Individual giving

Facebook's Open Graph platform allows you to build applications that pass information between Facebook and your website then publish back to Facebook.

This month at the IoF West Midlands conference, Liz Loudon brought a useful reminder of the importance of effective language in fundraising. In an excellent presentation, she gave valuable tips on making an impact with appeal writing.

There is more or less an expectation for charities to be on Twitter, but when was the last to you stopped to think why your charity is on social media and are you acheiving what you set out to?

No effective charity or business wants to waste time and money or deliberately upset customers or supporters.  That’s why targeting has long been a mainstay of the marketer’s and the fundraiser’s toolkit.  In my simple world, it helps us to achieve two things:

1. Communicate only with the people most likely to act upon our messages in the way we want them to (assuming we match the target group’s wants and needs to our messages)
2. Save time and money by not communicating with audiences who are least likely to act in the way we want them to.

I appreciate that there are further subtleties here, like recognising that our organisations will have different messages which will appeal to different or the same audiences at different times, so one general rule of targeting simply won’t fit all situations. But in the last week alone I’ve observed three examples of the consequences of all this targeting being done independently by multiple, well-meaning organisations:

Targeting postcodes for charity bag collection Several contributors to the LinkedIn Group, Charity UK, have been sharing their experiences of receiving multiple collection bags – from several every week to 3 every day!

I was reading the tweets from the very useful @marketingdonut team and was pleased to see them share  renowned marketing expert Drayton Bird’s “35 things I have found to be almost always true”.  I was pleased to see it again as I didn’t get the chance to add to the list from a not-for-profit perspective... something I aim to put right below for the most impactful of Mr Bird’s points:

1. Relevance matters more than originality – 100% agree but originality tends to get more cut-through than cliché
2. The most important element in any creative endeavour is the brief – ie; the robust thinking that went into it and how the organisation can articulate that to an outsider
3. The urgent takes precedence over the important – but a mixture of both is likely to be the right thing to do (if your plans are robust, that is)
4. The customer you want is like the customer you’ve got – so true... but as well as the new types of donor, volunteer or supporter, not instead of!
5. The internet is just accelerated direct marketing – I think it's more than DM these days.  Perhaps it’s just a hugely powerful means to achieving a whole raft of objectives (including traditional direct marketing)?
   

Bit of a longer blog this week but I hope you’ll bear with me as I’ve come across an interesting issue that more and more charities, small businesses, community groups etc. are going to need to think about in relation to their web presence.

It stems from the increasing popularity of multiple browsers now being used by many of us to access the web.  I should admit right now that I use a PC and a Blackberry but I’ve asked the views of colleagues with Android phones and Apple products and they experience the same issue (albeit in different ways).

Put simply, I’m baffled by how different the same thing can look on different browsers and the fact that some things don’t work at all in some browsers whilst everything is tickety-boo in others!

How important this is depends on how we are trying to deliver our core messages.  Consider these examples;

I was looking at the RSPCA’s website and had cause to try and find some information about their rescue teams.  The charity chooses to use videos to show footage of their teams in action and I think this is a great tool to support both campaigning and fundraising.

I watched the video in my preferred browser, Firefox but the delay in the film starting irritated me sufficiently to switch to Google Chrome, which is usually a faster browser.  The video did indeed start more quickly (well, it actually started!) and I watched the team in action, hanging over the edge of a very high cliff to rescue a ram.

In terms of financial behaviour, the ostrich effect is the avoidance of apparently risky financial situations by pretending they do not exist.

Last week NCVO said 98% of charity leaders it sampled were pessimistic about the economic outlook and today BBC news featured the plight of charities cutting staff due to falling donations. Clearly, a lot of donors are feeling the pinch, with rising prices, more redundancies and a falling stock market. Even those in jobs are feeling poorer as their pockets are hit and they see the value of their savings falling. No surprise then that some charities are finding it tough at the moment.

So what can we do to ensure our organisations get through the next 12 months?

There's been some coverage in the last week around the launch of the new Health Lottery launched by Channel 5 and Daily Express owner Northern and Shell. The £50m lottery will be drawn and aired on ITV1 on Saturday evenings. Aside from the obvious fact that this is a competitor to the National Lottery for TV ratings, it raises the question as to whether health charities (and charities in general) will suffer as more competition arrives for the public's hard-earned cash.

Recently, I’ve seen some of the most fun and thought-provoking blogs and debates on face to face fundraising for a while.  Check these out as just a sample:

Ken Burnett; Craig Linton, The Fundraising Detective; Jonathon Graspass at Flat Earth Direct; Phil Heffer at St. Mungo’s; Gordon’s (Hudson) blog.

There are always two sides for every argument of course and whilst personally, what we feel about being approached by face to face fundraisers in the street (different to doorstep approach) might be negative, there are lots of bottom line statistics which show that for some organisations it is a worthwhile activity.

I want to add something to the debate if I may, based on some personal experience of a trip to London last Friday.