Getting Creative with Online Fundraising: 10 Campaigns Using Mission Inspired Gifts aka Gift Catalogues

Online fundraising programs are presenting new and effective ways for nonprofit organizations to raise more money and reach a wider audience more than ever, especially when integrated with other nonprofit organization communications efforts. In recent years though, organizations have found that more than just a simple donate now button linked from an email is needed to get the attention of information-overloaded supporters who are spending more and more time online – and being bombarded with more messages, online invitations and digital marketing than ever before.

Numerous noteworthy campaigns have surfaced as of late, breaking through the clutter and compelling online users to not only donate but also attaching a tangible element to the somewhat general act of donating online. Mission inspired gifts specifically, or using ecommerce to allow supporters to “purchase” certain tangible objects that reflect what funds are used for in supporting an organization’s mission, have proven to be an effective way of harnessing these elements in raising funds online. (These are often referred to as gift catalogues, as well)

After hearing about this webinar next week with Common Knowledge, Defenders of Wildlife, Operation Smile and Sierra Club sharing their strategy, program concepts and best practices for implementing gift catalogues, I was inspired to dig around and make a list of 10 noteworthy campaigns using this concept.

1. Oxfam Unwrapped – Oxfam is well-known for working to end poverty and injustice worldwide, but wanted to find a way to show how the money supporters donated went to provide simple things to people, villages and movements around the globe. Not only can you buy, well in family friendly terms manure, but you can also see a number of other items at incrementally larger price points that make various different impacts. They’ve also done a great jobs on including descriptions for each item in their ecommerce store on hoe exactly that item helps a specific need. For example: if you purchase to “train a midwife” it tells you this “Help[s] train a midwife working in rural communities to provide prenatal care and birthing support to pregnant women.

2. Defenders of Wildlife Adoption and Gift Center – Here you can adopt animals from Sea Otters to Tigers to Snowy Owls. They take the idea of the emotional tie people feel when seeing pictures of (yes cute) animals and allow them to actually “adopt” the animal of a supporter’s choice to illustrate how that person’s money is helping to save the lives and well-being of creatures shown in the ecommerce store.

3. International Fund for Animal Welfare– Similar to Defenders above, IFAW also allows for donations to provide “the gist of life” for seals, bear cubs and cats and dogs. Their clean interface and beautiful photography is inspiring to browse, and the offer of tangible gifts like stuffed animals of the breed you are supporting add additional incentive to participate in the program.

4. The Nature Conservancy– The ecommerce offerings of the organization highlights a ton of “gifts” including adopting reefs, trees, habitats for hummingbirds and jaguars – things similar to the organizations above. But they take the offering one step further by presenting the option to literally adopt an acre of land in areas all over the world. See the example of Australia. Think of all the locations around the entire planet that are important to people that they can now personally impact.

5. Sierra Club Sponsor a Wild Place– Sierra Club takes a mix of the elements above, using ecommerce to sell virtual sponsorships of locations as well as adding an incentive of gifts supporters receive when donating. To all the animal lovers out there: who wouldn’t love a little stuffed animal or photo of the location you helped save?

6. Seva Foundation Gifts of Service– Putting compassion and caring to work with supporter donations, the Seva Foundation ecommerce items include restoring sight to a blind person, money for projects that alleviate suffering caused by poverty and disease and providing human rights and medical support to women and girls.

7. The Red Campaign– Known for tying their mission of ending AIDS in Africa into contemporary brand’s marketing and entertainment projects, The Red Campaign offers a more mainstream way of supporting the organization. Supporters, or even online consumers, can purchase actual consumer products like a customized pair of Converse sneakers, red “Beats By Dre” Monster headphones or a red iPod nano with proceeds benefiting the organization. The beauty of this campaign? All of the ecommerce items are popular items consumers are purchasing anyways, so by adding a personalized or unique branding element, the campaign benefits from something online consumers were probably already planning to purchase.

8. National Geographic– Organizing elements of their site by the missions they support, NatGeo supporters can purchase personal items through their online ecommerce store, knowing that each purchase they make helps support the various missions. Like the Red Campaign, consumer goods (typically NatGeo branded) can be bought to add value to the buyer while also benefitting critical expeditions or scientific fieldwork.

9. Save the Turtles– With an emphasis on branded clothing, Save the Turtles makes being an advocate of the cause both fulfilling for a supporter, but also smart for the organization in that supporters will likely publicly support their cause throughout the year when wearing apparel marketing the cause.

10. Operation Smile– “Life-changing” gifts fill the online catalogue for Operation Smile. Antibiotics for 10 kids, equipping a volunteer surgeon and children’s pain medication are just a few items for “sale” that literally help to make the efforts the organization make on daily basis to change the lives of children around the world for the better.

Each of the above exemplify creative and powerful ways to connect the mission of an organization to the emotional (and yes, sometimes materialistic) ties of supporters, helping to drive crucial funding in ways that resonate with donors. If you’re interested in learning more about how some of the above organizations are designing and implementing these programs, don’t miss next Tuesday’s webinar outlining gift catalogue examples and tips.

*And as a bonus, as our “transmedia specialist” Josh points out not to forget Newman’s Own!

Making Grants Data Work: Nonprofit Data Jam, May 10

No, "Nonprofit Data Jam" is not the label on the mix CD you listen to while deduping your donor data file. :) It's an upcoming event in DC, hosted by the New America Foundation, on the topic of how funding and grants data could be shared and used in other ways. It should be pretty interesting - a brainstorming session of sorts about what could be done with data from philanthropic foundations.

Much has been made of the power of open data provided by governments, but the aim of this get-together is to push the discussion into how data gathered by foundations and other funders could be republished, mashed up, or otherwise used for new purposes and serve the common good.  Read the "modest manifesto" by Lucy Bernholz that started it all: http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2010/03/open-philanthropy-modest-manifesto.html

Information on the event from New America Foundation: http://www.newamerica.net/events/2010/open_data

Imagine if communities, donors, journalists, and funders had easy access to grants information from foundations. What new insights could we gather about needs and opportunities in our communities? How might foundations and individual donors work together, or foundations and public funders? What untold stories about local heroes might the media tell?

Please join us on May 10 from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. at the New America Foundation (1899 L Street, NW) for a rapid-fire brainstorming, networking, and idea jam on philanthropic data as the fuel for the future. We will livestream the event. Twitter #GiveData.

Will Nonprofits “Like” the More Social Web that New Facebook Features Present?

If you’ve been paying attention to the news in the past week, you’ve most likely heard about the new changes making their way into Facebook to make sharing interests across the web easier. In short, Facebook is making it easier than ever to connect your online social connections across the entire web, partnering with sites like Yelp and Pandora to start, to make web interactions inherently social. They've also changed the "fan" status of pages to "like" and are now offering easier integration of this in-site feature across all sites on the web.

As an avid Facebook user, the idea of these changes excites me in many ways as it will now be easier than ever to share and interact with my personal community all the things I “like” around the web (whether or not people care if I’m a fan of  the band Noble Dog, the local dog rescue organization Blue Dog Rescue or the TV show Six Feet Under is another story…) And for nonprofits who are interested in reaching younger generations and embracing social efforts after reading new studies like the Next Generation of American Giving, nonprofit social media benchmark studies and nonprofit social networking benchmarks, this is big news that brings some interesting potential to future social plans.

As Mark Zuckerberg said last week “people are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about,” and the new tools Facebook is offering are going make personalizing experiences, building out the graph of connections people are making and bringing all these connections together to create a truly social web experience.

No matter what industry you work in, or volunteer for, for that matter, people are the most important aspect to your success – people who support your effort, people who buy your product, people who use the tools you’ve built – so by putting people at the center of the web Facebook is putting its money where its mouth is, betting that social will continue to fuel the growth and success of the web.

And the nonprofit community is an exceptional example of a group that thrives from people.

One of the the first thing I saw online about the new Open Graph and "like" change was this tweet sharing the initial negative reaction towards the "like" status change:

In a recent post Beth Kanter distills some of the issues these new changes bring for the nonprofit and third sector citing some of the feedback from leaders in technology like Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble – both of whom seem to be keen on most of the new changes.

Holly Ross posted on her reaction to the news and changes to privacy settings, which she describes as “feel[ing] like I'm smack dab in the middle of a Tim Burton movie. It's hard for me to tell if I should be delighted or scared out of my wits.” Two mandatory elements she points out as imperative to her are the ability to opt IN and the needed realization on the part of consumers that we are all responsible for our behavior on the web. Hat tip to Holly on the last point, it’s been my mantra for years.

Allyson Kapin argues on the Frogloop blog that changing the new interaction to “like” on Facebook will be good for nonprofit that want to grow their Facebook base because it lowers the barrier of commitment of having to be a “fan”. Alternatively, she also says this may hurt organizations who are looking for higher quality Facebook supporters this change won’t help.

Notable quotes: some of the top points being raised around the web on the issue

A number of different social media pundits, interactive leaders and nonprofit professionals have started chiming in on their thoughts around the issue.

• “Every click of the button ensures Facebook can deliver a more personalized experience” - Pete Cashmore of Mashable in a CNN editorial
• “[The new capabilities are] potentially alarming for those who wrongly regarded Facebook as a private place, or who have genuine reservations over privacy” – Emily Bell of the Guardian
• “It's certainly easier to drop Facebook code into one's Web pages than to build a login system and social features from scratch” – Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek
• “I’m also concerned about quality vs. quantity… I’d much rather have 5,000 engaged, active “fans” rather than 50,000 people who just “like” us. We shall see… we’re going to be paying close attention to our FB insights in the coming weeks for sure!” - Carie Lewis of the Humane Society
• “Imagine if Facebook wanted to turn off the New York Times, for instance. It could. And that’s a LOT of power to give to one organization, even one that’s earned my trust like Facebook has. This is why I keep hoping Google has a clue (so far it hasn’t).” – Robert Scoble

Nonprofits already taking advantage of the new features

Earlier today I decided to see who had already taken advantage of the new feature by asking on Twitter. Here's a few of the responses I got back:

• PETA’s Ringling Bros Beats Animals campaign page
• American Cancer Society’s More Birthday’s web site
• Nebraska Humane Society’s Adoptable Dogs Page
• Girl Think Take has added a button on their homepage

The bottom line - what you should know now

1. There are now privacy settings that you have the ability to change that might be affecting what information you are sharing. Everyone should educate themselves on these, people and organizations alike. Beth does a great job of pointing out what’s changed here
2. There are less boundaries than ever before in getting people “engaged” with your cause. The real question left is how engaged this new approach will make your supporters.
3. If you have the desire, you can now implement the new like button capability on your sites more quickly and easily than ever. If you’re interested in doing so, Facebook has the documentation posted…and it doesn’t even take a developer to install!

I’m not sure any of us will truly appreciate all the opportunities and implications of this new change for quite some time, but it’s an issue anyone – especially nonprofits who are putting so much energy into making personal connections – should be aware of and chewing on right now.

How about you, are you planning to make any changes to your current Facebook efforts due to the new changes? Are you already starting to plan integrating the ability to “like” your websites and online appeals? Or are you in the camp of those still unsure and uncomfortable with the privacy implications?

And by the way, check out the new, shiny like button on the top of this post. Give it a “like” for practice, why don’t you? : )

Tackling your content inventory

After my last post, a reader asked for more information and instruction on creating a content inventory. What a great idea for a follow-up post! Maintaining an up-to-date listing of all content on your site will help your web team make decisions about adding new content and removing or updating outdated content to keep your web site fresh and entice users to come back. Also, content inventories are essential for any web site redesign to ensure the new site structure accommodates all types of content you’re looking to include. So, how do you make one?

1. Start with a blank Excel spreadsheet using the following column headers. Over time, you can add columns and information to your inventory as needed – things like “Notes”, “Date updated”, “Due date”, etc. - but these columns represent the basic information you’ll need to get started.
• Page ID – Use a numbering system here for reference and to indicate hierarchy of each page.
• Title – This is the title of each page as represented in the navigation.
• URL – Include a link to each page for quick access.
• Owner – Identifty the person in your organization responsible for creation and maintenance.
2. Populate the spreadsheet with your sitemap, starting with the highest level pages first, then working your way down to the detailed pages that may not be accessible from the navigation. I typically start on the homepage and then click all of the links in the navigation, documenting each as I go. Then, I’ll revisit each page, adding in rows for pages that are linked from there. Now, depending on the size of your web site, this may be a really tedious process but doing it manually is the most accurate approach. Also, even though the process may take a while, it's a great way to take stock of all the information on your site. Take the opportunity to identify content that needs to be taken down or updated. There are a few site crawler tools that can generate a list of links on your site (GSiteCrawler is one we’ve used) but they are quite clunky and you’ll still need to organize the links in a hierarchical order once you have the list. These tools are helpful to extract links for each page, especially for sites with large news or press sections, to ensure that all content is represented on your inventory.
3. Keep your list updated! Once you’ve completed your inventory, keep a copy on a shared drive so authors can update it as they add new content. It’s also a great tool to reference when developing an editorial calendar and, as I mentioned, is crucial for a redesign.

Below is an example of a content inventory for convio.com where we've completed a few lines. Hopefully these guidelines will have you on your way to developing an inventory of your own. Feel free to post questions or ideas in the comments.

Guest Post: Measuring Social Media with Multichannel Integration and Meaningful Metrics

It's no secret by now that social media is hot topic with nonprofit organizations, and quickly the topic of social media measurement is becoming a common conversation thread across the community. Presentations like NTC's "The Real Housewives of Social Media" and the heavy emphasis on social media at conferences like AFP show the real need for strategy around measuring the success of these programs.

Recently, Shabbir Imber Safdar, author of the TruthyPR blog and Shayna Englin of Englin Consulting LLC published an eBook entitled "Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It? Analytics and Measurement Techniques" (free to download) that's chock full of Facebook-specific nonprofit examples, measurement techniques and recommendations on the types of measurement programs organizations should have in place.  Studying real-world examples of Facebook pages and campaigns, Shabbir and Shayna found many interesting nuggets of guidance to share with the nonprofit community.

Guest Post: Measuring Social Media with Multichannel Integration and Meaningful Metrics

By Shabbir Imber Safdar and Shayna Englin

Nonprofits everywhere are drowning in opportunity.  There's all the new social media channels, plus all the channels they already were working on (like email).  And then there's the stuff that seems to work for some people that seems out of fashion, like "MySpace".   Most every nonprofit staffer I talk to is craving some guidance both about what's working in their online mix, as well as what's underperforming.

The call to "go multichannel" isn't enough, either.  How do you know if your Facebook work is underperforming in its contribution to the entire multichannel campaign? 

Late last year Shayna and I spoke to our friends and Convio client US Fund for UNICEF, to talk to them about how they measured social media, in particular their Facebook work.  What arose out of that conversation was an opportunity to study the last year's worth of performance by combining their Facebook page Insights data and their Google Analytics data into a single data set that we could track from Facebook post all the way through to conversion.  Our goal was to answer the following questions:

1. How effective is their work on Facebook in producing bottom line results for US Fund for UNICEF?
2. What is working? 
3. What should they be doing differently on Facebook to improve their results?

What we found directly impacted on their execution going forward:

The number of daily postings to your Facebook page strongly affects your resulting donations and fan base size

We found a clear correlation between daily frequency of Facebook posts and both clickthru rates and the rates at which Facebook fans unsubscribe.  We found a sweet spot that shows that unsubscribe rates rise precipitously when they post more than 3 items in a day to their Facebook page.

Your best performance comes during high profile disasters

We also studied the Facebook page's performance for both clickthrus to the website and donations in the wake of a high profile disaster, like the earthquake in Haiti.  We found that as expected in every channel, the rates of clickthrough and conversion spike amazingly in the wake of the disaster.

The real insight came when we examined the actual postings during that timeframe though.  At a time when clickthroughs and conversions should be at their highest, UNICEF staff posted several items to their Facebook page that didn't click through to the website, or went somewhere else entirely.

When your audience is likely to click thru and donate to almost anything you post because of a high profile disaster, it's a waste to send them to CNN.com.  The conversion rate of donations for US Fund for UNICEF on CNN.com is 0%, and it always will be.  It would be better to repost the content or embed the CNN video on a unicefusa.org web page, and then post that link to Facebook.

Likes and comments don't have a strong impact on clickthrough rate

We had a hypothesis about this, but were surprised to find our suspicion confirmed: there isn't a strong correlation between Facebook posts that get comments/likes and clickthrough rates and those that don't.  However the linkage was borderline enough that we felt it deserved attention in a future experiment we hope to run.

Facebook is a powerful tool and nonprofit use of it is in its infancy.  Remember what your email house list was like the first year?  That's your nonprofit Facebook Page.  The payoff is there, but it's going to take real attention to learn what works to get the most out of it. 

Take first step and start measuring your results.