You’ve got back another stack of FOI requests. In Wales we have four police forces to FOI and 22 local authorities. As well as data from FOI requests there’s plenty of data pumped constantly out of StatsWales from the Assembly Government and council’s even release data sometimes as well. We get masses of data back all the time, but how much of it sees the light of day?

Working with Josie Ensor, who is on secondment from the Telegraph at Media Wales, we decided to do some cool stuff with a sample of the data that comes out of StatsWales using the brilliant, and free, Open Heat Map. The first set, how Welsh identity varies across the nation and the second, how Welsh-language use has changed over time.

The first was relatively straight-forward. We took the data, and simplified it in a Google spreadsheet with one column as the council name and the second the value (the percentage of people identifying as Welsh). First I had to remember to publish the Google spreadsheet on the web (see our end spreadsheet here), not just make it public, so Open Heat Map could read it. Secondly we had to make sure our council names matched up with the ‘uk_county’ code that Open Heat Map will recognise.

After we’d got Heat Maps to read the data we played around with the colouring and shading, and we adjusted to ‘to and from’ range that Heat Maps uses to adjust the shade of colours. We ended up with a decent map, showing clearly which areas felt ‘more Welsh’ than others and it triggered a fair amount of comments and page views on WalesOnline. Interestingly the comments really do make the story, with people questioning the data source, arguing, agreeing and just generally being Welsh.

Before started work on our second map, making a data-set change over time when the magical play button is pushed, Josie spotted someone had already done what we needed to do (an advert for local authorities making their data available?). A message to the creator of the map and they agreed we could embed it in our story as long as we linked back to Open Heat Maps, no problem. Again, it attracted a fair amount of comments and page views.

And the one below was on Welsh MPs expenses from May to August this year, but I struggled to get it to display anything other than the value for each MP. Ideally I’d have liked to include a headshot of the MP, their name, their political party and link to their website.

So, what did we learn from using Open Heat Maps?

- Definitely read about Open Heat Map constituencies and codes before starting, this means you’ll be aware of what locations you can use or can’t

- Know what the story is. We knew we wanted to show X on the map e.g. Welsh identity

But the data isn’t the story, how could we take it on? A video package exploring Welsh identity would build on it. Do those on the Borders feel more English? Why is the Valleys such a hotbed of Welsh nationalism? How does Welsh identity map against voting patterns? Data is always just the start of a host of story ideas.

The biggest advantage of Open Heat Map is that it’s pre-built to recognise constituency and council areas, and a host of other area codes (it doesn’t go down to council ward boundaries though). As this post from Hannah Waldram shows, having this saves you a heck of a lot of time when trying to create a map that relies on locations to tell a story.

Have you used Open Heat Map? What did you create? Let me know in the comments below

There’s been a lot of talk about funding journalism and how the web can play a part in this, but the web above all for journalists offers an opportunity to create readers+.

Journalists have always had contacts, those people who we can go to for comment and stories. They might be professional people, police officers, nurses or the local cleaner at the comprehensive who overhears gossip when he’s having a ciggie round the back of the head’s office.

Now, though, through social media and the web we’ve got a pool of intelligent, connected and helpful people at our finger-tips. Here’s how to leverage it:

Searching Twitter for key topics reveals what your area knows

If you’re using Twitter, learn how to search for key topics and phrases. For example, we’ve recently had an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the South Wales Valleys. Searching for ‘legionnaires’ will bring up any mention of it on Twitter and you can see who tweeted it. This means you can keep on top of what other news sources are saying about the outbreak and also watch out for anyone tweeting ‘Shit! My gran’s got legionnaires’!’ or ‘Yay! Work closed tomorrow because of legionnaires!’. Bam. A tweet like that and you might have a way in.

Don’t forget the private word…

Using Twitter’s private message function. Using the legionnaires’ example above, if you reply publicly to that tweet you might not get much of a response. If you follow that person, they might follow you back, then you’ll have a chance to private message them on Twitter. This is an easy way to exchange phone numbers/email address’. Also, check if the person has a blog or website addressed listed on their profile as this might give you a way to get in touch.

Asking for help and case studies

Asking for help via social networks. You’ve been landed with a 800-word feature on a topic you don’t know that much about, you need some experts but you also want some real people. A newspaper full of X spokesperson and stuffy academic Y is not much fun. We like reading what Mr Jones from the local action group has to say. Pop a quick post out on Twitter and Facebook saying you’re looking for help ‘finding women over 30 who drink more than 2 glasses of red wine a week’ – or something like that. I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a ‘We’re looking for…’ page on WalesOnline where we list every type of person/expert etc we’re trying to speak to and the reporter dealing with the story. Make sure you get whoever deals with the main media twitter/facebook accounts to syndicate your requests.

Making yourself available

Get your email address on stories (both offline and online). People like email. It’s often more convenient than a phone call, and let’s face it calling a journalist can be a scary thing to do – especially if you catch them on deadline and you’re trying to get a notice out about a village fete.

Contacts should be searchable

Setup a Google Doc with all your contacts. I have a google doc contacts book (as well as a downloaded backup and hard copy print out done every couple of months). Create columns for forename, surname, what they do, what they are good for, the area they relate to, email address, mobile, phone, address, website and twitter account. This then becomes an incredibly powerful database of contacts you can search at a moments notice – without needing to remember the name of the chair of that residents action group you once met at a planning committee. You can search by name, what they do or what area they cover. Once you’ve got a contacts list, it’s worth sending out a quarterly email to those contacts to let them know what stories you’ve been working on and what you will be working on (i.e. what you could use a hand with).

Share the contact love

You can also setup shared contacts lists via Google Docs, so for example in our newsroom we have a shared Cardiff councillors contacts list. This allows all reporters access, is searchable by different fields and can be updated if a reported gets a new or better contact line for councillors.

Facebook will yield super-fans

Finding specialists and super-fans on Facebook. Facebook has groups. These are setup to allow people with similar interests to come together and celebrate the brilliance of, for example, William Shatner. This is searchable via the groups tag in Facebook, and if you look carefully it’ll show you the groups creator. You can then click on this person, view a basic profile and most importantly send them a message. You don’t even need to be a friend to send them a message. It could be your way in to getting in touch with a relevant and useful person.

Bloggers can be local and niche experts

Make a list of bloggers and subscribe to what they do (use an RSS reader to do this, there’s plenty of good ones out there like Google Reader. RSS allows you to read blog posts without having to visit lots of different websites all the time!). Monitor local bloggers, both location-orientated ones and topic-specific ones. If a new restaurant is opening in town, the local food blogger might know about it and be able to offer an extra few lines of comment.

More than meets the eye to online photos

Make use of photos. Flickr is a powerful tool for keeping an eye (literally, a visual eye) on your area. Monitor it for new photos and get your own flickr page. When you’re out and about on stories, take photos (don’t be afraid of using your mobile phone for this) of interesting things and post them to the Flickr account. Connect with local photographers. Subscribe to a feed of your local groups photos (search Flickr for your area) and you’ll be able to see, in your RSS reader, all the local photos being taken. You’ll be amazed at the stories which can come from an interesting Flickr photo. Plus, if picture desk are being pissy, you might be able to ask a Flickr photographer to use one of their photos for a story.

Why have readers+?

Readers+ will help you out. They comment on stories, they re-tweet and share your stories. They might even blog about something you’ve written about and carry on the debate. They will stick up for you. They begin to have a personal attachment to your work and style. They are not government officials, PR people or other people paid to speak to you. They are real people. It also increases their attachment to your media brand and who knows, they might buy the paper and visit the website more as a result.

Image credit to mararie

How have you used social media to find out things? Any other tips on using the web to help with your reporting? Let me know in the comments below

Foursquare. Gowalla. And now Facebook Places (although at the moment this is only available if you’re an American). Location apps for mobile phones seem to be the ‘in-thing’ on the web at the moment but is there any use to journalists in them?

Twitter clearly has a use as it can help us to find out where news is breaking, connect with contacts and promote our content. The same goes for Facebook, although that seems most useful for building communities around your fan pages of your media brand.

I recently tried out Foursquare for two months and could find absolutely no use for it. It was buggy and didn’t seem to get on with my laptop. I checked in at a few places and became the mayor of my local swimming pool (yay!) and synced up my account with my Twitter. However, I found it annoying. I often forgot to check in at places or when I checked in I had absolutely nothing interesting to say. Likewise I tried out the screen where my friends were checking-in. Cool. But again no use.

I did put in it where I was reporting from, so I could say ‘Checked In at County Hall’ and then put the message ‘Covering an environmental scrutiny meeting’. But I could just post that on Twitter without bothering with Foursquare? I suppose it might reassure people that as a journalist I’m out of the office scrutinising democratic functions but how many people would really care? Although I never managed to achieve my goal of becoming the ‘Mayor of Cardiff City Hall’.

I could see tabloid journos using it if they ever befriended a celebrity who was using the service. Ordering the papparazi to the Pizza Hut where Charlotte Church was tucking into a vegetable supreme – but how many of us are going to befriend celebrities?

Location services seem more for building on your existing friendship networks rather than finding stories and seem a waste of time from a professional viewpoint for journalists.

The only use I can see for journalists is if they make a personal contact and add them. This allows them to see where the contact is and if the journalist knows where they are they could ask that contact to contribute something to a story – if, and only if, there’s something happening at that location at that exact moment. For example, if I saw a contact of mine was at the Cardiff City Stadium I could ask them to shoot some video of the fans outside the game cheering on Craig Bellamy after his winning goal. This could then turn into user-generated content for the website.

Image credit to nan palmero

So, I’ve left my Foursquare account to stagnate and I’m hoping I’m wrong. Is there a way these location-based services can be useful for journalists? Have you been using them for journalistic purposes? Let me know your views in the comments below.

Got up ridiculously early on Friday 16th July to head up the motorways, with Joni Alexander in tow, to take part in the ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers event in Liverpool.

Despite feeling as though we’d stumbled into the middle of a Liverpool Daily Post & Echo school outing, we soon found ourselves immersed in trying to use data to tell a story and do something useful with it.

Media organisations have access to, possess and make use of a lot of data. But how much they make use of it, is limited. The Guardian is certainly leading the way with the DataBlog, to give you the numbers behind the headlines but particularly in regional and local journalism there isn’t a lot of spewing out of data. That’s mainly because there just aren’t the resources or the time.

However, we enlisted the help of master programmer Julian Todd, the man behind The Straight Choice, to get us up and running. Our team (me, Julian, Joni and Jo Kelly) had a big interest in local information, so we trawled through the Liverpool Echo’s website in the districts section. Huyton. Toxteth. These are the places where our readers live and what do they care about? With talk of public sector cuts and ‘frontline services’ being protected we thought it would be interesting to show how scraping data could help expose any cuts to ‘frontline services’. So ‘Plod Watch’ was born – complete with a rather rubbish hand drawn logo.

We scraped the data from the Merseyside Police website about PCSOs and PCs. We were able to pull contact information for each officer and a photo of them as well. We then set about attaching the Merseyside Police areas to the Liverpool Echo’s areas. Very different as we discovered.

Eventually we came up with a page that showed all the officers who policed that Liverpool Echo district. Now the clever bit. Everytime Merseyside Police update their website and remove an officer, a big red X will appear across that officer’s face and an email will be sent to the journalist who covers the patch to find out why. Officer promoted? Officer left for better things? Or have the ConDem cuts come swinging their way into a frontline service?

We also scraped the Echo’s website itself to show the story count in a graph for the district. This could then be filtered down to show the story count for crime stories in the Echo website. We could also look at embedding the faces of police officers in the relevant district pages to as a ‘your local police’ widget allowing people to click through directly to their local officers. No more the faceless, car driving, bobby. They’d be on the virtual beat.

The day itself showed some amazing things could be done with data, and showed how when programmers/developers are paired with journalists they can do some great things. It reminded me though that despite all this great data, you still need journalistic minds to interrogate it and find the stories and pick out what’s important to people.

So, keep your eyes peeled as Plod Watch might be coming to a local newspaper website near you.

You can read some great write ups about the day from Alison Gow and Mike Nolan

How do you or would you use data? Have you seen any examples of regional/local websites publishing data? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to guinavere

However, the stories about a new block of flats or a new air quality management area aren’t always the most exciting. So, how do you spice them up a little? The web allows us to quickly and easily add maps into our stories to give a sense of scale for readers.

Recently Cardiff Council declared a section of a busy road running through the city as an ‘Air Quality Management Area’. This means that the levels of toxic fumes are above the recommended amount. However, this road is a large one and trying to describe the exact area is difficult. Buried away in the documents is a map of the area, but it’s not got local landmarks on it to help people make sense of it.

Embedded below is a quick google map I added to the story to show the area and also the amount of people who live in the affected area. It localises the story, humanises it and adds context. Plus it will hold the attention of the reader on the story page for longer.

View Stephenson Court Air Quality Management Area in a larger map

How to make a google map and embed in your story

1. First of all get hold of the document from the Council, be it the planning application or scrutiny committee report. Find the map. Get it clear in your head where this area is, and if you’re not sure check the boundaries of the area. There’s nothing worse than an incorrect map.

2. Sign up for a Google account. Easy to do, once you have a Google account you can then use their Google map software.

3. Click on Maps in the Google top bar, and then click My Maps. Hit ‘Create new map’ and give it a title e.g. Newport Road Air Quality Management Area and write a short description.

4. You can then create points on the map, markers, and shaded areas or draw lines. The image above shows what’s available to you when creating the map. Think about the best way to display the information you’ve got, if it’s a series of locations you’ll want to use markets. If it’s a new traffic route, you’ll want to draw lines. If it involves zones or areas you’ll want to create shaded areas. Some maps may use all of those tools, for example the Air Quality Management Area includes a shaded area and markers.

5. When adding areas/markets make sure you include a title for each of them and some added information e.g. don’t just put ‘Marker 1′ make sure it says ‘High Cross’ and in the description ‘High Cross will be the main terminal for the new bus station’.

6. Once you’ve added all the information, click the ‘Link’ option and you’ll then be able to get an embed code. This allows you to put the map into your story, so people can see the map while reading the story. When you click the ‘Link’ option you’ll see two bits of code and an option to say ‘Customise’, click this and a screen will pop-up and allow you to edit the size of your map. Plus very importantly where it is centered and the amount of zoom. For council stories the zoom in on maps is likely to be very high, as they relate to a specific area – there’s no point showing the whole of the UK in a google map that’s about a street in Nottingham.

7. Get the code and embed it into the HTML part of your content management system. You may need to ask your technical team for the best way to embed Google Maps, you may need to request it is ‘white listed’ as a widget, or you may be able to access the HTML code for stories. Either way, check with them the best way. Make sure the map is the width of the story – just as if you were putting a photo in. Also, include a title above your map so that if it doesn’t display – people at least understand it’s there. Something like ‘View a map of the new traffic layout for Reading’ and make the ‘view a map’ a link to the Google map itself (you can grab a http://www…. link to the actual map by clicking that ‘Link’ button in the Google map options).

There you go, you’ve added a Google map to your story and helped put it into context for your readers. It’s also a timeless piece of content, so you can re-embed it if you run a similar  or follow-up story.

Here’s some other examples of maps being used in local reporting to good effect: YourPonty does a good planning application round-up map and Blog Preston used a map to show the location of old railway tunnels that run under the city.

Do you use Google Maps as part of your reporting? Got some examples of excellent Google Maps that you’ve seen on news websites? Let me know in the comments below.

I was recently away from work for a few days, some lieu days needed taking (use them or lose them as they say) and the combination of a Bank Holiday and the chance to visit the girlfriend back up in the North of England was too good a chance to miss.

So, I returned to my desk the other day and found an over-flowing inbox, many missed calls, voicemail messages, twitter messages, an RSS reader full to the brim. I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all.

I’m a pretty organised person, I use Remember The Milk for my tasks, I’m good at responding to emails and phone calls and I’m generally good at not forgetting stuff. But how do journalists deal with the information overload? How can we sift through everything when we come back? Especially when your role is as someone in the community that people want to speak to.

This post from Chris Brogan, ‘Your Blog Is Not Your Job‘ made me think, with the advent of social media and easy communication tools – it seems to be becoming even harder for a journalist to take a break.

What tips have you got for coming back off holiday and dealing with the deluge? How do you sift through everything and decide what to do first?

Image credit to dylanroscover

Creating content is one of the toughest bits about running a blog. Waking up, hitting the start button and then realising you’ve got nothing to write about. Here’s a few ways to ensure you’ve always got content flowing through your blog and keeping your finger on the pulse of your local community.

Use RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a great way to get feeds from websites that offer them and this will keep you up to date with websites – without having to keep visiting them! Win. You can use sites like Bloglines or Google Reader

Use email alerts

Don’t rely on RSS. A lot of websites do email newsletters or allow you to subscribe to email updates. You’ve got an email account, so get email alerts dropping into it regularly. They’ll often give you a lead.

Your local paper

They still exist and they generally aren’t going away. Subscribe to the RSS feed of your local newspaper(s) and take a read of this every morning. This will give you a clue as to what is on the agenda at the moment. You will also find they often just do snippets on community stories that you could make much bigger. Take one of their stories and see if it could go further, is there a new angle? Could you do an in-depth interview with someone featured? Whatever you do, don’t just copy and paste what the local paper writes as you’ll end up in hot water and you’re not adding value to your blog.

Your local council

They are always doing stuff. Events, taxes, councillors, elections, new projects. Local authorities are busy places and there are lots of people to speak to. Subscribe to the RSS feed if its authored, or email the press office and get on their distribution list for press releases.

Other local blogs

There will be other local bloggers. Someone will be extolling the virtues of your local river, or something like that. Find them and connect with them. Subscribe to their blogs RSS feed. Their two line post might lead to a series of posts for you about a subject, or they might even guest post on your blog. There’s a few ways to find them:

Google Blog Search, put your location in and away you go

Go to blogger.com, find a blogger from your area. Got to their profile and click on the location, it’ll show you all other bloggers in your area.

Once you start finding them. Create a page on your blog as a local blog directory, it’ll be popular.

Flickr

Flickr is a photo sharing website. But it also has groups – put your location into the find a group box and you’ll be amazed at how many people are taking photos of your area. Connect with these people, feature their photos with your posts (always remember to give credit to them for the photos) and you’ll find little snippets and stories.

Youtube

People seem to like making videos. There will be some for where you live. Go to Youtube and put your location into their search box. You’ll be amazed at what you find. Feature the videos on your blog, connect with the users and you’ll get even more. You can even get an RSS feed so you don’t have to keep checking for new videos.

Facebook

It’s the biggest social network – Facebook. There will be lots of people in your area on it. There will be groups about your area. Join them and keep in the loop about what local people are saying. Local campaigns will often have Facebook groups and it’s a great way to connect with people involved in local issues.

Twitter

It’s growing quickly, and don’t forget it’s got a handy little ‘Location’ bit on people’s profiles. Download Twitter Local – and put your location in. Then follow those people, some might follow you back, some might not, but you can see the conversations going on in your area. You can also go to http://search.twitter.com put your location in and get real-time results for what people are saying about your location. You’ll find snippets, follow them up, and you might just be able to create some content.

Theyworkforyou.com

Every area has an MP. Go to TheyWorkForYou and put your postcode in, find out who the MP is and then get an RSS feed or email alert everytime they do something. You’ll be amazed what your MP talks about and either how much or how little they talk. You can also get loads of great information about how they’ve voted on big issues.

Openlylocal.com

A new website – OpenlyLocal – it doesn’t have every local authority but it does have a lot, and it gives you lists of councillors, committee dates, new documents etc. Well worth checking out if you’re short of a meeting to cover and get a story.

Whatdotheyknow.com

A brilliant site. Freedom of Information requests can often lead to some juicy requests. It’s worth registering with WhatDoTheyKnow yourself so you can make FOI requests, but you can find all your local authorities and subscribe to RSS/email updates for when items happen relating to them. You can also get an RSS feed for your whole area. I’d recommend signing up to:

- Local council, local police, local primary care trust, local schools, local colleges, local universities, local county council, local fire service

Fixmystreet.com

Get reports on when stuff is wrong in your local area via FixMyStreet and someone needs to fix it. Get an RSS/email alert for a specific location. Follow it up and you’ll have a wealth of short stories that really are about your local community, everything from pot holes to dog dirt.

Help Me Investigate

A new service, launched in Beta – Help Me Investigate. It’s collaborative reporting, you ask a question and people will help you find the answer. You can also join in national questions and then break that down to your local area.

Getting out there

Nothing is a substitute for getting out there. Go to meetings, go to events, meet people, go to the pub and you’ll see posters, hear conversations and find out about things that are happening in your community. Just make sure you’ve got all the online stuff there so on a slow day, you’ll find there’s always plenty to write about in your local area.

If you find any other good websites for sourcing content, or think we’ve missed any then please let me know and I’ll add them. There will always be new website or tips and tricks for finding content, so this list is by now means exhaustive but get setup with these and you’ll never be short of new posts.

Image credit to miss_blackbutterfly

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?

He gave an insight into how the BBC is beginning to use CRM and how it is changing the way the organisation works in the digital age.

Kelleher started by saying that using CRM in a non-commercial organisation is more difficult than for commercial ones, as CRM systems are traditionally based around converting leads into sales and building a relationship with the customer.

The BBC in the analogue age had a policy of not using direct marketing, after all they didn’t need to as there were only up to five channels and limited radio stations, 30 odd million used to watch the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.

However, recognising that the corporation has moved into the digital age they set up about working out how CRM could be used to target and deliver to an audience that was fragmenting, changing its behaviours, becoming less loyal and changing their methods of consumption.

He then showed a rather wacky diagram with all the ‘social media’ and other tools that could be put into the direct marketing mix and asked ‘how much of this stuff is going to add value?’. That is the question that all organisations need to be asking themselves.

To respond to the changes in audience then the BBC is adopting some principles for how to engage with the audience:

- Personalise. Make content relevant to the person.
- Customer insight. Use data to understand what the audience likes
- Self-help. Provide resources for the audience to get help there and then, not wait to speak to a person
- Accountability. New media tools can be used to show transparency and explain why decisions are made
- Online channels. Explore new ways of delivering content to the audience.
- Brand experience. Ensuring that through a distributed strategy the brand is not diluted and the BBC is still respected as an institution
- Data drive decision making. Data will be available at all levels of the organisation to inform decision makers, rather than relying on assumptions about the audience.

Kelleher then made an interesting point about CRM. The systems will produce endless amounts of data and reports but it’s knowing how to interpret these reports – you can produce reports until you’re blue in the face but if your non-data geek decision makers can’t understand them or are overwhelmed then this defeats the whole purpose of having the system.

In the new digital world it’s all about relevancy. The content needs to be tailored to fit the audience member, not the audience, the audience member. Mr Smith likes very different things to Mrs Jones, even though they might be the same age, live next door to each other and work in the same industry. The digital world should offer personalised interactions wherever possible for the audience and give users the chance to set preferences, more of what they want more of the time.

We were shown an example of an SMS pilot that the BBC had run using Radio 1. They had been unsure of how to use SMS as a marketing tool and they decided to pilot it with the Scott Mills show on Radio 1. This was because a lot of the listenership are under-25 and SMS is embedded in their lifestyle. They tried various different styles and tones for the texts and found that the more informal texts that matched the celebrity (Scott Mills) were most popular and prompted the best response rate.

However, it’s easy to get carried away with SMS marketing and bombard your audience – instead organisations should focus on adding value for the audience wherever possible.

Kelleher then briefly touched on the iPlayer – a huge success for the corporation – and how direct marketing was being used there. There was a subtle recruitment button in the bottom corner of the iPlayer frontpage (can’t say I’d ever noticed) that pushed users to a simple sign-up form. From this customised updates were produced to inform them of new content that they would be interested in.

The BBC is in the process of refining it’s data collection touchpoints as they have hundreds, if not thousands, of them. They send out 110 different email newsletters and 30 million are sent every month. The most popular is the BBC Food email newsletter.

Kelleher briefly touched on a new project that the BBC is running around its Darwin campaign. This is TV, radio, online and offline events all related to the theme of Charles Darwin. The website features a very simple ‘Sign up’ plug and all the user has to do is enter their email address – nothing else. This is then cross-referenced with the main CRM database and added to a list of ‘They like Darwin’. A personalised email with call to actions are then sent out related to Darwin content on different media. The open rate for the emails is a phenomenal 80% and the click through rate was 20-25%. Not bad for a campaign I’d never heard of.

Ultimately thought content is king, and I agree completely with Kelleher on this. He used the analogy of a first date. You meet a girl and you find out she likes guinea pigs, France and red wine. After two years worth of dates you’re still discussing guinea pigs, France and red wine. You never learn more. You are eventually going to get bored of discussing the same things and go off and find something new. This works with direct marketing and CRM, you need to be constantly offering up something new, something different and something that makes people say ‘Yes! I’d like to know more about that!’. You can’t afford to be static, because it’s easier now than ever before for someone to disappear off and find new and fresh content with the touch of a button.

Finally, Kelleher finished with the new rules for CRM and direct marketing in the digital age:

1. Research the audience’s propensity. Ensure you’re using the right approach and technology for the audience you’re targeting
2. Go where the audience are. If the audience all use Facebook, you need to use Facebook to get to them.
3. Make the user’s recruitment journey easy. Simple sign up forms.
4. Make interaction relevant. Don’t ask for data about whether they have a pet, and then never use it. The user will be expecting something related to guinea pigs they’ve put in that they have guinea pigs.
5. Make the interaction timely. If an event has just happened, hit the user with some content about what happened. If an event is upcoming, allow enough time for them to register and attend.
6. Provide value. This is key, you need to make your content stand out from everyone else.
7. Be clear about what you want the audience to do. Is it a call to action? Are you asking them for money? Do you want them to watch a video?

Overall it was a great keynote from Kelleher and gave a real insight into what the BBC are up to and his new rules for CRM and direct marketing in the digital age will no doubt be banded around the industry for a few months to come until someone events the newer new rules.

What do you think, are the BBC using CRM well? Could they be using it better? What do you think of the new rules for CRM and direct marketing in the digital age?

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!