queer ideas

When to choose choice

Choice is becoming a buzzword in fundraising. But just how important is it?

Over the last few years, organisations like Kiva, DonorsChoose and CRUK (with MyProjects) have done rather well by offering people a chance to decide how their donations are used. Kiva, which launched in 2005, has generated over $200 million for people working their way out of poverty. DonorsChoose, which is only two years older, has generated over $77 million for schools in need of teaching materials. And CRUK has over 400 individual fund raising pages and 23 project pages which have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds.

But is choice the key factor that lies behind this level of fundraising success?

There are a number of charities that have built websites around the offer of choice who haven't been quite so successful.

Take FORGE for instance. I wrote a piece about this charity back in 2008 on how they came unstuck when they focused on offering online donor choice as a means to raise funds.

See The Difference, who do some great social networking activity to promote their site, also seem to be struggling (see this post for more thoughts on their approach to fundraising). If you look at their most funded projects on their website, few have generated more than a thousand pounds.

And My Action For Children which generated a massive amount of hits from press advertising and celebrity tweets seems to have converted just a tiny percentage to donors. Sign-ups just one month later have dwindled to a trickle.

I believe the different levels of success seen by the two sets of examples is down to something other than choice.

Kiva is fundamentally different. It asks people to lend - not give. And though a supporting donation is suggested (to fund the work of the KIva organisation) this is discretionary. In effect, you are not giving to charity as you can get your money back. As we've seen in the UK with Lend With Care, this is an offer that people find different and attractive. Add feedback on the impact of your loan and fantastic celebrity and corporate support (most notably that offered by YouTube) and you have a financial success on your hands.

DonorsChoose has also benefitted from celebrity support. But at its heart it offers something very special – great feedback. Though they will accept any size of gift, DonorsChoose prompts donors to give $100 by promising them a feedback pack from the school they help. This pack contains a letter from a teacher along with drawings, thank you notes and photographs from the children who've benefitted from the donor's gift. DonorsChoose encourage schools to get really creative with these packs and see them as so important that if a school fails to provide them to donors they can be excluded from the site. The other stroke of genius of the DonorsChoose model is that they also offer a thank you pack to everyone who gives a closing gift. So if a project has just a few dollars needed to hit target, the donor who makes up the shortfall - even if it really is just ten or twenty dollars – gets a thank you pack as well.

Take a look at CRUK's MyProjects and you see two main types of donation – gifts in memory and gifts in response to personal fundraising pages. In this respect it is not that dissimilar to JustGiving. The most successful of the projects on MyProjects is the Santander staff fundraiser for mobile cancer awareness units. Santander staff have been encouraged to raise money for CRUK with the promise that if they hit a certain target they will be eligible for a trip to Brazil to help renovate a school. MyProjects has simply functioned as an online means for them to run personal fundraising activities (see what I mean about it being just like JustGiving?).

If choice was that important to donors, thousands of tiny niche charities would be doing much better. If someone wanted to offer support for disabled children in London for instance, all they need to do is type those words into Google and they'd be presented with a long list of organisations that would love a donation. And more to the point, they would probably all offer a more rewarding and personal experience of giving than can be had when you donate to the national charities you'd find bidding on those search terms through AdWords.

And here's another example of why I think that choice is only a small part of the route to better fundraising.

I started out my fundraising career at ActionAid (about twenty years ago) where I worked on a product called ProjectAid.

ActionAid raised most of its income through child sponsorship. Supporter feedback and research told us that people loved knowing how their money changed a child's life. It also told us that some people found sponsorship expensive and others found it 'emotionally unattractive'.

We took a few logical steps and the end result was ProjectAid. We'd ask the donor to sign up to a regular gift and every four months we'd send them details of projects in need of funding. They could choose the one they wanted to support and we'd then report back on how work was progressing. I still have the first recruitment piece we ever produced and, as you can see, It's not that far from the 'game changing' ideas of crowd funding that we see today. Just on paper rather than on-line.

We tested it with a variety of media, but it didn't do that well.

But what was particularly interesting was how donors responded to the offer of choice. Most ended up ticking the 'where the need is greatest' box on the donation form. The product eventually was used as a 'drop ask' for people who were interested in child sponsorship but found the price too high. It was superseded by another product that concentrated on providing good feedback, which in the long run was more effective.

I've been involved in offering choice to donors in a number of different ways over the years and found similar results pretty much every time. Some people do value choice (particularly with causes such as cancer research and with high level gifts), but many others were more interested in hearing about need, impact and what they had done to make a difference. As one donor put it (and I paraphrase)...

"You're the experts on this. I just want to know that my money has helped".

In my experience, that's what charities should be focusing on. As I mentioned in a previous post, choice is only important if it is relevant. If it isn't, it can become a chore and actively turn donors off.

And if you are interested in finding out why, you should probably take a look at this study featured in Neuromarketing on choice fatigue.

If used appropriately, choice can probably enhance your offer, but, using the tried and tested (and tired) golfing analogy, it should be one of a number of clubs in your fundraising bag, rather than a single club that you rely on for the whole game.

My seven stages of Twitter

You must have heard about Twitter. If you are already a user, you'll probably be able to relate to much of my experience. If you haven't yet joined, hopefully this will help you find out what lies in store for you.

First a few notes for the real beginner.

• A tweet is a micro-blog. You have 140 characters to share a thought. People use URL shorteners so that they can post links. 
• A follower is someone who reads a twitterer's tweets. When you follow someone, their tweets are automatically delivered to you as they are posted. 
• The @ symbol before a name is simply there to define the name of a Twitter user. I'm @markyphillips for example.
• The # (hashtag - it's alt 3 on a mac) defines discussion topics to enable simple searches. #followfriday for example is the hashtag given to the day each week when recommendations on people to follow are shared (you will have to sign up to see what is happening on followfriday).

Now, back to my seven stages...

Dismissal

I first heard about Twitter a couple of years ago. I'm not sure who told me about it first. It was either @rydesign or @breathingsince.

At that point it looked to me like some sort of mass texting service that you could use to let your friends know about the state of your hangover, what you'd had for lunch and what particular song was playing on your itunes.

I thought it seemed like a load of rubbish.

Signing up

After hearing and reading a few news stories, I finally signed up in February. I made some inane comments along the lines of those described above. My opinion hadn't really shifted much.

Fiddling

I started following a few people and organisations outside my network of friends and got a few follows back. Being a newbie, I didn't quite understand the rules. I did a small number of business type tweets that referenced queerideas.co.uk and Bluefrog along with other sites and news that I thought might be of interest to charity fundraisers. 

Interest

@AlineReed let me in on @serafinowicz's use of Twitter and Just Giving to raise £5,000 for Comic Relief.  I blogged on this back in the middle of March. The fact that someone was using it for fundraising suddenly lifted Twitter out of the realms of a disjointed stream of consciousness into something that charities could use to engage donors and raise funds.

Oooooh I thought (in a rather Frank Spencer way).

Engagement

I started following 'hard core', looking for all Twitter streams that interested me. From social networking specialists, through to charities, fundraising, advertising, Arsenal, news, celebrities and politicians. I gained new insight into charity fundraising, uncovered fantastic pieces of psychological and social research, discovered great new organisations like herorat.org from @AmandaSanter and started to interact with CEOs of charities like @Kjer from FORGE. 

I started being braver about my own tweets too. I saw that personal comments helped to turn organisations into people who I grew to like. Rather than just keeping it to newsy items, I started to joke and returned to a few of the tweets that I'd dismissed weeks earlier. I even started to swap restaurant reviews with @causeperfect and we have been talking about setting up a 140 character restaurant review twitterstream called #wowchows (credit to Jackie for the name).

I also moved from using the twitter website to TweetDeck for my computer and Tweetie for my phone. These make it easier to communicate with large numbers of twitterers.

Conversion

Recently my brain has started changing. I am now thinking in 140 character chunks and I'm much more economical when explaining issues. 

What has been the biggest surprise is that it has changed how I give to charity. If I like the people who are tweeting, I'm much more likely to give to them. As a result I'm now a donor to the Lake Simicoe Conservation Foundation in Canada through @KimberleyCanada, Borneo Orangutang Survival Inernational through @DerekHumphries, Charity:Water through @scottharrison and as I've mentioned already, to FORGE through @kjer. I've even got around to re-starting a direct debit to Amnesty International UK because of the tweets from @SusanneUre from Amnesty in Canada.

Smaller charities in the UK have also caught my attention. Organisations like @HearingDogs and @bullyinguk are in the big league on Twitter being regularly recommended on #followfriday. The biggies such as @theNSPCC and @christian_aid are still comparatively quiet and follow very few people.

Twitter is another enormous step in the globalisation of charities. It is changing the ground rules on a weekly basis. Just because I live in the UK, for example, doesn't mean I have to support a charity based here. The feedback I get from my Twitter friends is what is important to me. 

I can see that more of my donations will be given through the way I interact with them on Twitter. Next on my list is going to be the sponsorship of a Lion Guardian through Wildlife Direct - brought to my attention directly by the CEO – @paulakahumbu.

Evangelist

Of all the social networking vehicles I've engaged with, Twitter has been the most enriching and rewarding – in all senses. Yes, there is a fair amount of chaff amongst the grains of wheat, but each snippet of news that I read, each thought that I'm exposed to and each link that I click returns so much that it is worth it.

I really can't see the day when I'll stop blogging and I don't see Twitter damaging blogs at all. At the end of the day much of the joy of Twitter is through being referred to larger thought pieces, more detailed stories and research findings and I'd like to continue adding to the knowledge and understanding that Twitter is helping tens of thousands of people to unlock.

Why don't you join us? New friends, understanding and knowledge comes free with every sign up.

You start here.

Now and again, something happens that surprises you

In my efforts to keep this blog dynamic and useful, I've taken to late night and early morning posting (It's the only chance I get as I'm running Bluefrog during the day).

At about half-past seven on Friday evening, I put up the preceding post about FORGE on how they are using Tipjoy and Twitter to raise funds. 

As you'll have read, I made a few critical points about the copy used on the site and in emails. 

Within a few hours, Kjerstin Erickson, the CEO of FORGE, was feeding back through Twitter on her thoughts on my comments.

The fact that a CEO should respond to a donor regarding what they say about their charity shouldn't surprise me, but unfortunately it does.

          

The Third Wave charities are fantastic. They will transform our sector for the better.

I've given my first donation via Twitter

I've posted about FORGE in the past (A US based charity that works with displaced communities in Africa). They tried to implement the Kiva model (without the lending part) and it didn't work too well.

As a result, Executive Director, Kjerstin Erickson, went public about the organisation's situation. 

The story was picked up by Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy and a pretty intense debate started. Management consultants, PR people and the general fundraising community all started chipping in and helping out.

The result was that their funding gap was filled and the organisation found itself on a much firmer footing. They still have some way to go, but a visit to their site shows a growing number of projects that are full or partially funded. They are tiny compared to Kiva, but have funded 26 projects this year and raised over $40,000.

That said, they are still an organisation that suffers from a mild case of self-important syndrome. 

Their home page focuses on what the organisation does, rather than what the donor can do. What is Forge? and What's the problem? all take precedence over how a donor can make a difference. The language they use can be described as academic at best (and, at some times, impenetrable). Take their description of refugees for example – "dynamic social and economic actors who have the potential and desire to control their own lives, livelihoods and futures".

And their emails are even worse, addressing the reader as a "valued subscriber" and promising "periodic emails specific to your interests".

Transparency is central to the FORGE model, but inaccessible language can act as a barrier as much as a locked filing cabinet.

Ok, gripe over. They do great work and the language can't be that important to me because I've just made my second donation. It wasn't much, just $2, but It's the way I gave it that is important – through Twitter.

Or to be precise, through tipjoy, a widget that allows you to donate direct from your paypal account. It's fast – one click – and seems to work very well. Tipjoy is not just for charities, commercial payments can be made using it as well. More details on exactly how it works can be found on the tipjoy site

I bet you're busrting to test it now to see how it might work for your charity. So sign up and why not give a gift to FORGE whilst your at it.

Note: If you want to follow me on twitter, you can do it here.

Build it where they already are

There are some interesting statistics available from Robin Goad on Hitwise regarding a recent RSPCA viral campaign.

Simon's Cat creator Simon Tofield, released a new episode of his cartoon series on YouTube on December the 8th. But rather than being about Simon's cat, it was about his sister's dog and created for the RSPCA to highlight the problems of pet obesity.  

As you might imagine, there was a direct link to the charity's Give Animals a Voice website that helped generate a massive peak in visits over the next few days with up to 16.5% of traffic being generated by YouTube.

There's an interesting aspect worth pointing out in the importance of traffic generated from Hotmail (Microsoft Live Mail), which accounted for approximately 25% of traffic on two days. It's also fascinating to see, as Robin points out, that traffic went back the other way - for the week ending the 13th of December the top rated site after Give Animals a Voice was YouTube.

I've already Blogged about FORGE's "buld it and hope they'll come" website strategy (which didn't work). The RSPCA have taken a different approach. They are being successful because they are tapping into a community that already exists. Simon's Cat's YouTube channel has over 60,000 subscribers  and some of the cartoons have had over 7.8 million views. This audience is going to contain a fair number of cat (and dog) lovers who could benefit from a reminder about pet health, but will probably also be good prospects for a gift too. 

This approach of "build it where they already are" seems blindingly obvious. The days of put up a banner and hope they'll click are over. You might get picked up by the YouTube massive if, like Kiva, you get a great partnership deal, but now our goal must be to focus on going to our audience where they are in a way that works for them and adds real value to our brand.

MarketingSherpa has found that a large number of marketeers are already planning on taking this route. Their September 2008 survey of 382 marketing professionals found that 48% were planning on increasing their marketing budget for social networking sites compared to 43% who were planning on reducing their spend on online display advertising.

It's also interesting to note that a third of those surveyed were planning to reduce their spend on products like Google's Adwords and Yahoo's Search Marketing.

When it comes down to it, people are more likely to engage with us when they feel comfortable. If that means we need to go to their homes on the web, then that's where we should be. Just like we used to go to their real homes (and as we still do, for that matter) with the always reliable direct mail pack.

Even if you build it, they might not come

If your head has been turned by the success of Kiva and you are thinking about how your charity might set up a similar direct giving product you need to know about FORGE.

FORGE was set up by Kjerstin Erickson, a Stanford University student, who spent a summer working at a refugee camp in Botswana. At the age of just 20, she decided to do something about the problems she had seen first hand and set up her own charity – FORGE.

The idea behind FORGE was simple – recruit and train US college based volunteers to work in partnership with refugees living in camps in Zambia and Botswana.

Over the last 5 years, FORGE has implemented more than 60 community development projects, it has a full-time staff of over 150 and has worked with communities of over 70,000 refugees.

Their fundraising model was simple. Each US student that wished to participate had to raise a minimum of $5,000 for the project. Over 50% of FORGE’s running costs were covered in this simple way.

However, FORGE changed the way it worked. Rather than use students, the charity placed the control of designing and implementing the projects directly in the hands of the refugees.

FORGE had great results on the ground and it was predicted that the funding gap could be filled through grants from trusts and other institutions. This, for various reasons, didn’t happen and FORGE was left with a big financial hole to fill.

Kjerstin’s response was to adopt the social networking fundraising model of organisations like Kiva and donorschoose. Their models were carefully studied and forgenow.org was created. It offered the opportunity to give a small gift – that would be added to donations from other individuals – to fund whole projects. Each of which was illustrated with great stories on the forgenow site

Just check the similarities out between Kiva and FORGE’s online mission graphics, to see just how closely FORGE had been looking at the KIVA model (note: FORGE will be changing their graphic so it may soon be disappearing from their site).

It didn’t work. They had a couple of mentions on CNN (Thanks Sundeep) but didn't get the same media coverage as the organisations they based their strategy on. 

As of November the 8^th (which was nearly six months after launch date) there were 25 projects available for funding. Sara Hall from New Philanthropy Advisors undertook a review and found that:

• 8 projects hadn’t received a penny
• 17 projects were funded or partially funded through gifts that were predominantly from FORGE staff
• 23 of the total 34 contributions listed were from FORGE or its three current paid staff members.
• 11 were from outside contributors.

With a $100,000 shortfall, Kjerstin decided to blog about the problem she faced. She was totally honest and open about her situation and it was picked up by Tactical Philanthropy blogger, Sean Stannard-Stockton.

Sean put her in touch with Curtis Chang, CEO of Consulting Within Reach who has been blogging on his thoughts and findings as he tries to get FORGE back onto an even keel with some very interesting references to Star Wars and Flash Gordon.

It’s not often that you can get so much free advice on implementing a brand new funding model. And if you want to find out exactly what has happened, I’d suggest a visit to Tactical Philanthropy and Social edge. Watching the drama unfold is not unlike watching an online soap opera. 

I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by saying that by the 12th of December, FORGE had already covered 55% of its shortfall and, as of today, got at least one new funder onboard.