Thomas the Thinktank

I recently helped create a community of practice at NTEN’s community site, focused on deeper discussions around social media fundraising. Today a few of us got on a webinar to try out the concept and dig in to a few nagging questions.

What do we call social media fundraising?

• Social network fundraising
• Social fundraising
• Facebook fundraising….

There seemed to be consensus that whatever the term, the definition had to be broad. Successful fundraising online isn’t just an app or a donation link, but an extension of the same culture of relationship building that is the bedrock of traditional fundraising methods.  Social media fundraising includes friends asking friends programs, apps, donation tabs, using social media to support other fundraising campaigns, lead generation, supporter cultivation and stewardship, and using social media friendly materials (images and videos) in non-social media contexts.  That’s a lot of stuff!

We also thought that social network fundraising was potentially confusing, as “social networks” refer to offline networks too: Gala events and mixers.

The cause marketing universe defines most of their programs as “action triggered donations” – when a company donates because an individual decides to Like, share, use a #hashtag, or participate in a context defined by the campaign. Almost always the company is providing the funds and the community “activates” the giving, but isn’t asked to donate themselves.

What about email?

We spent some time talking about the relationship between email and social media fundraising.  Some bloggers are moving “back” into email lists, and others are focusing significantly on capturing emails from their readers.  Email is a social network, after all, but one with different functionality and culture than most online social networks we’re familiar with.

It was noted that the experience of using email is becoming more social, with instant messaging and sharing built into the email program (like Gmail).  Also, email is useful as a way to follow up when the supporter isn’t able or willing to donate via smartphone, tablet, or text, but is willing to receive a followup donation link.

There was some concern about lumping email fundraising and social media fundraising together, as success in one area does not necessarily imply success in another.  Many organizations don’t recognize that the proportional size of communities (100 Likes on Facebook, 1,000 people on your email list, and 10,000 direct mail addresses) can have a huge effect on overall fundraising.

Culture and Geography

If you’re reading this in a big city, remember that large areas of the country are just now receiving dialup or broadband internet access. It’s not ubiquitous in rural Maine, Tennessee, and so on.  Some regional communities won’t use Twitter but will spend time commenting on news articles on their local paper’s website.

How do we measure social media fundraising?

At HelpAttack!, we pay lots of attention to conversion rates, dollars raised per unique visitor, and dollars raised per hour of staff time spent on a campaign.  Forward thinking nonprofits are setting up standards for tracking activity from different departments and different channels, so apples can indeed be compared with oranges.  For example, organization-wide guidelines for campaign, referral, and keyword codes encoded in URLs.  It’s important for organizations to track where a supporter originated (how they found you), and what ask tipped them over the edge to take action.  Donors don’t care which department a particular message came from, so your overall approach should be consistent & coordinated.

Pop quiz hot shot: What percentage of website traffic do you get from mobile devices, tablets, and smart phones?

iPhone > Tricorder

A smart answer involves looking in Google Analytics or another tool and looking at the overall percentages (ours is 7.4%). An even smarter answer is “it depends!”  You probably only have a handful of pages that people visit on their phones: Your homepage, your Twitter and Facebook pages, and perhaps a couple event specific pages or signup pages.  This post is all about how to get the most bang for your buck when investing in the mobile web.

Terminology

There’s currently a line between the mobile web (meaning web browser), and native apps, meaning iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry apps. That line is getting blurry, but for now, for most organizations, simple mobile friendly web pages are the best option. Native apps can be more expensive to produce, take longer to deploy, and are difficult to change once they are deployed to app stores and devices.

Mobile detection refers to the practice of checking to see what device a person is using, and delivering different styling or content based on that. It’s not perfect, because new devices are coming out all the time, and some devices can’t be distinguished in this way.  HTML5, in this case, refers to using certain HTML tags and best practices so that mobile browsers already know how to render your page in a reasonable way.

Using best practices on the web, and making sure your webpages are clean and standards compliant is very beneficial in many ways, including Section 508 compliance, browser rendering, mobile friendliness, and load times. Do that first and you’ll probably make all your users a little happier. After that, it might be wise to invest some time on the mobile experience.

The Easy Way: Let Others Do The Work

If you use an open source CMS (Content Management System), you are already familiar with the benefits of a worldwide community of developers and users. These plugins will try to detect mobile devices, and reformat your page into a single column.  To accomplish that they might hide some columns, change horizontal lists to vertical lists, stuff like that.  In some cases, you can just install the right mobile plugin, enable it, and you’re done. I’ve used the Joomla extension before – it does a pretty good job.

• WordPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/
• Drupal http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools
• Joomla http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/mobile
• Plone http://plone.org/products/web-and-mobile

If your CMS doesn’t have a handy plugin, or if you built your own website, and don’t have much time or money to spend on a mobile layout, try this approach instead:

No Plugin? A DIY Example

On HelpAttack!, our most important pages for mobile are the signup pages. We had to make sure people at an event, or surfing through Twitter on a bus, could still join in. We made some sacrifices:

• Not collecting credit card information up front (too many things to type with your thumbs).
• No non-essential menus or modules.

// Used to hide modules, menus, and images not needed on mobile
.hidemobile { display: none }
// Change the main column from a fixed width to flexible
.container {width:90%; margin: auto; }
// ...and a handful of other changes

Then, we used mobile detection to add that CSS file when we detect a mobile device. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well.

Form Inputs

Once you have your simpler layout and content, and know what pages people are visiting the most from their phones, you might want to edit form inputs to help people out with phone or touch keyboards.  For example, phones can bring up a special numeric keyboard, or a keyboard with “.com” as a button, if you use the “number” or “url” input types, instead of regular ol’ text.

Capture Now, Contact Later

If a supporter reaches a donation form with 20 fields on it while sitting in traffic or while checking their phone during lunch, you are probably not getting their money just then. If they reach a form with two or three fields, including first name, last name, and email – you just might get their contact information.

Multitask by Steve Laggat

This same rule of thumb applies in many situations.  Sometimes it’s better to get just enough information from someone using their phone, and follow up later to complete the action. Email list signups, petitions, Likes, retweets, and shares are easy things to do with a phone – present those simple options.

Strategy First!

It’s better to think about what your mobile supporters want to do with you, rather than what you want them to do. What goals of your organization align well with people with a few only minutes to spare and only their thumbs to do it? Once they engage on their phones, what next steps make sense for them? How do you measure your results?

Before you invest heavily in mobile websites or apps, be sure you have solid answers to the above questions. Keep experimenting, measuring, and improving. If you’re already headed down that road, let us know how you approached the mobile web by leaving a comment. Thanks!

Birds of a Feather

The 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference happened just over a month ago. I’ve been watching the stream on Twitter, and reading many thoughtful blog posts. Attendees and the community at large is very fabulous when it comes to carrying the energy forward and putting new knowledge to work.

Sure, there are plenty of consultants and vendors like us out there, ready to help. But a far better place to start, for a nonprofit professional looking for ideas, camaraderie, and inspiration, is with people who are trying to do almost the same things at a very similar organization. A local animal shelter can’t learn much practicable knowledge from a Livestrong case study, and the American Cancer Society’s communications policy is probably nothing like PETA’s.

So, this is our contribution. We built a handy tool, using FirstGiving’s Charity API, which makes it a snap to find organizations that are just like you.  And by “Just like you” we mean share the same NTEE code and the same state.  If it turns out to be popular, we can extend it to also look at organization size & other factors.

Go ahead and try it out!  Here’s an example.  I bet there are names on your list you recognize, and perhaps a few you don’t!

"So the chart is accurate?" "Yes, precisely."

In late March I blogged about the 2011 Nonprofit Social Network Report. I used some pretty strong language (for me) to point out some problems I saw in how the report was being discussed, and how they arose from choices made when compiling the report.  At the Nonprofit Technology Conference, I was able to talk with a few stakeholders in the report, and through them, get introduced to others. At the core, it IS good that there’s a report covering website and social network use by nonprofits. I understand that doing random sampling among 1.6M nonprofits is hard and expensive. Still, we just want to make it better.

The new 2012 report came out during the conference with roughly the same approach, showing broad growth in use of social networks. Again, I think the figures are skewed upward because the report was compiled from self-selecting responses from organizations who self-selected to be on the email lists used.  For marketing purposes, I suppose it’s in HelpAttack!’s interest that most organizations think they are not using social media enough compared to their peers.  Well, we wish a Facebook Like was worth $214 to causes on average in the 12 months after acquisition…but it isn’t.

So after another few weeks of stewing about it, a couple ideas bubbled to the surface:

• Actually, for nonprofits, it doesn’t matter! Basing your nonprofit’s decision to invest more or less in social media based on broad reports like this is kind of like deciding whether or not to bring an umbrella based on average annual rainfall. Look at your cohort of similar organizations, look at your strategy, and make your decision based on that.  It’s more the funders, foundations, vendors, and app developers (like us) who should deeply study the broad numbers.
• If a nonprofit should focus on learning from (and emulating) very similar organizations, is there something we can do to instead report on the average Facebook community size for animal shelters in Missouri, or land conservancy organizations, or food banks?  The source data for that may not exist yet, but it will.
• There’s always talk about innovation and openness at NTC, and this is a perfect opportunity to put that to work. We’ve reached out to lots of other organizations and thinkers in the industry, seeing who else might be studying these issues, and to try to see what HelpAttack! can do to help.  If you’ve gotten this far in the post  and you have an idea, an opinion, or a need, please let us know.

I know we’re late to the party on blogging about this, but I did a doubletake when I saw Blackbaud’s most recent giving report. Only 13% growth in online donations? And they had to remove disaster relief organizations to get that number to be positive…in a year when a gigantic tsunami struck Japan? These reports have not been consistently tracking social media driven donations, but we look at overall online donations as a linked indicator. So what gives?

How international affairs organizations are counted makes a huge difference in the numbers, and to get a sense of how online giving is changing overall, I believe it is best to exclude this huge swing as Blackbaud has done in the 2011 report. We’ll leave the puzzle of why Japan and Haiti elicited such different responses for another day.

So, how do we compare the two? Note: The percentages by sector don’t add up to 100% (other sectors aren’t tracked, and account for minority percentages)

What I want to do is determine the percentage growth for the tracked sectors, excluding international affairs, from both years, but this number is available only in the 2011 report. An SAT word problem ensues! My method, excluding international affairs:

• For each sector, multiply the percentage growth in 2010 by the percentage that sector represents.
• Add those products together.
• Divide the total by the total of sector percentages represented.

If I did this wrong, please call me out on it. It’s encoded in a formula in this spreadsheet.  I’m glad I did the math, because my assumption was that the overall growth rate of online giving had radically slowed. Not true: The growth rate in 2010, excluding international affairs, was around 13% (@SMacLaughlin, with certainly more authority on the matter, says 15%), and the same number in 2011 was also around 13%. In 2007, according to Blackbaud data, overall giving grew 50%, then 40% in 2008, then 46% in 2009. I don’t have the source material to exclude international affairs from those figures, however.

So perhaps the big drop was actually 2009 to 2010. Let’s take a step back. Perhaps this whole discussion is flawed. Obsessing about online giving growth rates makes an implicit assumption that the overall magnitude of annual giving – $300B – is fixed, as it has been for the past few years.

We should be seeking to grow giving overall, and focusing on that percentage.

While the report’s statement “As with all large numbers, the bigger the overall percentage [of online giving within giving overall] gets, the slower it tends to grow” is usually true, overall giving is influenced not by a mathematical rule of thumb, but by:

• How many organizations exist, their capacity, and their participation and effectiveness in various kinds of fundraising.
• Changing donor demographics – yet, the US economy and population are growing much faster than giving is.
• Changing nonprofit demographics – some go out of business, new orgs are created to replace them with different ideas of how to fund themselves, perhaps by not needing donors at all.

The same growth rate from 2010 to 2011 (if accurate) can be viewed as a victory in that the growth rate did not decline as rapidly as from 2009 to 2010. The online universe has changed very rapidly over the last decade, but it is possible that most of the organizations who have the capacity to raise funds online have already started doing so.

So how do we continue to grow online giving as a percentage of overall giving AND grow overall giving too?

• Focus on the “long tail” – many nonprofits we talk with are still struggling with the basics of being online, let alone fundraising there. The temptation when the largest fundraising industry company makes plans to buy the next largest is for the mid-tier vendors to go after bigger nonprofit clients. Very few fundraising companies focus on nonprofits with 1-5 staff (please prove me wrong in the comments – let’s talk).
• Time. The cause of low experimentation for most causes is usually not lack of will or lack of skill or budget, but lack of time. We should focus on decreasing the amount of time it takes to use all kinds of fundraising tools. We think a lot about this – staff time per dollar with respect to community size – at HelpAttack!
• Stop focusing on big campaigns with lots of zeros, and make sure tools work well in efficiently converting unique online visitors or offline touches to donors. Very few organizations (Livestrong, American Red Cross, Charity Water) will be able to generate those impressive numbers with a mass audience.  We like it when reports and case studies focus on percentages and conversion rates instead.

What are your ideas to get US giving to $400B?