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In 2011, Washington, DC, became one of the first major metropolitan regions to host a multimillion-dollar local giving day: Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington. Nearly 18,000 people participated in the 24-hour, online fundraising event, raising more than $2 million to benefit 1,200 local nonprofits. Seen as a success for the participating nonprofits, the organizers wanted to know more about what worked and whether giving days as a form of regional nonprofit development could be a new trend for the sector. In the report “How Giving Contests Can Strengthen Nonprofits and Communities,” sponsored by the Case Foundation and released today, Geoff Livingston analyzes the impact of Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington and the repercussions for other regions and nonprofit communities.

Training

Just as organizations (usually!) don’t embark on fundraising without a plan for using the funds, we can’t adopt a new fundraising approach without proper training. Organizations I’ve talked to that have participated in giving days in other cities have consistently raised the issue of training and education, saying that to do well during the one-day fundraiser was one thing, but they knew they didn’t have the internal know-how and skills to succeed with online fundraising year-round. I am very glad to see that the Greater Washington event incorporates training into the planning process to boost the capacity of all participating organizations. In the report, Geoff describes the training this way:

The training program treated the giving day as an exercise in best practices. Core elements included using the Razoo giving platform, content best practices, online storytelling, social media strategy, and donor cultivation. Live events included a training conference with nonprofit social media expert Beth Kanter as the keynote, and a series of seven simplified half-day training “boot camps” in Prince William County, Arlington County, Prince George’s County, and Montgomery County. The in-person events were complemented by a free, comprehensive online nonprofit toolkit. Components included video tutorials, suggested calendars of activity, sample materials, frequently asked questions, logos, and a Twibbon for Facebook and Twitter use.

From my experience participating in training events and courses as a speaker and trainer, I see much better results when coupling online and offline learning and resources. While you can learn a lot during a workshop, there is no replacement for really putting what you learn into practice; when you are back in the office trying something out, it is incredibly helpful to have online resources to support your work.

In the report, Geoff also shares these results:

The training program achieved its overarching goals. Eighty-eight percent of nonprofit survey respondents felt the training program helped, and 84 percent reported that the training increased their ability to interact and fundraise online. The training did reveal a social media and online fundraising knowledge division in the Washington nonprofit community, between those who are experienced and comfortable with related tools, and those still learning basic social media outreach.

I am curious to hear what topics or questions organizations will bring up when they participate for a second year, and whether they will inform online fundraising and engagement training provided by other groups.

Benefits

The benefits of something like Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington are really three-fold, according to the report. First, there’s the actual amount of donations—more than $2 million in just 24 hours is certainly no small feat! With 1,200 organizations participating, the report states: “Forty-one percent of nonprofit respondents said their best prior online fundraiser was $2,500 or greater, showing the event rivaled most nonprofits’ prior efforts.” Even though online fundraising is still a small portion of the overall dollars raised by most organizations, it is growing—check out the 2011 Online Giving Report from Blackbaud for data.

Second, the report states that participating organizations benefit from establishing relationships with new donors that they can maintain long-term. This touches back on the need for training—it is important to train participants on how to use online tools and platforms, as well as on understanding donor engagement.

And finally, the 24-hour fundraising drive supported the local nonprofit community as a whole by increasing awareness of all the programs and services contributing to the region. The long-term relationship building that comes from this big one-day event is valuable to both the organizations and donors. This is a chance to contribute to something big while exploring the organizations that are working locally to improve the region. Donors who are familiar with only a specific organization or two before the event have a chance to better understand the entire ecosystem of organizations, and even find additional programs or services to support in the future.

For me, the key to this report is that we can’t determine the success of a major fundraising initiative solely by the amount of funds it raises. We should also measure success according to the increased capacity in the organizations participating and a long-term benefit to the community as a whole.

—–

I’ve recently shared a couple interviews exploring two case studies of really successful online fundraising campaigns: SXSW4Japan Raises Over $120,000 and $100,000 in Three Days with #TeamAutism. Both of them involved celebrities. And I couldn’t help think to myself, “oh, so all we need to do to raise funds for a great cause is get a celebrity? That’s not realistic or sustainable!” But, I looked at both case studies again, more deeply, and realized that both of them weren’t really about the celebrity at all. Both campaigns created opportunity for people to participate and then share it with their networks and make personal recommendations. Both campaigns leveraged the community and competition aspects of social media. The celebrity involvement was part of the branding, not part of the winning solution.

Getting Over Celebrities

Then, why do we keep thinking celebrities are so important to raising money? The data says we should move on. Two recent reports share data about the actual role celebrity connection plays in nonprofit fundraising and both say the same thing: forget celebrities.

The 2011 Millennial Donor report, the second in an annual series, focuses on engaging Millennials in fundraising. It’s an interesting and valuable report with a lot of great insights. When it comes to fundraising, though, one of the areas of most interest is motivation – this can help fundraisers and organizations align their message and delivery with the points of interest and the channels that are the most influential to the target audience. The Millennial Donor report uncovered that celebrity is the bottom of the charts:

When asked to describe what motivates them to give, 85% of Millennials pointed to a compelling mission or cause, and 56% cited a personal connection or trust in the leadership of the organization. A friend or peer endorsement compelled 52% to give, while a nudge from a family member prompted 42% to give. Slightly more than a third (34%) gave as a result of a workplace fundraising 52% drive. A compelling video won over 12% of donors, while fundraising contests only    42% inspired 5% to give. That high-profile celebrity 35% or influential leader endorsement? Apparently it’s not worth the effort from a strictly fundraising standpoint: Only 2% of Millennials said they were motivated to give by such endorsements.

Yep, only 2% said celebrities were motivating their actions! But, on the top of the chart: a compelling cause. In the newest eNonprofit Benchmarks report from NTEN and M+R Strategies, it’s easy to see what a compelling cause may be to Millennial donors: disaster.

Online fundraising revenue grew overall by 14% between 2009 and 2010. This rebound was led by an enormous 163% increase in the International sector due to emergencies like the earthquake in Haiti and flooding in Pakistan.

Beyond having just a compelling cause, Millennials are looking for trust – aren’t we all? According to the report, 57% of Millennials gave in response to a personal ask and 90% would stop giving if they did not trust the organization.

As Allyson Kapin wrote recently on the Care2 Frogloop blog, “Activists and donors rely more on their personal and social networks today, not celebrity endorsements.” In looking at TV ads, The 2010 Celebrity Advertisements: Exposing a Myth of Advertising Effectiveness,  report showed less than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative impact on consumers.

Celebrities are out; Trust is in.

All these numbers lead us to ask: “Just how do we earn Millennials trust?”

This is something to continue exploring in posts to follow, but here’s a start, thanks to the Millennial Donors report:

1. Friends or family endorsement– create campaigns, messages, and “asks” that your supporters can modify to make their own, and that are shareable across platforms

2. Report financial condition– transparency is key, your 990 and other paperwork is public data (it’s already posted on Guidestar so you might as well be open about it!)

3. Opportunities to meet leadership– being transparent doesn’t just mean with information and data, but also in being accessible, put your organizations leaders in a place where they connect with the community

Have you seen online donations increasing for your organization? How are you working to build trust with your community? I’d love to hear your experiences and suggestions!

Review the Table of Contents and read the report introduction now, or learn more in the following interview.

First, what does the “real-time Web” really mean?

It means different things to different people, but the most literal meaning is probably this: real-time systems push information from a publisher to a subscriber (be they a human reader or a machine consuming information) as soon as it’s available, without the subscriber having to ask if there’s anything new.

Think of how Facebook notifies you that you have new messages without having to refresh the page, or the way your Instant Messaging client shows you new messages as soon as they are sent. The underlying technologies used in those kinds of circumstances are now being integrated into all kinds of other websites because real-time delivery of information changes the user experience radically and offers all kinds of benefits. It’s smoother for users, users and systems get to take action immediately on new information and it’s much more efficient, meaning that your technology can do more with less computing expense.

When did RWW start focusing on the real-time Web?

Probably middle of 2008. Like people generally do, we thought about the impact that Twitter and Facebook were making on the web. When we looked deeper though, we quickly found out that there is far, far more going on in the real-time web than those two services.

For the report, you interviewed 50 Web experts – what were some of the surprising things you heard?

I was surprised to learn how broad this field is. We talked to people working with public records extraction in real time, with designers building lightweight, real-time presentation sharing tools, Google engineers have some incredible ideas about ways they hope that their PubSubHubbub real-time protocol will be used – stuff like real-world sensor networks and contact info syncing. When I started those interviews, I knew there were broad possibilities but I had no idea how broad.

How has the real-time Web already impacted nonprofit organizations or those focused on social impact work?

One of the organizations I did an interview with was the American Red Cross. As they say, “at the Red Cross, the real-time web saves lives.” Real-time information delivery has changed the way that organization works in radical ways. It’s amazing. Disaster response work that used to take days now takes minutes, using a combination of Sharepoint, mobile devices and airplane surveillance. The Red Cross also pays very close attention to the rest of the real-time web, though. I was fascinated to find out that the team at HQ is full of fans of the Breaking News Online iPhone app.

What impacts are right around the corner?

Organizations that choose to do so are already able to run circles around the web using these real-time technologies. I expect that some will do so and many will not. It will be like the difference between organizations that developed an effective web or email presence early vs. those that did not. If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate some elements of real-time information delivery into their work flow. Be that pushing real-time updates out to their websites and supporters, consuming updates on breaking news in their sector in real time, or collaborating remotely in real time. Using only the parts of the web that you must refresh for updates, when you remember to do so, be they email or web pages, will soon feel like putting your ear up to a tin can with a string connecting it to some other tin can far away. I don’t mean to say that everything will be real time and you must always live in that flow, but I do believe it’s fast becoming an essential form of engagement. Not just because everyone is doing it, either, but because it’s really very useful.

How can nonprofits or social impact groups take advantage of the real-time Web?

There are as many ways to take advantage of the real time web as there are to use the web in general. Here’s one of my favorite stories though. Some time back I was doing a workshop for nonprofit communications people and one of the attendees worked for a women’s advocacy organization. As a proof of concept, we took the RSS feed of the New York Times and filtered it for keywords related to her organization’s areas of interests, I think we used Yahoo Pipes to filter, it might have been FeedRinse.com, but that’s not hard to do in many different ways. Then we took the filtered RSS feed and we ran it through an RSS to SMS/IM alert service. I use Notify.me a lot but even faster than that now is an iPhone app called Nofitifcations. Or have your team’s geeks check out Superfeedr.com. So the idea was, this person could then watch the NYT feed automatically, get an SMS or IM alert whenever a relevant story was published and then she could call up her local newspaper or other press. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about this story breaking on a national level,” she could say, and or course they probably hadn’t because they don’t have robots watching for these things automatically, “but if you’d like to cover this topic on a local level, our Executive Director is an excellant source for information.” That journalist will love you for it. Do that enough times and your organization, no matter how small, will have a chance to grow its public profile substantially.

That’s just one idea. There are countless other ways that real-time information delivery can be leveraged by nonprofits. From live video to live updates to live collaboration, more and more experiences online are going on in real time.

How can we follow you and RWW as well as other leaders examining the real-time Web?

I’m at Marshallk.com, we’re at ReadWriteWeb.com, on Twitter I’m @marshallk and the whole ReadWriteWeb team is at http://twitter.com/rww/team

We’ve also assembled a list of real-time web industry thought leaders at http://twitter.com/rww/real-time-web

Review the Table of Contents and read the report introduction now, or buy the full report from ReadWriteWeb.

“Nonprofit marketers say their key messages are failing to connect with the people who need to hear them and that is a serious problem.  The way nonprofits talk about themselves to the public is a core competency critical to any organization’s success. The bad news is that most nonprofits admittedly are doing a very poor job, despite a great deal of effort. The good news is that fixing the problem is highly do-able and promises vastly greater success than they are experiencing now.”

The survey results included:

Most Nonprofit Messages Don’t Connect Strongly with Key Audiences:
Eighty-four percent of 915 nonprofit leaders who completed the survey last month said their messages connect with their target audiences only somewhat or not at all. Respondents represented organizations of all size, issue focus and geographical location.

Behind the Disconnect—86% of Nonprofits Characterize Their Messages as Difficult to Remember:
Most nonprofits report that their messaging suffers from lack of inspiration (73%) and poor targeting to audience wants and needs (70%), and is difficult to remember (86%). Few communicators laud their messaging for its strengths: Only 13% of organizations characterize messaging as cogent while 8% describe their messaging as potent.

Here are some comments from survey participants explaining why their messages fail to connect:

• “Our messages need to be more succinct to communicate how effective we really are.”
• “We don’t move our base to action.”
• “We have individual elements that are OK solo, but no unified path.”
• “Our messages aren’t hard-hitting or targeted enough. So they fall flat.”
• “We need to shape messages that are simple enough for staff to remember and feel comfortable in repeating it to others.”
• “Too much jargon. I can’t even understand what we’re saying.”

Inconsistency Reigns, Leaving Confusion and Annoyance in Its Path:
Less than 50% of nonprofits report consistent use of their positioning (organizational tagline, positioning statement and talking points). That means that even though most organizations have taken the effort to craft messages, those messages aren’t used consistently across channels (website, direct mail, email), audiences or programs.

More information and complete survey results, plus specific recommendations on how nonprofits can start to immediately improve key messaging, are available at:
http://nancyschwartz.com/articles/index.php/messaging-crisis-for-nonprofits/

This new white paper captures just a few of the stories and the qualities that make up the special place where we all come together. Whether it’s small communities coming together offline to train and share knowledge about using technology or it’s innovation projects competing in the same contest working together instead – we hope you’ll find this short paper compelling and share it with your networks. We hope you’ll add your story to the mix, too!

You can download the paper directly here.

As I announced recently, Advocacy Online and Fairsay have jointly produced a benchmark report to examine key e-campaigning performance measures. The benchmark data is derived from the activity of over 2 million supporters from 50 campaigning organisations in the UK, Canada, and several other countries.  In addition to the benchmark data, the project also includes an e-campaigning survey that has been carried by Jess Day, an independent e-campaigning consultant. (I also referenced the report in my latest presentation slides about social media use by individuals in nonprofit organizations.)

The report was launched this last week at an event in London (and via webcast).  I want to share some of the highlights from the launch presentations of Duane Raymond and Jess Day, but if you want to skip ahead to the download, you can scroll to the bottom!

Report Highlights

65% of actions reviewed in the report asked people to add their own message (whether this was a petition, or post, etc.) – this is great because letting your supporters personalize or otherwise get more involved in your actions will only help build a commitment to the outcome of your campaign or action as well as encourage your supporters to ask their friends or colleagues to participate as well.

Resources or capacity are still an issue – the big organizations do better with online actions.  This isn’t really a surprise as bigger organizations naturally have more people/staff and time, technical capacity and so on (many groups working on advocacy have only a couple people vs a large organization with hundreds).

Only 43% of actions linked to background information. People may worry that if someone clicks on an action button, say, on your homepage, and then you provide them links to more information about the topic of the action, that they will click away and never actually complete the action.  Nope. People may want more background information but that’s because they are interested!  Most all of the actions reviewed in the report that even those that did link to background information, those pages didn’t link back to the action! That’s why people aren’t completing the action!  Remember to link to actions from everywhere on your site that is related to the action!!!

58% of the actions scored full marks for visibility within their websites. That’s not a very high number for succeeding at visibility of actions on the one space online you have complete control: your own website.  There are lots of places where actions could be included to be more visible, like the above note of including them on background information (or blog posts!).

11% of campaigns had no target (meaning, “join the campaign”).  Be sure that if you are just trying to get supporters, or grow your list of interested people who could sign a petition or do other actions later on in your campaign or work, that you create an action that isn’t seen as empty or short term (literally just “we want your email”).

37% of the actions did not generate a thank you email after taking action; 74% sent poor quality thank you emails; and 69% do not send a follow up email within one month of a supporter taking action. This is bad news!  After someone donates, signs up or completes any other action for your organization is prime time for providing relevant follow-up options to get more involved, learn more, or support your organization/campaign in other ways.

50% of organizations had databases that included 40% or more of inactive supporters. It doesn’t help your cause to have people in your database that aren’t really there.  Provide ways for people to update their contact information or change their email address.

“If you stand back from the survey data these is one very clear message: strategic personalization and targeting are on a level of sophistication that many groups are still struggling to reach.” This means specifically working on segmenting your database and testing messages.  Track your supporters’ actions to know who you should target for which actions and when.  Succeeding at this, though, isn’t reliant on the tools but staff time and knowledge about how to do it.

Download Reports

Visit the Advocacy Online website for more details and downloads.

• Advocacy Online summary document – download
• benchmark data (author:  Duane Raymond) – download
• e-action review (author:  Jess Day) – download
• e-campaigning survey (author:  Jess Day) – download

You can download an outline of what the report will cover and a list of the participating organisations.

Join me!

I’ll be heading to the in-person event to hear about the 2009 report, case studies, and more.  If you are in London, you can join me!  If you aren’t in London, you can join in via a webinar!

The in-person event is being hosted at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in central London on October 13th 2009. The event will start at 4:00pm (BST) with registration and coffee, followed by a presentation of the report’s key findings starting at 4:30pm. This will be followed by a presentation by 2 organisations that contributed data to the study, plus Q&A and a drinks reception.

The webinar is scheduled to start at the same time as the in-person events: October 13th 2009 at 4:30pm BST.

Learn more about the event and register here!

It’s back-to-school time for many countries and that means a switch from summer programs, outdoor community events, and many youth campaigns.  New research out today from nfpSynergy shows that organizations who serve youth may want to be going online to reach them.

The Research

nfpSynergy, a leading nonprofit sector think-tank and research consultancy in the UK, “tracks a representative sample of over 1000 11-25 year olds throughout mainland Britain twice-yearly, gaining insights into their views and habits, both social and charity-related” in its Youth Engagement Monitor.  The newest report, out today, focused on the use of social networking platforms by young people who are/aren’t also involved with charities.  (Read the full press release here or download the Social Media data slides here.) Some of the results include:

• Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site amongst young people – used by over 7 in 10 (72%) of all 11-25 year olds; rising to 80% of 17-25 year olds, those of college/university age – and to 83% of those who are currently at, or who have already been to, university.
• Amongst 11-25 year olds, Facebook is trailed by Bebo (28%), MySpace (25%), Twitter (12%), MSN (9%), YouTube (2%) and “other” (4%)
• Those involved regularly with charities are far more likely to use such social media than those who are not, with four fifths (79%) of those claiming regular charitable involvement using Facebook, compared with just 69% of those claiming no involvement
• Bebo is the only major networking site to be more popular amongst 11-16 year olds (35%) than amongst 17-25 year olds (24%)
• Female respondents reported a significantly higher usage across all the top 4 networking sites

Despite this, less than half (48%) of the 187 charities that were surveyed as part of nfpSynergy’s Virtual Promise (2008) report said that their organization used social networking websites.

What It Means

First, what the research does not mean: Don’t jump into Facebook immediately!  It’s easy for organizations, especially ones with small staff sizes and lots, and lots on the growing “to do” lists to see stats or research like this and automatically say, “Okay, then we should be on Facebook and it’ll solve all of our youth engagement problems.” Or, maybe not that statement exactly, but close to it.  This data does confirm many thing we already knew: that most young people are using social networking platforms of one kind or another, that females are more likely to use networking tools than males, etc.  It also shows that those young people who are engaged or involved with charities are also those using social networking tools. But, it does not say that they want to engage with charities in social networking platforms or, if they do, how they want that connection to start and continue.

So, if your organization serves or engages with youth and you want to think about moving into social networking spaces, here are a few pointers to help you get started!

No running in the halls!

There’s no point rushing into things, so give yourself the time to think strategically about how you want to use social networking platforms in your organization’s work and how it best fits with what you are doing now and the goals you want to achieve.  If you are thinking of using Facebook, for example, you will want to consider whether you want to create an individual account, or Fan page, or a group; each platform has it’s own options for how organizations could be represented and each option has different ways that other users would be able to interact.  You also want to consider which young people you want to connect with: as noted above, different ages may use different platforms; there’s lots of research also discussing the different regions or nationalities using each platform, as well as socioeconomic groups (check out Danah Boyd’s recent dissertation on the way teenagers use social networks!).

Secrets, secrets are no fun!

Regardless of which platform/s you decide to use, remember to be authentic and transparent. No one likes secrets!  Young people you are trying to connect with online (anyone, really) will judge you by your profile information: does it say who you are, which individuals at the organization may be speaking on behalf of the organization via the account? does it give your contact information outside of the social network (website, email, blog, or address)?  how about information – if you provide mental health services, for example, post information about how to get help if you need it, or how to help a friend, and so on. All this will help to make your profile more reliable and trustworthy, as well as put information out into a social space where youth could come across it without necessarily looking for your organization specifically.

Going to Johnny’s party?

The parties, the dances, the school events, they all helped shape many of the memories from being school-aged.  There’s no reason to leave them out of your plan for connecting with young people in social networks!  Create opportunities and events that bring people together online and offline – these activities can help move people up the ladder of engagement, get them volunteering or advocating for your organization, using your services or helping promote them.  Plus, social networking is all about connecting with friends, new and old; if your organization is a catalyst for community by connecting those who are affected or interested in the causes you work on, it will be easier to round up participation for your campaigns (on or offline) and find more supporters to help push your mission and work forward.  So, throw a party or two, and have fun!

What do you think? Are you an organization that works with young people, and are you using social networking sites to connect with them? What lessons or examples do you want to share?

Comment here, or visit the original post at SSIR here.

As GuideStar explains,

“We’ve got good news and bad news.” The old joke fits the findings from our latest nonprofit economic survey, which looked at how charitable organizations fared financially between March and May 2009. The good news is that the proportion of nonprofits reporting decreased contributions, 52 percent, remained unchanged from our previous survey, which covered October 2008 through February 2009. So things apparently didn’t worsen dramatically for charitable organizations between March and May.

The bad news is that the numbers don’t reflect the stress the economy is placing on nonprofits. As one participant put it, “We are hanging on, barely.” Another reported, “The only reason we are still solvent is that we had a financial crisis and could no longer pay our utility bill. After media coverage of the situation, we were inundated with generosity and kindness, and the donations covered the utility bill and the excess paid off outstanding bills, with a little cushion for the future. We were very fortunate. We realize this is a one-time deal, but it has put us back on our feet.”

What’s significant to me? The fact that on every dataset the numbers are nearly exactly the same as the previous year.  Maybe this means those polled were in positions to have a buffer from the downturn; maybe it means that the real impact will show up in the 2010 surveys; or maybe it means that the effects of the downturn aren’t playing out the way speculators thought.

Check out the numbers and results here.

What do you think?  Has your organization seen more significant changes in it’s funding or services “because” of the economic downturn?