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?
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.
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.
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!
Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants - a weekly blog carnival comprising posts on a particular nonprofit theme. It’s the first time I’ve hosted the Carnival here on Giving in a digital world, and my theme for the week was ‘Engaging with supporters through online social networks’. In accordance with the ’seven posts only’ rule - here are the top seven posts…
The rise of Facebook over the last year has tended to obscure the fact that MySpace, with some 200 million members, remains the world’s biggest online social network. In the light of this, the folks at Frogloop have conducted an interesting analysis of how 150 nonprofits are using MySpace and what others can learn from this when considering their own MySpace presence.
Taking a different tack, Kivi Leroux Miller’s post ‘Forget MySpace and Facebook and try sites for Boomers?’ is a great reminder to think first about just who you’re looking to engage with and only then then to consider which social networks might be right to help you achieve this - rather than simply following the MySpace and Facebook crowds.
Here in the UK, discussion about such Boomer sites has been fueled recently by the launch of SAGA Zone. However, as reported on NMK’s blog, UK-based charity Help the Aged has criticised the site for segregating older users.
Alternately, how about building your own social network site? In her post social networks, walled gardens, and decision trees, Elizabeth Dunn discusses the pros and cons of an organisation-specific social network vs a ‘big box’ site.
And finally, with the launch of Google’s OpenSocial perhaps it’s going to get a whole lot easier to develop online engagement programmes through a range of different social networks (or perhaps not?).
While John Bell encourages nonprofits to take advantage of OpenSocial to engage with supporters through the development of multi-platform widgets in his post on Nonprofit widgets in the age of OpenSocial.
That’s all for this week, but you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, whoever is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.
I had an especially busy time last week with a couple of big presentations to give at the same time as I was due to be attending the Resource Alliance’s International Fundraising Congress over in Holland.
Unfortunately, while the presentations went fine, this meant that I didn’t get to see many sessions at the Congress - which is a pity because it’s a unique opportunity to hear from fundraisers from all around the world. However, I did get to talk to some folks from Ammado about their new social network - which is currently in Beta phase.
The Resource Alliance had partnered with Ammado at the Congress, with invitations for all 900+ delegates from some 50 different countries to join the beta test membership, so I joined-up and visited their exhibition stand to learn a bit more about it.
From the publicity materials I had thought that the site was purely intended as a social network for fundraisers - providing an environment within which fundraisers around the world can share ideas, pose questions, and generally feel more connected. All in all, rather like a year-round online version of the International Fundraising Congress. What surprised me was that the Ammado team actually envisage it as also being a general social network for people interested in supporting charities.
I must admit that I’m not convinced that this is going to work for them on a mass market scale - at least not in those countries where online social networking is already becoming established (which is pretty well all developed markets).
The real hard core of a charity’s active supporters might be convinced to join-up - and I can see it perhaps being a good place to communicate with and equip keen volunteers. However, for general supporters there needs to be a very good reason for them to register and maintain a profile on this site as well as on any other social networks they’re already members of - whether that’s MySpace, Facebook, the newly launched over-50s Saga Zone, or whatever.
If people are already active within their own personal networks on sites like these, then that’s where fundraisers should be engaging with them - if they want to benefit from the peer-to-peer fundraising potential on offer. Perhaps Ammado is hoping to ride the growing wave of interest in social networking and catch late adopters who haven’t yet chosen a social network site - but in that case they’ll be up against some very high profile generic site competition.
Only time will tell whether they can achieve their vision of creating an online “community of people who care”. Meantime, however well it develops as a Web 2.0charity portal, it’s certainly well worth fundraisers taking a look at Ammado as a potential resource for networking and sharing of best practice - which is a very worthy aim for the site in itself.
Rumours are bouncing around the web that social network site MySpace is preparing to launch its 3rd party developer platform at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week.
Creatively called ‘MySpace Platform’, it is expected to comprise a set of APIs and a new markup language that will allow any developer to produce advanced applications with the ability to access member information (profile data, friend list, activity history, etc.) - rather than just sit on the surface of the site as a plethora of MySpace profile pimping options currently do.
This launch has been expected ever since Facebook opened itself up to 3rd party applications in the same way back in May - in a move that has contributed significantly to that site’s astonishing growth since then.
For online fundraisers, MySpace Platform will offer opportunities to engage with the MySpace member audience in a far more sophisticated way than ever before. So, look out for the launch of new MySpace fundraising apps similar to the range of Facebook apps that have appeared over recent months.
