bryanmiller's blog

While in the commercial world discussions continue as to how the owners of Twitter might best get income from their free microblogging service, back in February this year the first Global Twestival - a real-world fundraising festival organised largely through Twitter - raised some $250,000 for charity:water.

Building on this success, a second international Twestival is taking place next month – from 10th through 13th September. But this time, rather than all events around the world focusing on a single charity, groups of volunteers have voted for the charity they would like their local city’s event to raise money for.

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Back in May last year I wrote about the ‘Hype Cycle’ devised by technology research company Gartner to illustrate the adoption, maturity, and business application of specific technologies, and I specifically considered where on the cycle various online fundraising initiatives lay.

So with the release of the the 2009 Hype Cycle Report, I was interested to compare where things are now compared to where they were last year - and there are certainly some interesting shifts from the perspective of the digital fundraiser.

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Yesterday Ofcom, the independent regulator for the UK’s communication industries, released its latest Communications Market Report – providing up-to-date information on the nation’s use of all communications technologies from Radio and Television through to the Internet.

Free to download, at 334 pages it is rather a lengthy read – but you can easily skip through it on screen and it does provide some very useful data for anyone looking to keep track of how Internet access and usage is changing in the UK.

Click here for some highlights or to download...

V – the UK charity that aims to inspire youth volunteering has just launched a fun new site called The Favour Farm to encourage young people to do favours for those around them in everyday life.

These favours can be as simple as giving a friend a hug through to taking part in a charity campaign and the site lets you record these in the form of small fluffy 'favours' that live on the farm. Friends doing things together can gather their animals into flocks and there’s a competition for the largest flock, with prizes of festival tickets and the like.

It’s certainly a great looking site with plenty of interactive animated content and each favour recorded also links to a related V volunteering opportunity – to illustrate the type of volunteering the favour creator might be interested in trying-out.

Click here to take a look...

There’s an interesting article by Jon Duschinsky in the latest edition of the Resource Alliance eNewsletter, where he introduces the concept of ‘Quantum Fundraising’ as a way of explaining how people increasingly want to come-together online to make something happen – but then disband and move-on to do something different elsewhere.

He also highlights what he believes to be one of the Obama online campaign team’s few errors – going against the quantum fundraising idea by trying to maintain the community that formed to get him elected when the mass of those involved have moved-on to other things.

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Last weekend saw the 2009 Relay for Life fundraising event in the virtual world Second Life – in aid of the American Cancer Society.

Hopes were high in advance of the event that they would surpass the $210k raised through the event last year – and sure enough they have. At the latest count they were up to $270k, and apparently there is still money coming-in.

If you're new to 'virtual world' online fundraising then click hear for more information...

Online research and measurement company comScore just released the findings of a study into UK social networking site usage which provides a good picture of just how mainstream social networking has now become – with an incredible 80% of the total UK online population (aged 15+) apparently having visited at least one social networking site in May 2009.

As you might expect, the most active users are still in the 15-24 age group, with 86% of them visiting social networking sites and spending an average of 4.6 hours on them over the month. However, 67% of the 55+ segment are also shown as using these sites, for an average of 3.7 hours over the month – confirming the fact that social networking is ‘maturing’ as an online activity (which, as I’ve said many times before, is good for online fundraising).

Click here to read more about the study...

I attended an interesting meeting last week, along with folks from a few other charities and nonprofit-related organisations, to hear about the plans in place to introduce new Internet Top Level Domains (TLDs) to add to those you’ll already know – like .com, .org, etc – and in particular to discuss what benefit might come from introducing a new nonprofit-only community TLD.

If you haven’t heard about this significant forthcoming change to the way Internet addressing works, don’t worry – you’re not alone. While it has been discussed for many years now, it is only relatively recently that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which co-ordinates the Internet’s naming and numbering system, announced a timeline for the use of new TLDs – with applications starting in 2010.

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Since the heady days of Summer 2007 when we had virtual Wimbledon and The Guardian backed a whole virtual music festival, the virtual world Second Life seems generally to have slipped down the online hypecycle from the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ to the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’.

However, one charity that is still actively establishing its presence there is the American Cancer Society. Led by an incredibly dedicated Second Life community of volunteers, the ACS has grown its Second Life activities substantially since its first virtual Relay for Life fundraising event in 2005 – raising over $215,000 through its 2008 event and now hoping to surpass this with its 2009 event being held this Saturday, July 18th.

Click here to read more details about the event...

There has been quite a bit of online discussion about the initiative launched earlier this month to help publicise the rebranding of the Christian Children’s Fund to ChildFund International, whereby they are aiming to acquire Twitter followers to @childfund by offering to send farming supplies to a family in Gambia, Zambia, Kenya or Ethiopia for every 200 followers gained.

I must admit, the first thing I wondered when I heard about the campaign was quite how the funding of the farming supplies was being provided. Presumably not just from the charity’s usual funds, as the incentive link then just wouldn’t make sense. Yet there was no mention of any matching grant from a major donor to incentivise the sign-up of followers – which would have made sense. It turns-out I wasn’t alone in being confused, as revealed by Geoff Livingstone from the PR agency behind the campaign in a blog post earlier today where he seeks to clarify the situation

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