woolworths logo

… 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:

Congratulations to Rachel Beer for organising the event, it was a cool experience to be ‘tweeting from the sidelines’ as the discussions unfolded.

There’s a couple of great posts from Chris Brogan about using twitter and where to start in the world of social media, with some useful tips for charities.

Image from flickr: Felice de Sena Micheli

‘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?

Some quality reading today:

• Why charities need to use social media

Good post about charities needing to embrace social media. There’s a lot bandied around about facebook this, twitter that, but it’s sometimes overwhelming. That’s why Rachel Beer’s guide is an excellent starting point.

• Will the web kill the high street?

It hasn’t happened. But the web does provide a way for specialist shops to take hold of a market and dominate it.

• Martyn Lewis campaigns for the nation’s young people

New online only charity that aims to get young people to reflect their views in the media. Seems like a good idea, but as young people are ‘turned off’ from traditional media brands who says they will come back to them to comment?

• 14 reasons to have a web guru on your team

Yeah! Great stuff. Any organisation that isn’t trying to understand, work with, get involved with the web and social media won’t win in the long run.

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.

Fantastic blog I stumbled across today, it’s all about communications and marketing for nonprofit organisations. So if you’re in that sector or even if you aren’t then go and check it out. It’s written by the brilliant Kivi Miller. Go and check out nonprofitmarketingguide today, you won’t be disappointed.

What I’ve been reading today:

• Compared with what?

Post about the modern marketing mix, where does social media fit into it and how or indeed can you measure the return on investment?

• In defense of raising money: a manifesto for nonprofit CEOs

I sent this to my CEO, if you work for a nonprofit then you should to. Some good points made by Sasha and thanks to Seth Godin for the heads up.

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?