good practice

Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan has made a rallying call for a Netsquared this side of the pond – which could be an “incubator for web-enabled social change in the UK & Europe”.

Dan identifies some possible goals:

• To stimulate web-enabled social innovation
• To create a an online-offline community for learning skills, sharing experiences and developing expertise
• To sustain socially progressive activity through alternative business & organisational models

I like the emphasis Dan gives to “activism”, and “the organisational question” in particular…

Perhaps, like the second Netsquared conference, it could aim to incubate a new generation of web-enabled non-profits that use new forms of organising to deliver more directly on their missions.

There is a very real tension between where social media is taking us and how charities are responding (although there needn’t be). Web 2.0 requires Leadership 2.0. Surely two sides of the same coin.

All this may well dovetail with the initiative soon to be unveiled by Bertie Bosredon, the Head of New Media at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie gave me an update earlier this week.

Yesterday, I happened to get a call from Richard Saunders, who is head of website development at NCH, the children’s charity. He also hinted he would welcome a forum along these lines. And Rob Bowker at the BTCV has flagged his interest to me via this blog.

I also know from many of the conversations I had in Brussels last week that there would be an appetite for this elsewhere in Europe, too. Paolo Ferrara left a comment on my recent Buzz Director post to let me know that they are starting to unpick this concept in their own Italian context.

I hope many others will be up for it. But it won’t all be plain sailing; David Wilcox recently held up a mirror to reflect that in the UK at least, the sector has not always been good at being generous in this way.

I’m optimistic. At the start of the year, when I was considering some of the trends that might drive charities in 2007, I wrote that I was “thinking of co-organising an open-space event for those championing social media tools (and change management) within their organisations.” But Dan is right, this is much bigger than a single event.

I would only add that I’d like to see people from all ‘disciplines’ involved in this – I’ve had enough of silo-thinking .

Thank you, Dan; count me in.

Thanks to Steve Andrews of Whitewater for this post pointing to a terrific example of how Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) is using blogs to put donors directly in touch with the work they’re supporting.

Canadian doctor, James Maskalyk, is working for MSF in Abyei, Sudan. He is writing a blog about his experiences. It’s truly inspirational stuff; particularly because it comes directly from him in real time, not in a sanitised quarterly charity newsletter. He shares his doubts, his fears, his hopes and his triumphs. He happens to write beautifully, but it doesn’t matter when he leaves uncorrected typos or uses poor grammar. Because it’s real.

Here’s the link to Dr. Maskalyk’s MSF blog.

One commenter / donor wrote:

I have been a monthly donor to MSF for some time. On Tuesday, I will ramp up by contribution, because I have a house, a job, a healthy beautiful sometimes-maddening daughter, a garden, rain, food – and hope. I wish I could give those things to the mother whose baby you tried to save. I cannot, so I will do what I can.

Steve titles his post “Real Close”, which I think is right on the money.

We can learn a lot from our kids… and how they say thank you. I’m no exception.

But Whitewater’s Steve Andrews says it perfectly:

Saying ‘thank you’ is one of the best opportunities you have to inspire your donors, to make them feel fantastic about their decision to give.

I urge you to read Steve’s post.

Another ‘must read’ blogger, Jeff Brooks, touched on a similar theme recently:

If you want full value from donors, you need to engage them in a relationship and conversation.

Treating donors as human beings. There’s a concept.

Reminds me of something a kid once said to me at youth club. He fancied himself as a bit of a bully. He said something to me in an attempt to provoke a response. I ignored him. He got huffy, got his words muddled up and barked, “You’re talking to a brick wall”. I think he meant to say something else. Anyway, we were teens. It was a long time ago.

People have long memories.

I’ve been having a lot of widgety thoughts recently, so I thought I’d bundle up a few loose ends in the one (long) post.

First though, if you’re playing catch-up a bit, Heidi Cohen has written a good widgets primer on ClickZ.

Now… I happened to replace half a dozen conventional light bulbs at home on Sunday with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). Over in the US, Yahoo! has launched a campaign in collaboration with Inconvenient Truth producer Lawrence Bender, Wal-Mart, and others, to raise awareness among Americans about the energy and environmental savings afforded by CFLs.

When you purchase a CFL bulb anywhere in the US it will be added to 18seconds.org! And, you guessed it… you can easily and quickly configure your own widget (or ‘badge’ in Yahoo-speak) and install it on your website, blog and / or social network page with a simple cut and paste. Brilliant!

If you’re interested in reading more about the campaign, Lawrence Bender has written a guest post on Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog.

Demonstrating impact

The first book I ever read on campaigning was Des Wilson’s A to Z of Public Advocacy, first published in 1984. I can’t lay my hands on my copy (in the garage?) but if I recall correctly, one of Des’s golden rules was encourage you to campaign for something, rather than against something, and the 18seconds widget does a great job of visualising – in raw numbers anyway – the accumulated impact of hundreds of thousands of small actions by distributed individuals to effect positive change.

I emphasise “positive” change, as leveraging Web 2.0 communication tools for good was something that was discussed in a lively ‘conversation’ hosted by Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan during the Uploading Innovation ‘unconference’ last week.

If you hadn’t guessed already… for me, widgets are one of the most exciting ingredients in the emerging Web 2.0 toolbox.

Wear your cause on your blog

Another new kid on the widget block is Carebadges, who aspire to be the yellow bracelet campaign of the web, and while I think the implementation can be improved a lot, I agree with co-founder Saar Gur who told me:

We think that as people express their identities on the web, there is a big gap where social causes ought to be. We want people to express the things that they care about beyond cultural items (music, movies, etc.).

Last year I actually registered the domain name – mycauses.org.uk – and wrote on this blog that I would willingly give it up to any organisation which promised to use it wisely (or hand it over to MySpace if they agreed to establish a “My Causes” tab on their social networking site!)

Anyway, I interrupted Saar…

We want to give people ‘badges’ to help them identify with a cause and have a positive social influence amongst their peers. We use our “impact meter” of impressions/awareness, donations/support to help recognise folks that use their popularity for good. The money [donations] will come later if we can give tools to those who want to create cool badges, email signatures, etc., and we focus on the social impact that each user has in recruiting new members…

I’m not totally convinced in this peer group tactic, in much the same way as I’m not sure how much saying “I’m In” means you’re really anything other than a number. You’re agreeing that Oxfam’s mission is a noble thing.

Widgets have the potential to show you how by taking this or that action, you are making a difference.

Communicating success

This could be the Holy Grail for widgets.

18seconds does this in a visually compelling way… it joins the dots… and it makes it look simple.

But wait a minute. ChipIn’s Carnet Williams says something very interesting in this interview with Britt Bravo (which to Britt’s great credit rather trumps my own interview with Carnet last month).

Carnet says…

What I think 2007 really should be part of is the evolution of the widget into a smart widget. We are going to see widgets that are going to be focused around transactions, such as a ChipIn widget around donations, focused around intelligent content, meaning that widgets will soon be able to identify the users, and where they’re located, so that they can serve our conditional and intelligent content.

I really think that widgets are going to evolve and you’re going to start seeing a whole new breed of widgets that are more intelligent, that are richer in the data, and that have a much more grounded rationale so they’ll move from becoming decorations to part of a business process for companies and individuals online.

Now the slightest hint of ‘smart’ widgets is enough for me: if I could only get information I care about – e.g. what difference a project I supported is actually having, or the accumulated effect of campaigning actions, etc. via a widget… now, that would surely become a key driver of my future support for that cause.

The Network Effect

For a great insight into the power of the widget widget web, check out Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent article, Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets.

Dion identifies the YouTube ‘badge’ (we’re still talking widgets) as demonstrating the value of ‘chunking’ up content and services into bite-sized reusable pieces.

Particularly because it has so many viral distribution pieces built into it, the YouTube badge is the canonical example of the power of opening up and letting the entire web distribute your content for you.

Not content just to ask you if you’d like to share a video with friends via e-mail (resulting in friends forwarding to friends, and to their friends and so on) but YouTube makes the code snippet for embedding it right on your own site or blog readily visible and available to the right of each video.

Not content just to have their content just on a single site, YouTube realized that it was by mobilizing millions of users to extend the YouTube platform to their own sites that they could achieve lasting and durable network effects. E-mail propagation is powerful but it’s almost certainly no match for having millions of persistent, discoverable YouTube badge installations all over the web.

Dion kindly gave me permission to reproduce the following graphic (originally published here) which illustrates the full potential of the network for extending the reach of your widget / message.

Here in the UK, Justgiving has added badges (these are just badges) to the toolset available to fundraisers (is it just me who thinks all widgets, gadgets, etc… look better with rounded corners?).

Their widgets have been doing pretty well, too. Since their release at the end of December, over 8,000 individual Justgiving widgets have been posted on the web and the highest performing widgets have registered over 500,000 page impressions.

Right now, there are 1,479 “active” Justgiving widgets, all doing their stuff, and this figure is expected to rise pretty steeply as we get nearer to the London Marathon.

Justgiving’s Simon Doggett told me that a Flash version of their widget is in testing, and should be released later this month (fundraisers have been asking for a widget that is optimised for those websites that currently block iframes, e.g. MySpace).

Well, that turned into rather a long post, so I had better think of a way to summarise how I believe widgets can prove a winner for not-for-profits:

• You move beyond the single website model and turn the entire web into a distribution system for your content / stories (Dion Hinchcliffe)
• Smart widgets will (hopefully soon) allow you to report back on how you are making a difference

More on widgets.

One of my recent predictions was that widgets and widget fundraising would make their mark here in the UK in 2007.

A good time then for prolific US-based blogger Beth Kanter to write an excellent case study on her experience using the ChipIn widget for her successful personal fundraising campaign for the Sharing Foundation.

ChipIn founder Carnet Williams hopes that others can learn from Beth to make their own fundraising efforts more successful.

It seems especially appropriate to mention this today, as Beth is celebrating a Big Birthday! A toast would seem in order, then.

Crumbs, I may have just the thing: talking of toast, and talking of sharing… this is another one of those ‘traffic pyramiding’ schemes, but this time in aid of charity. A cool (and slightly eccentric) way to donate to a good cause.

Intrigued? Point your mouse to Your Name on Toast!

Steve MacLaughlin has just posted some good advice on the Blackbaud blog:

Make sure that your online communication, wherever it takes place, clearly conveys who you are, what is your mission, why it matters, how people can get involved, and what is the impact of their involvement. Choice abounds on the Web and someone else’s site is just a click away. Your message needs to be compelling and coherent enough to rise above the clutter. Don’t let your message get lost in the medium.

So, just thinking out loud for a moment…

• Ignore the tools… start with strategy, outcomes and the message.
• If it fits, embrace social networks. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
• Keep this core message simple, e.g. “Make Trade Fair”.
• Simple actions repeated at scale within a social network produces serendipity.
• Post your edgiest, most viral content… be useful, and (if appropriate) be entertaining. Be prepared to respond quickly, too… and offer guidance.
• Remember, it’s about helping people to connect to each other… rather than to your database.
• Be collaborative – recognise that people may like to create something which will be seen by many.
• Let them know their efforts are crucial to advancing the cause / your mission.

But manage the risks. Social networking is both a blessing and a curse :)

• Be ready to lose some control – it comes with the territory.
• You cannot ‘vet’ who wants to become your friend.
• People may seek to build their reputation or associate you with ‘their’ cause by adding your logo to their video / blog / profile.
• be wary of anti-big-brand videos / spoof ads.
• Have a strategy in place in case things go wrong.
• Look at the probability of something occurring (e.g. legal action), and assign a value to that and calculate risks.
• The benefits outweigh the risks. In most cases people have the best intentions and will respond to a gentle nudge.
• Don’t embed yourself too deeply into social networking (and for that matter, anything else I might enthuse about) and forsake the other stuff.

Of course, all this will be easier to manage if you employ a buzz director or recruit some virtual volunteers!

I’ve often considered how online job search could be made more effective for recruiters and job seekers. Perhaps tagging is the answer. Employers could add tags to opportunities that would be used to power job searches.

So, check this out. Breast Cancer Care are looking for a Web Content Manager to join their New Media team and have created a web page using tags to convey the nature of the role.

I like the way that they have made the tags active links to appropriate sections of their website (and external sites). This could be extended to include links to photo sets on Flickr illustrating the charity’s activities.

When you think about it, this technique is also common sense; as more and more tech-savvy, socially-orientated graduates enter the marketplace, Breast Cancer Care are making themselves stand out from the crowd.

I recently conducted an email interview with Bertie Bosrédon, Head of New Media at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie’s responses make for interesting reading and I’ll be picking up on a number of these themes in future posts. Is Bertie a buzz director, I wonder?

How do you see social media (e.g. blogs, flickr, social tagging) blending together to the benefit of charities?

MySpace, Flickr and YouTube (among others) will become increasingly important tools for charities in the next 6-12 months to connect with existing supporters and reach new audiences. This will make us work in a different way – publishing more content directly to those websites, instead of expecting visitors to visit our own site. There will be benefits, but it will also become more difficult to gauge effectiveness.

Do you think large charities are making the most of the opportunities offered by these tools?

Large charities tend to go for bespoke solutions. For instance, I’ve been asked on many occasions to create photo galleries. I am convinced it is more effective – and obviously cheaper, to set up a group on Flickr where everyone can upload their own photos and share their stories – real photos taken by real people. There is so much that can be done. Having said that, I have recently seen some powerful campaigning videos on YouTube, e.g. this video for the purple ribbon film festival in Taiwan to raise awareness of violence against women and this one produced by WWF Canada for their Save our Climate campaign.

What do you think are the main factors preventing charities from more readily adopting social media?

The first factor is budget. Many charities have redesigned their website in the last two years or so and it is difficult to justify investing in new systems.

I have been working in this sector since 2001 and I speak regularly with other web managers. I am always impressed by the level of creativity and the desire to do more… and almost always disappointed to hear repeated stories of lack of resources, the difficulty of getting internal buy-in and lack of recognition of in-house skills. Too often, web teams are not seen as experts but more as technical people whose job it is simply to “copy and paste” printed content onto a web page.

Have you found it challenging to persuade colleagues of the opportunities?

Not at all, and I feel very lucky for that! I was given free reign to set up my [New Media] department. Six months before I joined [in April 2006], the web team at Breast Cancer Care comprised two members of staff. I now have fourteen people in my department (6 percent of all staff). I have two staff working on content development, another two on technical development, and one on web analytics and traffic management. The rest of the team work on ‘interactive services’ – managing the forum, live chat and developing interactive tools for users. We are also recruiting a clinical nurse specialising in new media who will advise the content team on clinical issues.

Admittedly, the New Media department at Breast Cancer Care maybe unusual in our sector. But other staff also embrace the potential of new media, and so does the senior management team. Even the board of trustees express a keen interest.

We know how many people receive our publications, how many patients attend our courses, how many helpline calls we take and how many visits we receive to the website. The website is our most accessed service by audience reached. Consequently, half our time is spent developing tools and information for these visitors, while the other half consists of responding to internal queries. We operate like an internal agency, like a consultancy. We also do a lot of internal PR. For instance, we set up an internal new media blog where we keep our colleagues updated with what we’re up, and to signpost other websites and campaigns we find interesting. We hope to make this blog more widely accessible in 2007.

A new media conference to promote our discipline to staff colleagues is planned for next year. It will take place in our Head Office but staff from our regional centres in south London, Sheffield, Cardiff and Glasgow will hopefully be able to attend as well.

What role do you think blogs can play?

There are two aspects to blogs. Blogs that charities write for their supporters and blogs these stakeholders write about the charity. The latter can be very effective, although a note of caution is necessary: a charity’s ‘brand’ does not have the same protection as a commercial company because your supporters feel strongly about the charity they support and feel they have some ‘ownership’ of the brand. They don’t think there is anything wrong with changing your logo… after all, they are raising money for your cause. So you don’t have 100 percent control over what they say and this can sometimes become an issue. So yes, blogs can be powerful but they must be carefully managed and resourced.

At Breast Cancer Care, we also have an very active discussion forum. We employ five sessional moderators to maintain the quality of the forum; five ‘hosts’ work ten hours a week each on the forums. They are paid staff and trained to deal with specific issues related to breast cancer.

Can you tell us a little about the strategy behind “Kelly’s blog”, the response and plans for development in this area?

The strategy was simple: there wasn’t one. After we started our internal blog, we were wondering if we should offer a blogging facility on our website. That’s when Kelly emailed, asking if she could start a blog. We thought we’d give it a try. We have been surprised by the traffic and the interest generated by Kelly’s blog. It has been one of the most popular areas of the website for weeks.

We actually met Kelly for the first time yesterday. Following her feedback, we have decided to ask more people to blog for us. Other visitors to the website will be able to comment. But for the reason I mentioned above, the posts will first be checked by our ‘New Media Nurse’.

Will 2007 be the year charities integrate social media into their engagement strategies?

Well, more charities will certainly experiment with blogs. But in many charities, you have to convince several departments across different directorates and that takes time. Because the web is essential for all of them, there will be a need for more cross-departmental projects. The boundaries between your fundraising, campaigning and core business (e.g. support, information) won’t be as defined as they are now.

Therefore, I’m not quite as optimistic! I would say that 2007 should be a year of ‘self-promotion’ for web teams… and 2008 the year they lead with e-strategies.

Any advice for other charities – large and small – who may be about to dabble?

Use the expertise of your team and allocate time to experiment.

I strongly believe that a charity which hasn’t yet invested, or is not seriously thinking about investing in digital communications, and the necessary resources, will struggle in the next 2-5 years.

Bertie Bosrédon was Online Manager at the British Heart Foundation for five years until April 2006 when he joined Breast Cancer Care to set up a new digital department.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has a long history of embracing innovation to raise awareness of its cause. Way back in the 1930s for example, the Society was one of the first charities in the UK to screen fundraising films in cinemas.

The child protection charity is now using Google Maps in the latest phase of the hugely ambitious Full Stop campaign to end cruelty to children, which it launched in March 1999.

The “Be the Full Stop” website shows how the actions of individual fundraisers, donors, campaigners, volunteers link up across the country “to create an unstoppable force against child cruelty.”

To get on the map, you sign up to the following statement:

I believe child cruelty can be ended and I want to get on the map and take action now

Once on the map you can:

• Invite friends to join you and create your own, personal network of support
• Explore the map and see how other people are taking action in your area and beyond
• Visualise how you are part of a committed and active community of NSPCC supporters

I like the way you can easily view the map without first having to add yourself to it, and the tag cloud of people mapped to actions, making you feel you are standing up and being counted.

Since “Full Stop Week”, which ran from 2 – 8 October, an online gallery of photos has been added using a Flickr mashup.

An accessible version (no map of course) allows you to drill down to your own postcode.

The NSPCC has one again teamed up with its digital agency, DNA, to create a wonderfully innovative way to visualise the aggregated actions of thousands of supporters.

This is far from being a full stop, of course; you’re not interrupted by a call to make a donation. This is all about raising awareness, making connections and building deeper relationships with potential supporters.