Here in London we’re experiencing a rare combination of happenings this week - it’s the start of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships AND the sun is shining!
One year on, when you stop to look back, you realise just how much Second Life hype there was and just how it has died down as the whole subject of virtual worlds has slipped into the Hype Cycle’s Trough of Disillusionment.
Their market forecast predicts that over the next ten years some 22% of broadband users world-wide will have registered with one or more virtual worlds. In commercial terms, they believe this will equate to a market of some one billion virtual world consumers worth around $8 billion of ‘in-world’ revenue.
While acknowledging that less than 10% of virtual world registrants currently become active users, they expect this to rise to 27% by 2017 as the technology improves and new virtual worlds emerge providing more social and educational applications.
Call me a geek, but I remain convinced that we will see virtual worlds becoming an increasingly important online fundraising environment over the next decade. However, these figures do help frame just where they might lie in the future fundraising mix. If the Strategy Analytics valuation turns-out to be accurate then it doesn’t look like virtual worlds will be delivering the lions share of your online income in 2017.
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.
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.
There’s so much going on in the digital fundraising world and only so much time that I can find to blog about it. To help keep-up, I thought it would be useful to include a round-up of items that I’ve come across over the last month but haven’t been able to include full posts on. Hope you find it interesting - and useful…
1. News of two innovative approaches to get people engaged in online advocacy (including a Second Life Guantanamo) from Beth Kanter’s ever interesting blog in Tear It Down and Virtual Guantanamo
3. In Should Facebook have banished Ranger Rick?The Green Miles reported on the heated debate over Facebook’s refusal to let Ranger Rick, the beloved persona of the US National Wildlife Federation, keep his Facebook profile - on the basis that only a real person can have a profile. I’ve spotted at least one UK charity which still seems to have a profile in place (cancer care, girls name, no more clues..) - so why pick on Rick?
6. Finally, some very worthwhile reading and food for thought from London-based non-profit thinktank nfpSynergy, which made its great report on The 21st Century Donor available for free download.
Macmillan Cancer Support, the charity behind one of the UK’s largest fundraising events - The World’s Biggest Coffee Morning - is really getting into the Community Fundraising 2.0 spirit this year, with “virtual” coffees being shared through email, Facebook, and even in Second Life.
The email approach is a fun way to spread the word about the event, enabling you to send your friend a virtual coffee which is then drunk at an animated microsite - complete with slurping. Requests for small donations are made throughout, including extras if you want to send a virtual biscuit or muffin with the coffee. Having dispatched the virtual beverage you then get the opportunity to share the whole virtual coffee experience through a link on your Facebook profile.
If that’s not virtual enough for you, then on the day of the event - this Friday 28th September - you can drop-in to the charity’s newSecond Life Macmillan cancer information centre to take part in a Second Life fundraising auction or just to throw a few Linden Dollars (the SL currency) into the giant coffee cups around the place. After the event Macmillan intends to continue using the centre as a source of information and support for any Second Life users affected by cancer, as well as offering a retail area where visitors can purchase real life Macmillan merchandise.
All-in-all, a great example of a charity using a mix of online channels in an innovative, fun and engaging way to help involve more people with their event. Apparently nearly two million people took part last year, raising over £6.7m ($13.5m) - so here’s hoping all of this virtual activity pays-off in real income growth terms after Friday.
I’ve been meaning to add a post about DonorsChoose.org for a while now, as it is another excellent example of how we can use online fundraising to give donors what they are increasingly looking for - real choice in terms of how their donations are used and a real connection with the impact they are making.
Then I was reminded of it when I heard of the site being mentioned in a recent Doonesbury comic strip - which is great product placement for the folks at DonorsChoose.org!
DonorsChoose.org was originally set-up in 2000 by teachers at a Bronx public high school as a means to help overcome the shortage of quality learning materials available for their pupils. From the outset, they recognised the “untapped potential in people who were frustrated by their lack of influence over the use of their charitable donations” and set-out to address this by offering specific project funding opportunities at levels affordable to all donors.
Since then DonorsChoose.org has grown to involve schools right across the USA, with teachers submitting project proposals that range from “Where did all the pencils go?” at $60 to “Geological Field Trip” at $2,000 - and the site has advanced search functionality to help donors find just the right project for them.
This alone would make DonorsChoose.org a fantastic example of online fundraising - but they don’t stop there. The subsequent feedback donors receive sounds second to none, with all $100+ donors receiving specific feedback from students participating in their project - keeping the whole experience incredibly real and personal.
The impact of this fantastic individual donor fundraising approach is plain to see with $13,717,312 so far raised to fund 29,574 projects right across the USA.
As I mentioned in my earlier post about Kiva.org, this is what the future of individual donor fundraising is all about - doing all we can to make donating an increasingly real experience, far beyond what we’ve become used to offering donors through mass mail campaigns and ‘thank you’ letters which amount to little more than receipts.
Organisations like DonorsChoose and Kiva are wonderful examples of how the Internet can enable us to do just this - transforming the relationships we develop with donors and thereby the income we receive from them.
Yet still such initiatives remain as rare as chickens teeth - and where I see them they are almost never being developed by large established charities.
Is it perhaps that the established organisations are simply trapped by the way they have always fundraised and so can’t break-out to offer donors a ‘DonorsChoose-type’ experience even if they want to?
If so then in the future we could be in for some very interesting developments as the big, established, fundraising dinosaurs lumber-along as always while the new, smaller, faster-moving fundraising mammals evolve the way they do business to better fit the developing consumer world.
And we all know what happened to the dinosaurs (if not then best ask some kids on a DonorsChoose project - they’re bound to know).
Last week was particularly busy in terms of the activities of nonprofit organisations in Second Life, with WWF unveiling its ‘Conservation Island’ plus the formal launch of the Nonprofit Commons community - providing free virtual office space and advice for nonprofits wanting to get started in the virtual world.
Nonprofit Commons launched on Tuesday, with 60 people in San Francisco joining over 100 online in Second Life at the launch event. Supported by Second Life entrepreneur Anshe Chung, Nonprofit Commons offers nonprofits new to Second Life a free parcel of land including an empty office, which they can then use as a base to trial different activities.
Then on Thursday, WWF formally unveiled its own Second Life presence, ‘Conservation Island’. When you visit, you find yourself at the foot of a waterfall looking out over a short street and an orang-utan in an ice-cream van. From there you can visit various displays explaining different aspects of WWF’s work, from bycatch to climate change.
It’s great to see WWF addressing global issues using the global medium of Second Life. However, I’m sad to say that Conservation Island really doesn’t make the most of Second Life’s interactive potential - and as a result I fear it’s not going to achieve the level of engagement and education that it could have done. There are all of the usual things, like links out to the WWF site and free branded avatar clothing, but that’s about it. In many cases the animals I spotted around the island couldn’t be interacted with at all. Overall, it feels rather like a missed opportunity, which continued development will hopefully help address.
Over recent months Second Life has been receiving quite a lot of negative media coverage. Time Magazine went so far as to include Second Life in its five worst websites list and Wired got in on the act too, with an article about corporate marketers wasting millions trying to establish a brand presence in Second Life.
Reports like these are a natural counter-balance to the incredible hype Second Life has received over the last 6 to 12 months. As a fairly regular visitor I can confirm that it really doesn’t live-up to the type of PR-spin which has people expecting a truly lifelike virtual world - but that’s no reason to right it off as completely pointless.
Set aside the fact that the graphics are not up to the quality of the latest gaming consoles, that only some 30k of its claimed 8m residents are ever online at the same time, and that if more than 70 people visit a single place then the whole thing grinds to a halt. What we have here is still a fascinating experiment in online social networking, enabling people from all around the world to communicate and interact with each other in a new and potentially highly creative way.
That said, I’m not advocating that it come first in every organisation’s list of Web 2.0 marketing plans. I simply believe that it shouldn’t be ruled-out without fair consideration.
Second Life’s potential for good was amply illustrated by last month’s wonderfully well designed and executed Second Life Relay for Life, raising over $110k for the American Cancer Society – and hopefully the Nonprofit Commons initiative will enable many more good causes to test new ideas and reach new audiences through this innovative online environment.
The great news is that, according to the Second Life Insider blog, the event looks set to raise over US$100,000 - more than double that achieved last year.
As promised in my earlier post, I’ve put a selection of snapshots I took at the event here on Scribd (a site like YouTube, but for documents) to try to give a feel for it. Although, to be honest these really don’t do justice to just how amazingly well designed and implemented the whole event was.
However, the big difference between the two - which for me makes the Relay for Life event stand-out head and shoulders above the commercial Secondfest - is that Second Life Relay for Life was begun by a group of Second Life residents working with the charity to re-create its ‘real world’ Relay for Life event.
These ‘grass roots’ community origins have led to the whole event being significantly richer and more engaging than the commercially sponsored Secondfest, as well as appearing (to me) to be better designed and run.
This is something that other charities looking to become active in Second Life could do well to learn from - working with the in-world community to develop something that works for them is undoubtedly the best way to develop an effective Second Life presence.
Like any big event, the great success of the Second Life Relay for Life is down to an incredible amount of hard work by a team of highly talented and dedicated people. It’s certainly no easier to pull-off, just because it’s ‘virtual’. Infact in many ways it’s far harder. I certainly felt for the organisers when I spotted a group of walkers who had got stuck at one point on the route because a temporary technical glitch had caused the road ahead of them to cease to exist. That’s not something you see happening on the London Marathon!
For anyone inspired to consider the possibilities for promoting their own charity in Second Life, I’d suggest you take a look at the Nonprofits in Second Life site and then just get yourself in-world and spend some time travelling around and talking to people. If you’d like some ideas of interesting places to visit, then let me know and I can give you some pointers.
On July 27th and 28th, the American Cancer Society will be hosting what it is describing as “the largest contiguous event Second Life has ever seen” in the form of its third annual ‘Second Life Relay for Life’.
Building on the great success of the charity’s ‘real world’ Relay for Life events (now also run here in the UK by CRUK), in 2005 a group of Second Life residents worked with them to re-create the event within the virtual world. In its second year, over 1,000 people took part by walking their Second Life avatars along a custom-designed track – raising more than $41,000 (in ‘real world’ US dollars).
This year is planned to be bigger and better, with a community goal of $75,000 and all sorts of fundraising events, including an auction of items created by top Second Life designers.
Admittedly, in comparison to some of the ‘real world’ sponsored events run by big name charities, $75,000 isn’t a vast sum. However, by working with Second Life residents to pioneer this type of community involvement, the American Cancer Society is achieving far more than purely raising funds on the day. They’re successfully communicating their cause in a new and highly engaging way to an online audience who get to support the charity in a way that is most interesting and relevant for them.
I’m often heard mis-using a JWT quote about the future of advertising, because I think it’s a very strong reminder for all fundraisers: “The future of fundraising is to stop interrupting what people are interested in and to become what people are interested in”. This is an excellent example of a charity doing exactly that
If you have an opportunity, do head-on down to the event to see it for yourself (it’s free to join Second Life and really pretty easy). Alternately, if you find Real Life enough to handle without adding a Second one then don’t worry, I’ll post some snapshots from the event afterwards so you can see what you missed.
