I spotted an interesting post by Shiv Singh at interactive agency Avenue A|Razorfish the other day, about the seven key attributes they have defined as characterising ‘digital brands’ (meaning brands best equipped for our new digital consumer world), and it occurred to me that the same criteria could be handy when examining charity brands and the way they engage online:

FRESH - does it inspire a feeling or emotion?

ADAPTIVE - does it respond to your involvement?

RELEVANT - Is it useful or appealing to you, specifically?

TRANSFORMATIVE - Does it raise expectations of the brand or the web?

SOCIAL - Is it worth borrowing, sharing, or contributing to?

IMMERSIVE - Do you lose track of time?

AUTHENTIC - Does it seem genuine?

The presentation above provides some examples of this as well as comparing top scoring ‘digital brands’ to Interbrand’s traditional top brands list. While in Shiv’s post he provides a handy interactive Excel ‘Brand Gene Scorecard’ with which you can have a go at comparing how your own online brand presence rates against your competitors in terms of digital engagement.

Contrary to the countdown on the Finerday holding page - which when I took the screen shot above seemed to suggest that it won’t be live for over 106 years (they’ve since fixed it) - this new social networking site aimed at ‘older people and their families’ is apparently all set to launch next Friday, 4th July.

Endorsed by the charity Age Concern, Finerday will be a free to use site and, rather than simply following in the footsteps of the UK’s other over 50s social network site SagaZone, its focus is clearly stated as “linking all of your family, whatever their age”. This ‘linking’ is supported through easy uploading and sharing of family photos (which seems likely to be a key function) plus integration with Facebook, Bebo, Skype, GMail, and Yahoo! - and seems like a sensible move, as it offers older users a reason to engage with social media that they may not have had before.

Forrester’s technographics research suggests that less than 10% of active UK internet users aged over 65 currently engage with social networks, compared to over 70% in the 16 to 24 age groups. So it’ll be interesting to see how well Finerday manages to capitalise on the existing engagement of younger family members to boost interest amongst the older ones.

From the sneak preview of the site (developed by social website specialists Kwiqq) it looks to have a nicely designed, simple interface with enlarged icons to help less frequent users of keyboards and mice keep up with their more computer-savvy younger family members.

Added to this, post-launch Finerday are apparently intending to market the site bundled with a broadband service and a low cost computer adapted for older people - which illustrates a real commitment to their vision of engaging older consumers with social media.

Definitely an initiative to keep an eye on.

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!

In contrast, this time last year I remember floating about in Second Life visiting IBM’s virtual tennis championships and chatting online to the developers about how they were able to replicate the real world happenings at Wimbledon in Second Life - including the rain.

That same week, The Guardian was promoting SecondFest its three day Second Life virtual music festival and pretty well every other week throughout the summer some new ‘virtual world first’ was being announced - including several from nonprofits.

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.

However, while not so frequently in the headlines, serious consideration of the commercial potential for virtual worlds has continued. One of the most interesting items I’ve seen on this in recent months is a report released by the consultancy Strategy Analytics, entitled ‘Market Forecasts for Virtual World Experiences - from Habbo Hotel to Second Life and Beyond’

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.

Now, the $8 billion market value does sound like a lot of money (let’s face it - it is a lot of money) but to put it in context this is actually less than the $10.44 billion estimated to have been given online to US charities last year.

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.

Last week, Ted Hart released his latest estimate of US online giving figures, showing overall online income to US nonprofits in 2007 as $10.44 billion - up 52% from 2006.

Accurately measuring online giving on a national level is clearly maddeningly difficult. However, this is the seventh annual estimate calculated by Hart, apparently based on “the review of hundreds of first hand reports of giving he receives from charities and review of third-party research projects completed during the time period” . So, assuming the methodology is consistent, this should at least provide a good basis for observing the overall growth trend.

By comparison, according to the Giving USA Foundation’s latest figures just released this Monday, overall US charitable giving in 2007 is estimated at $306.39 billion - up just 3.9% on 2006.

Looking beyond the US, Hart believes the US figures represent slightly more than 50% of world-wide online giving, which he estimates to have now passed $20 billion.

Earlier this week YouTube released a new feature called ‘Annotations’ that allows you not only to annotate your uploaded video with captions, but also to create links within the video to other video clips or to your YouTube channel.

Easy captioning is a handy function, but it is the interactivity offered by the embedded links that makes this new feature particularly interesting. There are several simple demonstrations of what’s possible already on the site, including one involving the good old ‘pick a card trick’ shown above (which jumped from 300k to well over 2m views in a day - showing the level of interest in the feature) and a ‘find the shell’ game (keep going to the ‘hard’ video and just see where it leads you;-).

Interestingly, the annotations seem only work on YouTube and not when the videos are embedded elsewhere - which is unfortunate (and presumably why embedding on the ‘pick a card’ video has been ‘disabled by request’).

Ever since YouTube took-off I’ve had countless discussions about how best to use videos on the site to engage with consumers beyond simple viewings, comments and ratings- other than just including a URL for them to type into their browser. While still restricted to links within YouTube, this new feature does offer a new level of interaction which has the potential to be used in interesting ways by non-profits. For example as the basis for a personally guided, interactive video presentation of your work or support opportunities.

Thinking ahead, if links out of YouTube are added then the potential becomes even greater. Allen Stern at CentreNetworks suggests that external links could offer a new way for YouTube to monetize - through a small fee being paid to link products in videos to the product owner’s site or ecommerce sites.

Many non-profits are already making use of YouTube - so who will be the first to get into YouTube interactivity?

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?

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.

]]> http://givinginadigitalworld.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/insights-tips-and-tricks-for-online-fundraising-its-this-weeks-carnival-of-nonprofit-consultants/feed/ http://givinginadigitalworld.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/online-fundraising-and-the-hype-cycle/ http://givinginadigitalworld.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/online-fundraising-and-the-hype-cycle/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 14:29:22 +0000 Bryan http://givinginadigitalworld.wordpress.com/?p=124

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.

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!

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.