1.  Use HelpAttack! and give each time a Tumblr gets updated.  Of course we’d mention this first!

It’s easy to give a small amount each time a Tumblr user posts something (we use RSS for the magic).  There are a few different ways to use this:

• Are your supporters on Tumblr?  Ask them to encourages others to give to your cause each time they post.
• Are you on Tumblr?  Ask your supporters to give each time you post things relevant to the cause, like the Robin Hood.
• Are your volunteers on Tumblr?  Whether they are in classrooms or disaster zones, if they have time to share images of their work, your community can use those images to support their work.

2.  Drive Traffic… To Your Donation Form!

Add an attractive, relevant image to a page that also includes your online donation form.  Make sure that page grabs a user clicking through from Tumblr and makes a case for donation.  Picture of a puppy?  Help us find homes for puppies like this one.  Picture of a snappy suit or skirt?  Help us provide professional clothes for homeless people searching for jobs.

3.  Embed a Message in an Image

From icanhascheezburger to We Are the 99%, if you want a contextual message to stay with a shared image, you should put it inside the image itself.  And sometimes, that makes it more powerful than the image alone.  Are you lucky enough to have Ryan Gosling as a celebrity ambassador?  What if he did a spin on “Hey Girl” including a short URL to a donation form?  This doesn’t have to be about donations – you could also tastefully include your logo in the bottom right, or an awareness-driving banner.

4.  Network within a Tag

Tags (like #hashtags on Twitter) let people find posts about certain topics more easily.  What popular tags make sense for your organization?  Search around – what kind of content is being shared?  What do you have to add?

5.  The title says 5, but we’ll leave this one to be filled in by you.  What’s your idea?

If you haven’t already, add your cause to HelpAttack!, decide if Tumblr is the right community for you, and let’s try out these ideas!

Amazon’s tool allows you to have legions of people execute simple, repetitive tasks that computers can’t (yet) do well.  People classify images, translate snippets of text, answer surveys, find bugs.  You structure your task as a simple set of instructions, and a simple web form for the results, and then you decide on an appropriate fee to pay the “Turker” for his or her services.

You could clean up address information, do prospect research, look for partner organizations, search for grants, test campaign language, test campaign images, and all sorts of other stuff, with an appropriately designed Mechanical Turk task.  One drawback is that you can’t target specific demographics, so you won’t know how closely respondents correspond to your community of supporters.

At HelpAttack!, we used Mechanical Turk a few times last year to gather data related to the social media communities of certain causes.  We had data from the IRS with name and revenue information, but we didn’t know which causes were active online, and how big their communities were.  Automating and parsing search results, or crawling the web, yielded poor results and would have taken a lot of effort.  Our instructions to Turkers basically said:  ”Google this nonprofit name, identify their main website, and see if a social media profiles is linked from the website.  Write down the URL and the total number of Likes or followers and enter them in the form.”

More recently, we used it for user testing.  User testing for internet startups is like flossing.  You know you should do it, your dentist says you don’t do it enough, and it’s easy to rationalize reasons not to do it right now.  We asked Turkers to visit a public pledge (“join me”) page on HelpAttack!, and we asked them how they thought our service works, why they would use it, and also why they would decide not to use it.  Getting 30 seconds worth of feedback from 20 people cost $5.  If you want to try this, check out Feedback Army, which makes the process easier.  Here are the results:

“How does it work?”

1. You sign up for facebook or twitter, you give money to support disaster victims
2. I believe that by using Facebook and Twitter and making a donation your friends will see it and it will encourage them to as well. Its the use of the social media to make a difference I believe
3. This service would work to support causes and the American Red Cross
4. You support ARC via Facebook and Twitter.
5. We give our donation to the sites that except it for the Red Cross.
6. You give authorization to the app to tweet or post to facebook on your behalf
7. Contribute with each Facebook or Twitter update.
8. You pledge money based on the number of facebook updates on the red cross page.
9. YOu can pledge a specific amount to charity for every tweet or facebook update you enter.
10. Not sure
11. You tweet or use a facebook post to say you donated.
12. Each time a person updates their twitter, a set amount of money is added to the account that will be charged to that person later, as a donation.
13. I’m assuming it uses social networks to drum up money for charity.
14. That Twitter or FB account is linked to a donation site associated with the Red Cross
15. People pledge to give a few cents each time they make a tweet or facebook update and the money is donated to the American Red Cross.
16. Frinds donate money
17. No not really, but it might.
18. It asks for an amount you’d like to donate and keeps track of every tweet or update so you can donate that amount per tweet/update.
19. You pledge money via your facebook statuses/tweets.
20. You donate money

Wow!  The good news is that most people got close – we’ve removed a bunch of words from that page over time, so it’s important to make sure it still makes sense.  (16) thinks that their friends donate the money, which may be true but not the primary focus. (17) either didn’t get it or didn’t finish the sentence.  (10) wasn’t sure.

Why would you decide to use it? (What do you like on the page?)

1. “Bacause it’s easy; I have both Facebook & Twitter accounts”
2. To help those less fortunate
3. I would use it if someone I know was homeless or in need of blood or had another anomaly.
4. Looks friendly.
5. It would be faster for the contribution to get there.
6. I think the message is important.
7. See a person I might know at the top, and other people top left.
8. It seems easy to use.
9. It is easy, and the money goes to a god cause.
10. To help people
11. To tell people they should donate.
12. The page shows clearly that it is related to Red Cross, a well-known organization. It also shows other people who are using the service. It also shows that you can set a limit.
13. I like charitable donations in general, so I would probably give it a try.
14. Seems like a legitimate site.
15. People use and enjoy twitter and facebook, so it’s a fun way to help and be reminded.
16. Contribute to a good cause
17. I like it because you can see how much was raised.
18. kinda of a cool way to raise awareness and donate at the same time.
19. I think it makes it easy and it looks like a really interesting unique idea to raise money for relief funds.
20. I like the social features and the orange buttons

This isn’t the best question, because it assumes the person will like at least one thing about the page, and the fact we are paying them (even a little bit) might bias the answers. Still, the reasons listed correlate fairly well with the answers we imagined people would give.

Why would you decide not to use it? (What don’t you like?)

1. I’ll share my basic personal info as soon as I donate using my accounts
2. Dont want to seem as if Im doing it just to make myself seem better than those who dont give to the cause
3. I would not use it if the money did not go to the right people.
4. None.
5. If I did not it would be the lack of funs.
6. If the tweets were more than i signed up for, as in spam my followers, I would stop using it.
7. Don’t know how much, or what it might cost me to do it.
8. I prefer to make fixed donation to charity and get the match from my employer.
9. It could be really easy to donate more than you want if you don’t pay attention.
10. The page was too cluttered, too confusing.
11. If it automatically shows how much you donated, I wouldn’t want to use it because I don’t like showing off.
12. It lacks information about how will the payments be made (logistics).
13. I don’t know if it’s trustworthy in 30 seconds. I’d have to do some research. It looks a little clustered and confusing.
14. It don’t use twitter or FB
15. Me, I don’t send out tweets or use my facebook status to communicate, so it wouldn’t work. But I did, I guess the problem is it relies on the honor system. Or does it?
16. Need more information or direct donation
17. I dislike it because it tells you how much people pledged.
18. having to create yet ANOTHER account for something. it’s not a big deal though.
19. I’d definitely use it. I think it’s a brilliant idea. =)
20. I don’t have spare money

(4), (5), (20), and (19) aren’t so valuable: Either they didn’t find a problem, or we can’t address it.  The rest are extremely fascinating, particularly those concerning how the supporter will be seen by other people, and Turkers reacting to seeing specific amounts given by others.  (12) is something we hear a lot, and probably the first real change we can make to the page based on this feedback.

I’m going to approach this from “What do I want to do?” rather than “What can I do?”

HelpAttack! represents a new kind of online fundraising for causes, and perhaps our biggest challenge is in getting people to think about that in a new way.  Our biggest competitor is what organizations and partners are doing now, and have done for the past few years.

So, in order for HelpAttack! to succeed as a business, we also have to succeed in identifying the organizations who would do better if they tried things the new way.  We also have to succeed in then explaining how their content, supporters, microdonations, slacktivism, and advocacy all work together online and on social networks.  We have to succeed in helping them run good campaigns, and we have to convince them to stick with it in order to build on what they’ve invested in.

The best way I can help HelpAttack! accomplish those goals is by learning a lot more about a few things: marketing, PR, training, education, and advertising – as a web developer, not my first languages.  But, I’m looking at the coming year as a very exciting, and fun, challenge.

In short, I want to change the world in 2012 by working to establish a new model of online fundraising.  It’s a model that will take over the world and satisfy every donor, but I’m confident it will help the right organizations, and the right donors and supporters, do great things.

But now a harder question…who do I tag??

To start, team HelpAttack!

• Holly Caruso
• David Neff
• Vanessa Swesnik
• Sarah Vela

Next, some of the great folks I’ve met up in Boston

• Marc Baizman
• Debra Askanase

And someone I’ve never met

• Michelle Murrain

Here’s how it works:

• Make at least a $5 donation between February 8th and February 18th.
• One donor to the celebrity “team” who raises the most money will receive a poster signed by the 88 celebs.

I think whomever put this together did a couple things right:

• The barrier to entry is low, only $5.
• They somehow found a LOT of celebrities to participate.  The combined audience must be huge.
• The celebrities can participate with friendly competition as they Tweet.
• You can only get the poster if your team wins.  Therefore, each donor has an incentive to spread the word, give more, and make sure their team wins.  This will probably lead to more giving overall.

Of course, a few things can be improved.

• The nonprofit’s website isn’t the most professional.
• In Chrome the homepage turns blue (??) and it plays music  :-(
• The celebrities could be providing matching donations.
• There’s no indication of how much money has been raised by each team!  Maybe that’s by design..

What do you think?  How does it stack up against other celebrity fundraising on social media?

1. Drive traffic… to your donation form.

Add an attractive, relevant image to a page that also includes your online donation form.  Make sure that page grabs a user clicking through from Pinterest and makes a case for donation.  Picture of a puppy?  Help us find homes for puppies like this one.  Picture of a snappy suit or skirt?  Help us provide professional clothes for homeless people searching for jobs.

How it works: Pinterest, in some studies, drives more traffic than YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and MySpace.  The service is extremely clicky!  Pinterest links the pinned image to the page where it was pinned from.  You can ask your supporters to do the pinning as well, helping the image spread farther and faster.

2. Embed a message in the image

From icanhascheezburger to We Are the 99%, if you want a contextual message to stay with a shared image, you should put it inside the image itself.  And sometimes, that makes it more powerful than the image alone.  Are you lucky enough to have Ryan Gosling as a celebrity ambassador?  What if he did a spin on “Hey Girl” including a short URL to a donation form?  This doesn’t have to be about donations – you could also tastefully include your logo in the bottom right, or an awareness-driving banner.

3.  Give with each pin

As mentioned in Joe Waters’ post, with HelpAttack! it’s easy to give a small amount each time a Pinterest user adds a pin (we use RSS for the magic).  There are a few different ways to use this:

• Are your supporters on Pinterest?  Ask them to encourages others to give to your cause each time they pin.
• Are you on Pinterest?  Ask your supporters to give each time you pin things relevant to the cause, like the National Wildlife Federation.
• Are your volunteers on Pinterest?  Whether they are in classrooms or disaster zones, if they have time to share images of their work, your community can use those images to support their work.

If you haven’t already, add your cause to HelpAttack!, decide if Pinterest is the right community for you, and let’s try out these ideas!

This is my new favorite screenshot.  Why?  It does a great job capturing the current state of social media, and social media fundraising, for most causes, and there are some great best practices on display:

• As a smaller organization, @FreeArtsNYC found a great way to amplify their reach on Twitter and Facebook, by offering a donated set of Jet Blue tickets to someone who made a pledge on HelpAttack! before January 31st.  It worked!  Their conversion rates (per click) were fabulous, and got lots of retweets.
• @brianachene provides a reminder that while most donors aren’t social media wizards quite yet, the best way to learn the ropes is to ask questions.
• @FreeArtsNYC thanked their supporters publicly, which is great.