After a 5.30 AM start I arrived in York a little bit fuggy but ready for an interesting and thought-provoking day. I wasn’t disappointed. In the surroundings of the National Railway Museum (ace place for a conference, big trains!) I mingled with fellow third sector professionals to discuss the impact that the web, email and social media was having on fundraising and charities in general.

Speaker 1: The story so far: Charity websites & the email – the good, the bad and just don’t go there!

The day kicked off with Howard Lake from UK Fundraising taking a look at where the third sector currently stood in relation to using the web. Howard was a great speaker, opening up the subject and explaining the basics of things such as RSS, web design, where to place your donate button.

From a Union perspective it was great that we are already doing a lot of what he talked about, but it was great to be refreshed about the basics and to remember what we should be doing on a web 1.0 level before trying to run on the web 2.0 level.

There’s a few things I’m going to put into practice on our site. The first is to instead of having a ‘donate now’ button on every page to re-focus the site to have a ‘get involved’ button on every page that allows students to quickly find out how they can get involved in the Union.

Speaker 2: Developing your online fundraising – the opportunities to be used

There was a shuffle around to the programme as Jonathan Waddingham took to the stage from Justgiving. Unfortunately Nick from Mission Fish hadn’t tuned up for this slot (or as we learned later, he wasn’t actually due until the afternoon) so Jon was bumped up the programme! He gave a great presentation that showed the huge increase in community fundraising seen on Justgiving over the past 12 months.

Jon also spoke about the success of their Facebook application that allows users to plug it into their profile and use it to help reach their total. This was a really clever idea, allowing features such as a little bar that sits on your profile and shows how much of the total has been raised so far and most important how your friends can help YOU reach the total.

From a Union perspective I think there’s a lot more that the organisation can do to support students in their personal fundraising exploits. We could point them in the direction of great tools such as the Justgiving facebook application, show them how to use the web to fundraise and explain about using secure tools such as Justgiving and Bmycharity.

You can watch Jon’s presentation here:

Justgiving’s Jonathan Waddingham talking in York! from Justgiving on Vimeo.

Speaker 3 – Web 2.0 – where are we heading? An introduction to social media

I consider myself to know a fair bit about social media (blogs, twitter, facebook etc) but it’s always good to be reminded of their power and what they can achieve. Steve Bridger took to the stage and with a very flashy presentation (he uses a mac, so no powerpoint here!) he really opened everyone’s eyes to what social media can achieve for nonprofit organisations.

Steve opened by re-telling his days as a campaigner for Oxfam and as a student. He pulled out his ‘telephone tree’, now I’m far too young to remember one of these but apparently they were all the rage during the 80s for student activists. Remarkably though they are very similar to Facebook, you have a number of connections that you ‘touch base’ with regularly. Just with Facebook it’s easier, quicker, cheaper and the number of connections can be much larger. This demonstrated the reach that social media can give charities.

We were then shown how a blog can be a powerful, and fast-moving, vehicle for change. Steve showed us After Wilma, a blog he setup to help cover the devestating of Hurricane Wilma in Mexico. The tourism board didn’t want people to see what was happening, it was ‘business as usual’ according to the tourism board. The blog combined user generated content, images, blogs, videos and reports to showcase what was happening.

Flickr and Twitter were shown to the audience next and Flickr in particular was a very effective way of showing what the charity can do. Steve was really hammering home that charities can use social media to tell their stories. Flickr in particular is a great way to tell stories, as images are far more powerful than reams of text.

The key point that I picked out from Steve’s presentation was when he said “social media is messy, that’s just the way it is”. This is really true. You can plan and create strategy after strategy for social media but the best way is to just do it! And it will be messy, difficult, tricky but also brilliant, engaging and connecting.

Speaker 4 – The power of social networks for online fundraising

We were joined live via web link by Beth Kanter from San Francisco. The connection wasn’t brilliant so I couldn’t hear some of what Beth said but she gave an overview of how she’d used social media to raise money.

She’d used blogs and twitter mainly to raise money and awareness for various causes. I think the figure was something like $210,000 from just online fundraising. Imagine how cheap it must have been to do, not in terms of time, but in terms of overheads, no print/paper costs. I think Beth’s brief web chat showed how social media can be used to make a real tangible difference.

Speaker 5 – A case study – Dogs Trust

The next session was a real eye-opener. Dogs Trust took to the stage and after all the theory we’d heard and examples, they showed us how they had used social media to create a community and also achieve their goal – to re-home dogs.

They’d used Facebook to create a network where they had 35,000 fans (that’s the equivalent of the Union’s membership) and this gives them a base to push out messages to those fans and get them involved. Not content with being on Facebook the Dogs Trust showed off DoggySnaps – summed up as Facebook for dogs. This is a brilliant idea and they’ve created a network for dog owners to show off their pets, connect with each other and the Dogs Trust sell advertising off the back of it to fund it.

Their use of twitter was also eye-opening. They had a full-time staff presence who looked after their social media presences and being on twitter was an important part of it. They gave an example of how they’d managed to re-home a dog through twitter, and just being there to respond to people was important.

This got me thinking about how the Union can use twitter. We have an account but don’t actively use it to engage with our membership (don’t know how many of our membership are active on it, but students tend to be early-adopters!). The key for using twitter seems to be to engage people by asking questions and be a ‘real person’ where possible on twitter – not just an automated post/response drone.

Speaker 6 – eBay for charity: buzz-building, special auctions and social networks

Nick Aldridge from MissionFish had arrived after the programme cock-up took to the stage to explain how eBay and MissionFish could be an excellent way for charities to raise money.

He also appeared to sound a note of caution about social media and the web, and rightly so. While the numbers with social media appear big and impressive, they are still a small % of a charities audience and potential donors. It’s easy to get carried away with new media and forget that 3 million odd people still read The Sun every day! However, something that starts online/social media can often help lead to ‘old media’ coverage because the old guard like anything that is new – hence why Twestival got very good coverage.

Nick also went through five key trends about online fundraising that he’d picked out during a joint research exercise with the Institute of Fundraising:

1. Stories, not annual reports
2. Engage and explain, then fundraise
3. From walled garden to public park, beyond your own website
4. Integrate the online work to fit your overall message
5. Use partners to reach new audiences

Speaker 7 – To blog or not to blog? That is the question

Chris Garrett rounded off the day with a top session about blogging. He got a little sidetracked when speaking about twitter, but it was great that he put his twitter screen up and talked everyone through what it actually was and what it could do.

He had a great little summary of why charities should blog:

attract, inform, interact, retain, energise, recruit

That hit the nail on the head. Great stuff. He also spoke a little about SEO and explained how using a content management system such as wordpress, or anything with tags, makes your web presences infinitely more findable by Google and other search engines.

Summing up

Overall it was a great day and while some of it was stuff I already knew, there were some fantastic examples of how social media and the web can be used. The main idea I came away with was that the Union can use the web to engage students a lot more and connect them with opportunities and ideas that they want to be involved with.

Credit has to go to Graham Richards from the Institute of Fundraising North for his excellent organisation of the event and for being adventurous with twitter to find speakers!

Seemed to be a trend over the last few days as some great posts popped up about what the US election and in particular the Obama campaign means for marketing professionals, charities and nonprofit organisations. Here’s the best:

Seth Godin kicks off with a great take on what the elections meant for marketing professionals. He definitely believes that online is the place to be for campaigning.

Kivi was quick off the mark with what nonprofit organisations can learn marketing wise from the election. She focuses on the ability of the Obama to fundraise from a whole spectrum of people, small amounts building to one huge total. She also links through to the Getting Attention blog which has a good piece about what the election taught us about email marketing.

The Charity Place has a piece about what nonprofits can learn from the Obama campaign, and it’s more of the same. Engagement, make friends first and then ask for money – not the other way round. I think that’s an important one, build a connection and then ask for the money.

Damn, I never have enough time as I think I do. I’m back and ready to fire, let’s get cracking. This is the second in a series looking at how third sector organisations are using the web to campaign.

This time I am taking a look at what the housing and homelessness charity, Shelter, is doing on its website in a campaigning sense.

Let’s break down the homepage and see how much is going on related to campaigning:

shelter homepage

First off we’ve got a huge great campaign in the centre of the page. If you’re Captain Hook it’s a nightmare, all those ticking clocks. It’s a great use of the web to campaign, inviting the user to do something right now about an issue. You’ve got a choice to make as well about which clock to click. There’s also a ‘What you can do’ tab underneath the Shelter logo.

Let’s see what happens when we click one of the ticking clocks, a nice flash interface tells me to wait after clicking the repossessions clock. I’m still waiting…oh, there we go. I’m through to a page in the ‘Now is the Time’ campaign. I’m invited to sign a petition and very cunningly it shows me the exact time that I ’stopped the clock’ on the homepage. Down the right hand side I’ve got a list of other people who have recently signed the petition.

shelter petition screen

I’ve signed the petition and feel much better for having stopped loads of reposessions. At the bottom of the petition it gives me the option to ‘become a campaigner’ with Shelter and receive regular updates about the campaign. This is really important as too often people sign a petition and then never hear anything about it’s progress. This makes people wonder – what is the point? And apathy is the hardest thing to overcome when running a campaign.

The ‘What you can do’ page is great. There’s plenty to get stuck in to and there’s also some video. Now previously we saw how Action Aid had used video to promote their social network for fundraisers and activists – Shelter are using it in a broadcast method with a short film called ‘Trapped’. I like the flash interface for it, with information along the top that you can switch to at anytime while viewing the film. Only downside is that I can’t embed the video onto my own blog and show people what a fantastic piece of work it is – perhaps getting it onto YouTube would be a good idea and then allowing viewers to embed it into their own website, or send an invitation to a friend to watch it?

The rest of the ‘What you can do’ section is pretty standard but important, petitions, email the PM, write to local newspapers – you get the idea.

Overall the Shelter website has a very strong focus on campaigning, a great use of interactive campaigning features such as the flash used to push people to sign a petition for the ‘Now is the Time’ campaign. The short film was presented very well, but needed to have more interactivity to make people feel like they should do something after watching it.

This year I’ve set myself the challenge of reading some books. After my studies there came a period where I didn’t want to read anything, but since the start of 2008 I’ve been trying to read some books of substance.

I’ve recently finished No Logo by Naomi Klein. It’s described as ‘The Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement’ by The Guardian. In it Klein exposes the child labour violations of corporations, such as Nike, and makes you realise how quickly corporations have taken over the public space. She also spent a lot of the book focussing on the activism of consumers in the face of the ever expanding corporate sphere. It was inspiring to read the stories of those in the mid/to late 90s who fought back against the branding of their lives.

Klein ended the book on a rather sombre note. Yes a new global movement seemed to be forming, and after the Seattle riots following the World Trade Organisation summit then there really was a change in the air – but the attacks on September 11 2001 changed so much. That one event seemed to change the way that activism was taking place and changed the public perception towards the protestors – “You’re either with us, or against us” is the rhetoric that George W Bush spilled out. Johann Hari in the New Statesman asks ‘Whatever happened to No Logo?’.

I was especially interested in how Klein referenced the internet in her book. It seemed that this explosion of activism against large corporations happened around the same time that internet take-up really took off (mid-late 90s). She states: “it is the Internet that has rapidly become the tool of choice for spreading information about multinationals around the globe.” Which made me think, Klein wrote this before the rise of big internet corporations, such as Google and Facebook. How easy would it be for activists to use these social media in their campaigns? Facebook relies on advertisers to keep itself going, if consumers were to revolt against a branded network space – what would happen?

But, also, with the explosion of broadband has their been an explosion in activism using the web? What examples are there of people using the web to network as citizens and turn that into a campaign? How are third sector organisations using the ‘online’ generation to affect change? I started my series on ‘How third sector organisations are using the web for campaigning’ and reading No Logo has inspired me to finish it. How are these social media, that by their very nature are there to connect people, being used to connect and affect change?

Thanks to Craig McGinty for flagging this one up. Craig posted about the Manchester Evening News’ great use of Dipity to create online timelines. They created one about the congestion charge in Manchester.

Could Dipity be the answer to the problem of trying to bring an audience up to speed on a long and complex issue? A journalist relies on the archives to remind themselves of what’s happened previously and I know from when I’ve been in newsrooms a trawl through past stories was essential. Dipity is web 2.0 completely, taking loads of information in different formats and shoving it together in an easy to follow timeline. Reminds me of those textbooks we had at school of timelines about the Tudors etc?

It’s not just journalists who could be using Dipity, charities and campaigning organisations can put an issue and its background in the spotlight and show what’s happened previously. I think the Students’ Union where I work will be hoping to use it to show the top-up fees debate, which will rear its head again in 2009 when the report is started into lifting the cap. Dipity could be fantastic at taking deep, and often political, issues and putting them into an easy to follow format. How else could it be used?

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be taking a look at how third sector organisations (charities, voluntary organisations, lobby groups) have been using the web as a campaigning tool. This came about as in my role at the Students’ Union at UCLan I am investigating ways for the Union to use the web for campaigning, as previously the organisation relied heavily on printed material and suffers from a general lack of imagination around campaigning. And the biggest problem, no people.

So, to kick things off I’m looking at Action Aid. As their website header proudly states they’ve been fighting poverty for 35 years – but how is the web playing a role in fighting poverty?

The key to any successful campaign is PEOPLE, people and MORE people. People feel, have rights and have time/effort/energy. Many hands make light work and all that. Well, on the frontpage of Action Aid’s site – perhaps not as prominently as it could be – is ‘MyActionAid‘. This is hosted on a separate URL so can be promoted offline. This is a social network for activists.

Social networks and media should be great for charity. They allow the creation of social networks around specific topics, and for Action Aid they’ve taken this to a higher level by hosting and creating their own network. I can’t get access to it, as I’m not a member, but this rather funky (E4 style video clip) shows me the power of it:

Good stuff and great use of video, plus it helps if you’ve got a relative celebrity to do your voiceovers (yeah that bloke off the E4 ads who puts loads of sarcasm into everything). However it’s only had 266 views on Youtube.

The homepage of MyActionAid could be a bit better, they highlight upcoming events but it could do with showcasing more of the fundraising events that are upcoming. Overall though, a cracking social network for activists.

The campaigns section is titled ‘What you can do‘ – good stuff, if I saw the section ‘Campaigns’ I’d be bored stiff. This is engaging and a call to arms, it says ‘We are ActionAid, come join us’. Not ‘We are ActionAid, we campaign on this’. Again, it’s about engagement and people. I managed to end up clicking a big circle called ‘Take action now’ but when I did I was a bit disappointed to find a news story about a Labour minister giving his heart. The form to actually take action about this was below the scroll line, so I might not have bothered to look. If there’s a form, put it high up or at least have a big link to it.

There’s good use of a blog for the campaign on targeting poverty, charity blogs can sometimes be a bit weak but the brilliant PR stunt of applying to demolish St Paul’s cathedral in protest at mining projects in India makes for great material for a blog, especially as it gives the charity a chance to expand and add detail.

So to sum up:

• Great social network for activists, but frontpage could have more of a buzz about it and feature more of what the activists are doing to campaign, raise money etc
• Good use of blogging to support campaigns, helped by some creative PR
• Hiding away forms that encourage engagement below scroll lines is not good
• Good use of video to promote the social network, was good to watch and helped by star voiceover

I got an email today, via the Common Purpose 360 network*, from a chap who is looking to expand The New Generation Society website. It’s a charity, setup at York University, by the looks of it they are trying to expand.

He was interested in creating a more ‘community feel’ to their website. Everything we listed was ‘we want our own Facebook, but we don’t want it to be Facebook’. Fortunately, I had just the thing for him and something I’m trialing in my role at UCLan Students’ Union to create a series of networks for course representatives based around their school and faculty.

I pointed him in the direction of Ning. A fantastic tool that allows you to create your own social network – complete with forums, events, photos, video, groups. Best of all it’s open-source so you can code your own gadgets for it, and it allows your users to get involved. Ning is not there to ‘replace facebook’ or to be ‘the new facebook’, instead it takes the forum/messageboard concept and allows you create an interactive community around a specific subject. It reminds me of when everyone used to have a free Geocities website about their favourite band/sports team/famous person.

So, we’ll see if the New Generation Society take up a Ning for their site and bring their community of activists online. For small organisations, especially those with no budget and who want to bring together a network for people around a particular subject – Ning couldn’t be better.

*Note: I’m a graduate of the Common Purpose Frontrunner programme. It’s for young people who have shown leadership in civil society. Apprently I have done so.