructions and got the teams to register their mobile phones with twitter for use during the day. All teams were equipped with a Laptop, an OS Map, 3G card, Mobile Phones, Twitter instructions and had a car hired from the Islands car hire place (don't talk to me about the Vauxhall Agila I ended up with which was not built for Island driving - But did do a great impression of a car flying at points in the day). They were then sent on their way. Once underway we started to Direct message the teams with their first clues (we decided to send the different teams to different start points and build it from there) and the teams got underway.

For the event itself we set up a Hashtag of (#Arran). Hashtags are used in Twitter to represent an event and are great for keeping data together and for following lots of feeds on one subject at once. So every time a team wanted to post something up on Twitter we insisted on them inserting this Hashtag into their message so everyone could track everything else that was happening on the day. Importantly though hashtags are not really a feature of Twitter but more a convention used on twitter by users so we used Tweetdeck throughout the day to track these tags.

After the teams had completed their first tasks and sent in their pictures then we sent them another clue which involved them going to another part of the Island. We used a points system to score the day as we wanted to intersperse the day with small bonus items like pictures of seals or some of the sites of Arran like Lochranza Castle. We awarded 100 points for each clue that was completed and then 10 points for any bonus items. The day was a roaring success with all the teams embracing the technology and enjoying themselves traveling around the island and learning loads about the local area. The banter on Twitter was also very good and interesting to see how some of the teams interpreted the clues and bonuses (I always thought that Sand Castles had sand! ;-)).

The biggest lesson from the day were that we should have checked more into having a mobile phone signal (although actually that did make the day more interesting) and make it very clear to teams who haven't used the technology how things like replies and direct messages work. Other than that it was an excellent team building exercise that I'd recommend to anyone and I could see it easily being reinterpreted as a fundraising challenge event tool.

Why not follow me on Twitter also? Click here..although I have to be careful as you never know who is watching!