I went to visit Mencap’s ‘This Is Me’ exhibition yesterday at Liverpool ONE. I expected it to be in a prominent place but it was tucked away down one of the side alleys that come off the main strip, opposite where you go up the escalators to access the terrace area with all the restaurants.
Once I found the exhibition it was great to see the images, that were all entered into Mencap’s Snap! competition and some of the entries are really moving. They show people with learning disability doing things that everyone else does, there’s a guy watching Blackburn Rovers and another guy abseiling. The exhibition has some information about Mencap, what they do and their vision for how people with learning disability should be treated equally. It also has information about what a learning disability is and what it isn’t.
The stars of the exhibition are the images, particularly the ones taken by people with learning disability. The image above of Anthony Quinn, is him taking his photo in a mirror and is an excellent shot. The blurb with his photo says:
Once a week I go to Brookfield College to study photography. Here I am practising taking photos. I find this challenging, but I am practising taking self-portraits without camera shake.
The stories behind the photos are also really interesting, seeing what people with learning disability do and what great things they get involved in. Hopefully people who look at these photos will realise that people with learning disability are not that different from themselves, and in particular that they enjoy just the same things as everyone else and also have the same dreams, hopes and aspirations.
If you get chance to visit Liverpool ONE before Monday 21st September 2009 take five minutes to go and wander around the giant photo boxes, it’s well worth it. After Liverpool the exhibition moves on to Leeds and Newcastle.
I’m a graduate of Common Purpose. I attended their Frontrunner programme in the summer of 2008. I met some really interesting people, talked about some big issues and learned a lot about leadership.
I wasn’t brainwashed during my time there and there was no specific agenda pushed on us – especially not any sort of ‘pro-European’ agenda as the BBC article alledges. The only agenda we had pushed on us was that we could be a positive force for change in society. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to be discussing?
The work that Common Purpose does is very beneficial. Yes, the courses are not cheap but that’s because of the quality of speakers they get at the events and they are also very well run – you get what you pay for with most training and conference events. The people I met were drawn from every walk of life, some from business, some from charities, some still studying and the debates were very interesting and fun.
The ‘Chatham House’ rules are necessary because in some of the sessions people are very frank about what they are discussing or guest speakers are revealing some very delicate details about situations they’ve had to deal with.
Perhaps Common Purpose has more work to do to make its mission clearer and to try not to come off as ‘elitist’? Certainly without my time at the Frontrunner programme I wouldn’t have the confidence to work on some of the projects I currently am working on or put myself forward to become a trustee for Mencap Liverpool.
So, Common Purpose – a ‘secret society?’. I think not. But if they ever send me a cloak and a secret handshake in the post I’ll let you know.
Online fundraising is becoming more and more popular, replacing old style fundraising, but can Twitter play a part?
Attended the second Not For Profit Tweetup (#NFPTweetup) last night at Christian Aid’s head office in Waterloo. It was excellent, although the lack of free wi-fi access was disappointing (it being a tweetup and all).
The night started with Rachel Beer chairing a presentation where slides were presented about what Twitter meant to some of the people in attendance from the third sector and also some of those who weren’t in the audience but who had contributed virtually.
The general theme was that Twitter was a very useful tool, a conversation tool and a way to ‘humanise’ the organisation and not just hide behind a corporate shield.
We then broke off into groups and my group was charged with the title of ‘How can twitter be used for fundraising?’.
Here’s our key findings and ideas, and the below is some of the discussion that took place:
- Use Twitter to tell stories and then link off to a chance to donate
- ‘Friendraising’ and asking for favours on Twitter is often more powerful than asking for money or ask for content for existing media (photos, videos, guest blog posts, expert comment, ideas etc)
- Feature your community fundraisers and their efforts via your Twitter feed (this can act as a reward for those who go the extra mile), but only feature the more unusual or large-scale efforts rather than every Tom, Dick and Harriet
- Teach community fundraisers about how to use Twitter and other social media tools, as well as sites such as Justgiving and Bmycharity, to increase their donations and online awareness of fundraising effort
- Don’t abuse your Twitter following by always asking for donations
- Measurement will be needed to prove ROT (Return on Tweeting) in relation to fundraising efforts
- Setup up specific Twitter accounts for certain appeals and use these to promote the appeal, rather than featuring them all on your charity’s main Twitter account
- Twitter itself needs to fundraise to ensure long-term survival
Our first question to everyone around the table was ‘Have you used twitter for fundraising?’ and the answer was a resounding, ‘Not yet, but we’d quite like to know how and whether anyone else is doing it.’
One person in the group then contributed that they felt it would be a good way of raising small amounts of money for a specific cause, but this was countered by another group member who felt that the success of Twestival showed that large amounts could be gathered via Twitter and events organised around it.
We then discussed why it was that big charities and big appeals didn’t seem to be using Twitter as a fundraising tool but that individuals and smaller charities were. Everyone felt this was because it was easier for an individual and smaller organisations to adapt and use a tool such as Twitter where as larger organisations felt there were too many hoops and risks with using it.
We had Alex from Dogs Trust in our group and she contributed about how the charity had been using Twitter heaving. They now had around 2,200 followers and that they hadn’t actively fundraised for their appeals through Twitter but that they had promoted some of the fundraising activities of their supporters via their Twitter feed.
This led to a discussion about who you should follow and Alex commented that they were selective about who they followed and followed back. They don’t auto-follow back, preferring to weed out the spammers themselves. It was felt that asking for money via Twitter wouldn’t be right yet as they were still building their community but they had successfully used Twitter to ask for non-financial related activities – re-homing a dog, voluntary acts and time from supporters.
This led to a discussion about whether Twitter was a fundraising tool or whether it was ‘friendraising’. A tool to raise awareness of what you do and connect with supporters and then push them off somewhere else to donate, rather than potentially contaminate your Twitter following by asking them for donations to an appeal.
Many also felt it would be worthwhile if Twitter was to be used for fundraising that a profile on Twitter be setup for specific appeals e.g. twitter.com/savethewhiterhinoappeal and then people would know what to expect from this Twitter feed and it helped make people’s expectations clear. The issue of brand protection was also raised, charities even if they aren’t planning to use Twitter for an appeal should register the Twitter URL for their appeal just in case someone else does and pretends to be them!
Fundraising guru Howard Lake was also in our group and he added some insight into how Twestival had raised money for charity:water and the charity hadn’t actually asked to be involved – they were selected.
We were lucky enough to have Ben from Bmycharity in our group and the discussion led us on to how sites such as Bmycharity and Justgiving were experiencing surges in traffic (albeit from a small base to start with) from Twitter to their fundraising profile pages. He also commented that they were very interested in Twitter and its growing popularity and were looking at ways of incorporating more Twitter related activity and feeds into their profile pages.
We then discussed that perhaps Twitter was more of a tool for community fundraisers than for charities themselves, but charities could play a part by promoting the most interesting fundraising events/profiles through twitter to generate traffic and donations on profile pages. An interesting point was raised that charities had to be careful not to over-promote their fundraisers and this was the online equivalent of someone shaking a tin in your face and asking for 50p every 2 minutes.
Ben from Bmycharity chipped in at this point with a great example of how they had used Twitter to promote the more ‘unusual’ of their fundraisers. He spoke about how a woman was going from Lands End to John O’Groats in a powered wheelchair, but as a twist was offering the chance for two able-bodied people to join her on her trip. They found that by using Twitter to promote this the traffic to the profile page increased and potentially the donations increased.
This led to a debate about how the impact of Twitter on fundraisers could be measured. Someone needs to come up with a measurement for ‘Return on Tweet (ROT)’. It would be handy if there was a bit of code added to links put into a Tweet that tracked if a user went through to a specific page and then carried on to donate to the appeal/fundraising effort. This could then help charities say ‘we tweeted 20 times about this appeal and 46 people clicked through and 27 people donated a total of £256.70′.
We then discussed how charities need to do more to educate their community fundraisers about how to use online tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Justgiving, Bmycharity and others to maximise their fundraising efforts. This could be through running drop-in sessions (real or virtual) for community fundraisers and creating an online resource in a community fundraiser community site or on the charities own website (something like the Get Involve section) to teach people about the tools.
Finally, we discussed Twitter’s growing popularity and usage levels. Everyone was very excited about the potential for it and the growing uptake but there were notes of caution about whether it could survive long-term on just venture capital alone. Twitter needs to fundraise to ensure that it survives and this could be done through advertising (adverts that respond to what you’re tweeting about down the side of the twitter feed) or levying a charge at premium users.
There were more ideas and discussions than this but hopefully this is a useful snapshot of what our group discussed and I’d like to thank all those who took part it was great to hear everyone’s comments and find out what their charities were up to online.
I’d be interested to know what you think, can Twitter be used for fundraising? Is it mainstream enough to be counted as a viable marketing tool?
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.
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:
Stories, not annual reports
Engage and explain, then fundraise
From walled garden to public park, beyond your own website
Integrate the online work to fit your overall message
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:
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!
I’m getting up at the arse crack of dawn tomorrow to travel on the 6:54 from Preston to York. Why? Because I’m going to meet fellow marketers/communicators working in the third sector who want to know more about using the internet, email and social media.
It’s hosted by the Institute of Fundraising North and there’s a great line-up of speakers. The agenda seems very web 2.0 heavy and social media heavy and I’m looking forward to seeing what some respected experts have to say. We’ve even got someone joining us live via web link from San Francisco to speak about the power of social networks in online fundraising!
Why am I going? I want to answer these questions:
How can I put together a social media strategy for the organisation I work for
What should be involved in this social media strategy, what tools should be used
Who in the organisation should be using what tools and just as importantly who shouldn’t!
I’m hoping to find out what other charities and third sector organisations have been doing with social media. Are we ahead of the curve at UCLan or are we lagging behind?
We’re currently working on our communications strategy, this involves implementing CRM and lots of email marketing. I’ll be playing close attention during Howard Lake‘s session on ‘The story so far: Charity websites & email – the good, the bad and just don’t go there!’. Hopefully this will give me an idea of what will work and what doesn’t.
While the conference is ultimately about fundraising, coming from a membership I’m going to substitute where possible the ‘fundraising’ aspect for ‘engagement’. A lot of the tools used online involve calls to action, and instead of donating via credit card it might be that signing a petition could be inserted instead.
Hopefully I’ll be able to answer some of the questions I have tomorrow, meet some people who are already doing some of it, or even tell people about what we’re doing!
You can follow the events via twitter by using search.twitter to follow #iofnorth – I for one will be tweeting from ed_walker86 so feel free to follow me as I’ll be tweeting as long as my laptop battery lasts (or I can get a charge).
Just a quick note to say that I was successfully co-opted onto the board of trustees for Mencap Liverpool this evening (would link to their website but it’s currently down). This is a regional branch of national Mencap. At 22 I’ve lowered the age of their board significantly.
I’m really looking forward to working with them and my first task is redeveloping their website and then revamping their communications. It’s going to be a challenge but a good one. I’ll try and blog to provide an insight of what it’s like being a trustee for such a well known charity and also what it’s like being a trustee so young.
Had this sent through from someone I attended the Common Purpose Frontrunner programme with today, she works for the excellent UnLtd:
“ONE WEEK TO GO…!
The Big Challenge competition is closing to applications on January 12th 2009!!
The Big Challenge competition is only open for one more week to any 16-25 year old who has a big idea for a project or campaign that helps other young people lead more positive and healthy lives. There is £60 000 to be won for a number of inspiring project ideas that will make a real difference to young people’s lives. Winners will have their project costs paid for along with support and mentoring to carry out their ideas.
Applications must focus on one of these 4 areas:
· Drugs, sex and alcohol
· Sustainable living
· Gang culture
· Healthy living
Visit – www.bigchallenge.org.uk where you can apply, find out about volunteer opportunities, vote for your favourite project idea (between Feb 2nd and 9th) and read the applications that have been submitted so far!
Your Life, Your Decision, Your Challenge.
What are you waiting for?”
So if you’re between 16 and 25, reading this, have an idea in one of those four areas. What are you waiting for? Go pitch!
… it was exactly the same. The conversations that I used to have with colleagues and my manager are now becoming a reality. As Robert Peston has been saying it’s been a “lame duck retailer” for years and it’s not surprising really.
I worked there from the age of 17 right through to 20 when I was studying. Woolworths was very good to me, I used to come back every holiday from university, on my original rate of pay and get loads of hours. They were probably too nice come to think of it. It was a good place to work (as long as you weren’t planning on staying too long) but you had that nagging feeling that the retail reaper was going to strike eventually.
However, what’s scary is, if it can happen to Woolies then it can happen to anyone. I know Woolies isn’t what it used to be but it is a BIG company. 30,000 comployees, hundreds of stores. And for lack of a better word, it’s buggered. Students’ Union’s and charities, and anyone else for that matter, need to think that if you’re not innovating, upping your game and leading your area then you’re going to suffer. How many charities and third sector organisations will be cutting back, focusing on easy wins, core values and all the rest of it? That’s great, but if you’re not taking the odd risk, maybe failing once, twice, thrice, but making a great win somewhere else then you’re not going to make it.
The big thing that has struck me is that the public may like you, have a soft spot for you, but they won’t spend a penny with you and that’s what everyone needs in the end – money. How many charities are loved, liked, looked highly upon but at the end of the day if you can’t pay the bills then the administrators will be in. The new economy will be made up of companies who aren’t afraid to put themselves out there, but have a solid plan behind everything to make sure that donations/profits/readers/punters/whoever/whatever are still coming in.
I didn’t make it down South for the #nfptweetup but it seemed like it went really well. You could contribute a slide in advance for discussion by those at the event (apparently over 30 people showed up) about how twitter can be used, examples.
Mine was ‘What is twitter’ overkill and who in an organisation should be doing the tweeting. On the twitter overkill questioned it seemed that if you’re not interesting when you tweet then anything is overkill, but if you are interesting then tweet away to your heart’s content.
Below is the slideshow of crowdsourced slides for the event, experiences of using twitter, questions and examples:
‘Are Students’ Union recession proof?’ that was muttered by our chief executive during a meeting the other day. He’s not the only one wondering. We’ve kicked off a discussion over on The Charity Place about how Students’ Union’s can respond to the challenges that are potentially ahead. So here’s my key points about how Union’s can respond to the threat of a recession, some are specific to UCLan but some could go for the sector as a whole.
1. Make sure no one can question our legitimacy. This means showing what we do, how we do it and why we’re important. This makes it harder for people to take things away if we are shown to be doing an excellent job. Also, as Union’s officially become charities it’ll be important to consider our impacts as an organisation and be able to measure them. The days of just giving money to said club and society and saying ‘that’s involvement’ is going to be harder to justify, or running said campaign because someone sitting in an office thinks ‘it’d look good wouldn’t it?’ are dead.
2. Get smart with technology. We’re looking at investing in technologies which will allow us to use students data to increase loyalty to student services, get smarter with how we communicate with students and ensure that destination events are promoted effectively. Poster/flyer blindness is rife and especially for us being a city campus we’ve got to compete for every single penny to ensure we are still the ‘gatekeepers’ of the student market and student pound.
3. Customer service. Ensure that commercial outlets are 100% switched on and ready to please every single customer who comes through the door. Students are going to be thinking twice about spending, and we need to make sure that when they do spend that tenner they are very happy with what they’ve got – not just the product but everything that comes with it.
4. Don’t rush into things. Just because there is a recession looming (or already here) doesn’t mean we should just retreat into the trenches. There are umpteen opportunities for Students’ Union’s to partner up with loads of different organisations and work with them to deliver services, create a market, deliver information and much more. This is especially relevant if there is going to be a big government splurge in spending, as some of that might be up for grabs for new projects or promotions.
5. Innovate. Be a leader, take the odd risk or two but make sure you’ve backed it up with resources. Not easy in a recession, but if you spot an opportunity to expand then make sure you’ve got the support behind it and do it properly.
6. Engage the membership. They after all are in charge, go out to the membership and ask them how they think things can be improved, get them onboard, get them working with you, for you, feeding back to you and most of all being loyal to you.
7. Develop niches. Ensure that while you’re appealing to the 18-22 student pound market that you’re developing niche products/services/communications that satisfy a particular demographic of the student body. We know that the demographics of students are changing to include international, mature, part-time, commuting and a whole host of other ‘groups’ – identify them and develop strands to appeal to them and bring them into the mix.
What do you think? Are Students’ Union’s actually recession proof? Or is that bullshit? Will some go out of business? How can they survive?
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