Causes App celebrates first birthday - but surely there is more potential for Facebook fundraising?

Last Saturday was an important anniversary in Social Networking terms, marking one year since Facebook launched Facebook Platform, the toolkit that enables the development of 3rd party Applications (Apps) that integrate directly with Facebook user data. The sudden explosion in Apps resulting from this was a significant driver of the site’s massive growth in popularity throughout 2007, and according to Facebook stats site Adonomics it has led to the release of almost 27,000 Apps to-date.

The same day was also the first anniversary of the biggest non-profit Facebook App, ‘Causes’ from Project Agape (now also available on MySpace).

A runaway success from launch in terms of installations, Project Agape marked the anniversary with the release of statistics on its first year’s activity. Apparently they now have a total of 12 million registered users (95,886 daily active users when I just checked) supporting over 80,000 US and Canadian non-profit organisations. Other countries are still being considered for inclusion, but in a post on the Causes discussion board earlier this month it was explained that “Supporting donations to UK-based charities is still a project we’re interested in, but we are strapped for resources and cannot provide a date”.

80,000 non-profits being represented on two of the world’s biggest Social Networking sites is undoubtedly great news, with the App clearly tapping into a widespread desire amongst site users to share their support for charitable causes.

However, when you look at the figures released in terms of hard cash it seems like Causes still has some way to go before it becomes a significant income generator for the organisations involved. Over the last 12 months, $2.5 million has been raised through Causes for 19,445 organisations - equating to an average of just $126 per organisation. No donations at all have been made to 75% of the 80,000 organisations being ’supported’.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think Causes is a great initiative and I do understand when other commentators have observed that this is $2.5 million that these organisations would not have had otherwise. However, I wholeheartedly believe that supporter engagement on Social Networking sites has the potential to deliver massively more in fundraising terms than what currently appears to be the equivalent of an online small change collection tin.

Perhaps it’s simply that the Causes ‘Digital Badge’ approach to supporter engagement just doesn’t lend itself to generating higher levels of financial engagement? Is it just too easy to install the App and choose a few organisations to support by putting their badge on your profile and that’s it - job done?

By contrast, those Apps which extend the tried-and-tested sponsored challenge fundraising approach to Social Networking sites seem to better illustrate the real Community Fundraising potential of sites like Facebook. For example, Justgiving.com (which enables individuals to set-up fundraising pages in support of their sponsored activities) has seen significant uptake of its Facebook App (see their latest stats here) and identified Facebook as its second biggest referrer after Google - a trend confirmed by Hitwise UK.

Anyone else got any examples of where organisations are managing to raise significant amounts on Social Networking sites?

Insights, tips and tricks for online fundraising - it’s this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, a weekly blog carnival drawing together some of the best nonprofit news, advice and resources on offer across the blogosphere.

Each week a different host blogger sets a topic for this carnival and other bloggers submit posts on that theme - with the best seven being highlighted on the host’s blog. This week it’s my turn to host and the topic I chose was ‘Insights, tips and tricks for online fundraising’.

So, without further ado, here are seven online fundraising insight, tip and trick posts for you…

1. Starting off with some tips on how to evaluate and utilise Website architecture and and design to boost online fundraising from Jim Killion and Amanda Wasson of is7.

2. Staying with website design, Katya shares some tips from the latest study by Donordigital on what makes a great donation page.

3. And still on websites, for anyone at the early stages of website planning Jason King has posted the handy presentation he gave at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane on Planning your non-profit’s website.

4. The Care2 folks over at Frogloop have reported on a recent survey that suggests that ‘51% of donors are not at all interested in Social Networks. However, apparently around a third of donors are somewhat or very interested in keeping-up with nonprofits through Social Media - rising to 40% for high level donors. Handy insight for social network fundraisers.

5. In her Nonprofits blog, Joanne Fritz shares some tips derived from UNICEF’s use of social networking and video-sharing sites.

6. For email fundraisers, here are Ten tips from Network for Good to help prevent your emails being deleted.

7. Finally, over at onLine, Garth Moore examines the potential of the new generation of ad funded click-to-donate applications.

That’s it for this week. You can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it travels around from site to site by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

Online Fundraising and the Hype Cycle

The other day I got chatting with a colleague about the ‘Hype Cycle’, used by technology consultancy Gartner to illustrate the adoption of technologies through the lifecycle of hype, disappointment and (in some cases) the eventual delivery of practical benefits. As shown in the chart above, the Hype Cycle comprises 5 phases:

1. Technology Trigger: the breakthrough, product launch, or other event that generates significant press and interest.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: A frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.

3. Trough of Disillusionment: Technologies fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and technology.

4. Slope of Enlightenment: Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the ’slope of enlightenment’ and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.

5. Plateau of Productivity: A technology reaches the ‘Plateau of productivity’ as its benefits become widely distributed and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

In the light of all of the current discussion about the potential for Social Media (aka Web 2.0) to deliver real benefits for fundraisers (aka Community Fundraising 2.0) this got me thinking about just where different aspects of online fundraising are on the Hype Cycle - a useful thing to consider if you’re in the process of planning any mid to long-term online fundraising activity.

On the ascendancy between technology trigger and peak of expectations we have things like Twitter - the micro-blogging social network that is generating a load of discussion at the moment but not, as far as I can tell, as yet being linked to any significant fundraising activity.

Just past the peak and on the brink of tipping into the trough of disillusionment there is fundraising in virtual worlds. I still remain convinced that at some point in the future some form of 3D virtual environments will become commonplace for everyday transactions like retail and fundraising. However, despite the interest in the American Cancer Society Second Life Relay for Life and various other Second Life non-profit initiatives last year, I think we’ve got quite a long way to go in the meantime.

Then, some place between the peak of expectations, the trough of disillusionment, and the slope of enlightenment (depending on who you ask) we have fundraising widgets and social networks. Anyone still needing convincing of the fundraising opportunity offered by the latter need only take a look at the Hitwise data from last year which shows how social networks are taking over from email as the primary drivers of traffic to key sponsored event fundraising site justgiving.com. There’s still a lot of testing to be done, but I don’t think it’ll be too long before widgets and social networks arrive on the plateau of productivity and begin to significantly out-perform the ‘old school’ of email as the drivers of online fundraising income.

A quick Community Fundraising 2.0 conference session plug

There was some great feedback following my Community Fundraising 2.0 session at the Institute of Fundraising’s Direct Marketing Conference back in February. So I thought I’d post a quick plug for a couple more conference’s I’ll be speaking at later this year - not just as an invitation to anyone attending to come-along and say ‘hello’, but also to see if anyone has relevant case studies of online fundraising they’ve been involved in that they’d like to share. I do my best to keep-up with the latest fundraising campaigns, but there’s so much going-on these days that it’s easy to miss things!

The first conference is the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention held here in London on 7th July. I’m co-speaking there with Natasha Hill, a former WWAV colleague and now Director of Supporter Marketing at Cancer Research UK, on the subject of ‘Fundraising in a Facebook World - Empowering Community Fundraising Online’.

The second is the International Fundraising Congress in October over at Noordwijk in The Netherlands, and the title of that session is ‘Community Fundraising 2.0 - the future of fundraising in a networked society’.

If you’ve got any suggestions for online community fundraising campaigns that you think I should take a look at, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. Thanks!

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants - here next Monday

The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is a weekly blog carnival that draws together some of the best nonprofit news, advice and resources on offer across the blogosphere.

Each week a different host blogger sets a topic for the carnival and other bloggers submit posts on that theme - with the best seven being highlighted on the host’s blog.

Next week the Carnival will be stopping-off here at Giving in a digital world again, and the topic for the week will be ‘Insights, tips and tricks for online fundraising’.

So, if you’ve got any research insights or general tips and tricks to share with online fundraisers world-wide - perhaps a new approach that worked especially well for you, or insights into how best to engage with supporters online - then be sure to submit a post here before Monday 26th May.

Could QR Codes be big for online fundraising?

Over the last few weeks I’ve started to see quite a few little black ‘maze’ icons (like the one above) on advertisements in papers and magazines here in the UK. While they may look like the latest evolution of the Sudoku puzzle craze, they are actually QR Codes (QR = Quick Response) - basically bar codes containing details of a web address, which can be read by your mobile phone (if you have the right software installed). This one is actually the QR Code representation of the home URL for this blog.

You point the camera of your mobile phone at the code and the software translates it into a message and web address and takes you directly to the advertisers website. No waiting to respond until you get to a computer; no searching the phone’s menus for the internet browser; no URL to enter using your tiny phone keypad. If you can scan it, you can go straight to the site. Sounds like a direct response advertisers dream!

Thinking about it from the fundraising perspective, right now my daily papers are carrying a range of different ads requesting donations in support of either the Burma Cyclone or China Earthquake emergency appeals. In most cases the response options offered are threefold: a traditional coupon, a credit card donation line (not always 24hr), and a URL. It’s pretty easy to see how in the future a QR Code, taking the reader direct to a mobile web donation page could streamline online response to such emergency ads. Read, scan, click, donation made - nice!

Over recent years there’s been a whole lot of discussion about the exciting future of the mobile internet, so the big question is just when we might start to see QR Codes being used in this way by fundraisers?

I first heard of QR Codes from one of our other planners at WWAV Rapp Collins, who had seen them all over the place during a trip to Japan back in August 2007 and predicted that we’d see them all over the place here in the near future. Sure enough, in early December 2007 the UK’s highest circulation daily paper The Sun devoted several pages to explaining and promoting QR codes - presumably hoping to get ahead of the curve in offering this extra response option to its advertisers. By the end of the following month the paper was reporting that its new service was a ‘hit’, with some 11,000 users, and announced intentions to continue to promote the approach.

While UK advertisers are clearly starting to test the approach, not only in The Sun but in listings magazines like Time Out, it’s still early days - but the potential for this type of response mechanic seems obvious. The fundamental barrier to its adoption on a mass scale is simply the need to download the QR Code software. This is freely available from i-nigma, whose smartcode reader is one of the most widely used (you can also create your own smartcodes on their website). But the truth is that most mobile phone users probably wouldn’t know where to start when considering downloading extra software to their phone, so adoption based on this is likely to be slow and gradual.

However, all that we need is for the major handset manufacturers to start shipping phones with smartcode reader software pre-installed and this could go mass pretty quickly. We can be sure that commercial advertisers will leap on the opportunity as soon as it starts to scale-up- and switched-on fundraisers shouldn’t be far behind.

Age Concern launches online personal information storage

Age Concern, one of the UK’s leading charities working on behalf of older people, launched a new online service last month. Called LifeBook, the service is intended to help users more easily manage their affairs, by providing online storage for all of those details that tend to go missing just when you need them - from renewal dates for insurance to friends’ birthdays. There is also a section that records the user’s final wishes, and promotion for the site notes that the information held could be invaluable to a family member or friend in case of an emergency.

This is not dissimilar to a commercial service I blogged about back in July 2007, although in that case the company - YouDeparted - was rather more up-front about the ‘case of emergency’ benefits of their service, which they described as “a personal organiser with a death benefit”.

While the opt-out boxes that form part of the LifeBook registration process make it clear that the charity hopes to use the service as the basis for cross-selling, they are undoubtedly responding to a very real need experienced by their constituents - which makes this a good example of the type of value exchange that is increasingly proving effective in engaging with potential supporters.

It’ll be interesting to see how they develop the service over time - perhaps to include the opportunity to upload video messages for loved ones as a more contemporary way to share final wishes?

Online fundraising benchmarking study - how well is your email activity performing?

The 2008 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study has just been released by M+R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network, and contains a wealth of data which will be of real interest to you if you’re involved in online fundraising or campaigning.

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.

The report is free to download here.

Anyone know of an equivalent report for any other countries - or interested in contributing data to a broader benchmarking study? Let me know.