Covering everything from click-through and conversion rates (by cause) to how much you might expect your email list to churn, it provides some really valuable data to help benchmark your own organisation’s performance. As an update of an equivalent report released back in 2006, it also provides insight into how performance against key metrics is changing over time.
The findings are based on the analysis of data from 21 US nonprofits involved in online fundraising and campaigning, but seem to tally well with the equivalent data I see for the range of UK charities I work with.
Ever since Facebook launched its open developers platform almost a year ago Facebook Apps have been all the rage, including a wide range of Apps developed in support of various charities. However, for anyone not especially into software development the idea of creating your own Facebook App may well never have occurred. Where do you start even if you want to have a go?
Well, based on the 30 mins I’ve just spent creating a simple little Facebook App for this blog (which you can add to your Facebook profile with just a couple of clicks here) a good place to start is at Widgetbox. As well as being a place to browse through over 50,000 web widgets, the site also enables you to create your own - through an incredibly easy to follow step-by-step, point-and-click process. There’s even a way to turn your widgets into cash - although I haven’t looked-into that as yet.
It’s free to use and, while the Widget and Facebook App I produced are very simple (actually a Blidget, apparently - a widget carrying a blog feed), if you’ve got more than half an hour to spend learning the ropes then you may well be able to come-up with something more sophisticated.
I just heard yesterday that this blog is now included in the Alltop Nonprofits listing at nonprofits.alltop.com - a very handy directory of all sorts of blogs relating to nonprofits, philanthropy, online fundraising, charities using social networks, etc. etc… with RSS feeds of their latest posts.
Take a look - it’s a nice easy way to catch-up with some really interesting content.
A bit of fun from telecoms company Orange, who have set-up a survey-based site that uses your responses to questions on internet use to calculate your ‘Internet Age’ - from ‘Online Toddler’ to ‘Virtual Vetran’.
I ended-up with 11 out of 16, making me ‘Dot Competent’ - which feels about right (having zeroed-out on the online dating questions - my dating days being back in a pre-internet age;-).
While undoubtedly intended as the basis for some future ‘research’-based PR activity, the range of questions asked is actually quite interesting as reference if you’re planning your own online research to determine levels of supporter internet use.
Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, has just released its first dedicated report on social networking in the UK. It’s free to download and makes very useful reading - essentially an extremely well researched one-stop primer on the whole subject. Alternately, if reading a report is just far too ‘old media’ for you, then you can watch a summary video - just click on the YouTube screen I’ve embedded above.
Largely based on Ofcom’s own quantitative and qualitative research, the report highlights a range of interesting usage findings - such as:
- The UK apparently has a higher level of social networking site take-up than the US, Japan, France, Germany and Italy. The only country where social networking is more popular is Canada.
- On average, adult social network users have profiles on 1.6 sites and check their profile at least every other day.
- Nearly a quarter of those who visit social networking sites are aged over 50.
Of particular interest to me is the attitudinally-based segmentation of social network users and rejectors developed on the back of the qualitative research, which provides some useful insights into different audiences for social networks.
The report also examines privacy and safety issues, including both primary research and a literature review.
Overall, it’s a must-read for UK-based marketers and fundraisers working with social media (or just wanting to know what it’s all about).
All this great research insight for free! Go on… hit download, grab a cup of tea, and go read it.
Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the Google Grants scheme, developed to support the online marketing activity of non-profits by providing free AdWords advertising to organisations selected through an online application process.
Currently available in 16 countries, and with more apparently on the way, the anniversary provides a useful reminder for any non-profits using, or looking to use, Search Engine Marketing to check out the scheme and see if it might be of use to them. Although, as reported in a comment to my earlier post about Google Grants, the programme may well be of more use to smaller organisations than those with a well developed SEM .
A common question that crops-up when I’m discussing the potential for Web 2.0 approaches to supporter engagement is whether such things as Facebook and MySpace aren’t just the domain of ‘young people’ (a flexibly applied term - usually defined as ‘younger than our supporters’).
One useful source of information to help inform such debates comes from Forrester Research, who have recently released an update to their Social Technographics profile for the UK.
Social Technographics is Forrester’s approach to segmenting the consumer marketplace based on how people engage with Social Media (another term for Web 2.0). Within this model, consumers can belong to one or more of the segments shown above, depending on how high on the Social Media engagement ‘ladder’ they have climbed - from ‘Inactives’ at the bottom to ‘Creators’ at the top.
The percentages shown above represent the proportion of the UK 16+ ‘frequent net using’ consumer market who Forrester’s research say engage at each level. So, as of the end of 2007 they estimate that 37% of frequent net users were in the ‘Joiners’ segment - using social networking sites.
This data can also be cut by age band:
Sure enough, overall engagement peaks in the 16-17 age band, with 71% ‘Joiners’ and 47% ‘Creators’. However, the spread of engagement towards the right of the chart still makes for encouraging reading. In particular in the 45 to 54 band (the entry level to the ‘Baby Boomer’ audience which represents so much untapped fundraising potential) where almost 1 in 5 frequent net users are in the ‘Joiner’ category.
As social networking and other social media applications become increasingly mainstream it’ll be interesting to watch for future updates from Forrester to see just how quickly the engagement of ‘older’ consumers on the upper rungs of the ladder grows.
One thing’s for sure - the numbers will be moving in the right direction for online fundraisers.
I’m afraid that a combination of some especially busy weeks at work and my home broadband going down for a while has left my blog rather sparsely updated since last month.
However, I have had the opportunity to write a short piece for the e-newsletter of the Resource Alliance on one of the subjects I’ve been working on quite a lot recently - Community Fundraising 2.0.
So, while I work on getting the blog back up to speed, do take a read and see what you think - as always all comments welcome.
I chose a broad and much discussed topic for my hosting of this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: Creating and developing online communities through Web 2.0.
On to a Social Network with a difference, NetSquared generated a load of discussion in response to its recent Think Tank question How Can Nonprofits use Twitter? - including the story of how the American Cancer Society is using twitter to promote its breast cancer research ‘Frozen Pea Fund’!
Then we have a whole host of Web 2.0 Tech Tips from Social Signal - covering everything from blogging, del.icio.us, and RSS to advice on community content.
And finally a post from DonorPowerBlog by my old Seattle-based friend and colleague Jeff Brooks, with some suggestions on how to have Kiva’s problem - namely raising too much money!
That’s it for this week. But you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it wends its weekly way across the blogosphere by subscribing to the carnival feed.
Recently I’ve been using an analogy originally promoted by online marketing pioneer Seth Godin to help illustrate how individual donor fundraisers, steeped in traditional direct marketing, need to evolve their thinking to capitalise on the new opportunities being offered by Web 2.0.
In his free to download ebook ‘Flipping the Funnel’ (with a tailored version for nonprofits), he highlights how fundraisers should re-evaluate the traditional approach of funneling high volumes of prospects into a fundraising programme to convert low volumes of supporters.
In Godin’s analogy, when you ‘flip the funnel’ (with the help of Web 2.0 tools) what you end-up with is a megaphone, through which passionate supporters can shout-out to their network of personal contacts on your behalf - overcoming the decline in mass-market appeals and reaching people traditional fundraising communications can’t reach.
In his own words “A new set of online tools makes this approach not just a possibility, but also an imperative for any organization hoping to grow. Give your fan club a megaphone and get out of the way.” I couldn’t agree more!
