online fundraising

Following last week's blog around how charities could benefit by building closer relationships with their online donors, I've received comments from various charity folks I thought I would share which add to the debate. The Deputy Chief Executive of a volunteering services charity emailed me to ask;

...do charities in receipt of such donations (lucky so-and-so’s) really care about who is sending the money? I suppose giving by text etc is likely to involve relatively small amounts – not insignificant when you add them all up I grant – but only the really big charities with large staff teams have the luxury of relationship-forging with all their smaller donors I would have thought.

And I wondered if charities do think about the donors or just see the events and participants as their 'points of contact'?  If your charity has runners in the London marathon, I'll wager you look after them with T-shirts, training help, cheering and support along the course and maybe even a drink and somewhere to sit down after the event.  But do you know who actually donated all that money?

I've written a guest blog for the Guardian's Voluntary Sector network this week on the question of why charities should build more of their branding into their online fundraising platforms.  It's not about logos and identities, it's about creating more of a relationship between the donor and the charity as well as the one that exists between the donor and the fundraiser.

I believe organisations like Just Giving, Everyday Hero, Bmycharity and Virgin Money Giving (to name just a few) have done incredible work in helping a huge number of people raise money for important causes and so I'm certainly not being critical.  It just seems obvious to me that if donors have more of a relationship with the casue as well as the fundraiser they're sponsoring, then future donations will be easier to attract / develop...

Why is this important?  Because this is how successful charities turn one-off donations into ongoing giving ie; grater financial sustainability.  Here's the article in full, please do share your online fundraising thoughts...

http://bit.ly/zzRxBg

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.

Avaaz is a fine example of a brilliantly conceived virtual organisation which has created a huge campaigning community then leverage that into a massive fundraising capability - see www.avaaz.org and