See What’s Out There

If one measure of the influence of blogs and other web tools is how much traditional ink they get, then their influence is huge. Today’s installment of, “lets make the blog the story” comes from the front page of today’s New York Times where they write about a group of bloggers called Firedoglake.com that have been covering the Libby trial in more depth than the traditional media.

There are two interesting articles in today’s business section.

First, a piece about how terrestrial radio stations are moving aggressively to add video content. Huh? Yup, video content. On their websites.

Across the country, radio stations are putting up video fare on their Web sites, ranging from a simple camera in the broadcast booth to exclusive coverage of events like the Super Bowl to music videos, news clips and Web-only musical performances.

“This is no longer the age of ‘having a face for radio,’ ” said Dianna Jason, the senior director of marketing and promotions at Power 106, a Los Angeles hip-hop radio station. “This is a visual medium now.”

The funny thing about this article is that they made no mention of the exact same thing happening to the newspaper. The New York Times now puts its reporters online with video, talking about their stories and even reporting from the field. I recently watched a report from Baghdad from a Times reporter with a video camera going along with troops cleaning out buildings full of snipers. There is no such thing as a face for the newspaper any more either.

The other article of interest today was about Google losing a copyright fight in Europe over links to Google News. It is hard for me to imagine that simply finding and linking to articles would violate copyright law, but it just shows to go you that this is still very early in an emerging legal area. We are paying attention to this because of the impact on issues of fair use and copyright, as they relate to online video and our clients’ work. The only thing I can tell you for certain is that it’s a good time to be an intellectual property attorney.

There was a very interesting thread of discussion on the N-TEN email list today about fundraising widgets, or charity badges. It was interesting enough that I will reproduce some of it here.

What kicked it off was this question from Chicago-based nonprofit consultant Betsy Harman.

A recent NTEN blog posting talks about charity donation badges as one of the 10 cool tools for nonprofits to use the web

I also think these can be very powerful tools for nonprofits. I wrote about it on my blog too (after ignoring my blog for far too long) and created a couple of badges recently using different tools.

At Sixdegrees.org you can create nice looking badges with photos and even links to videos and there are celebrity badges although the celebrity badges thus far haven’t raised much money (Tyra Banks $10 / Jane Kacmarek $30 -
lame!) Sixdegrees has received some media exposure recently so perhaps things will pick up. I saw Kevin Bacon on the Today show.

The NTEN posting mentioned the great work Beth Kanter did with the Yahoo for Good badge campaign for Sharing Foundation. In the case of The Sharing Foundation, they use the Network for Good donation page for all online donations anyway so posting the badge on their website or on an official org blog wouldn’t cause any confusion for donors as to which donation page to use or why do these donation pages look different from one another.

All this is leading to a few questions I’d love to throw out to nonprofits that have been experimenting with these badges:

1.) What methods are you finding to be most effective to encourage current donors and volunteers to create these badges and post them on their blogs, My Space page etc…? Are you posting badges created by your donors on your website as examples for others?

2.) If your primary means of processing online donations is not through Network for Good, do you have any concerns about steering people to two (or
more) different donation tools and forms with different looks?

3.) If you don’t use Network for Good and your own donation processing vendor has tools for creating badges like this are you steering donors to use those tools instead but potentially missing something by not tapping into the media buzz and celebrity connection of something like sixdegrees.org?

This is all still very new and I’m just wondering what people are trying and what people are thinking about this so thought I’d toss it out to this list where there are lots of smart folks who can comment.

Betsy Harman
Harman Interactive
773-728-4194

I replied.

Betsy

We have been working with clients on the issue of Charity Badges, or as they are also called, fundraising widgets. (There are some differences in look and function between many of these tools.) So in our experience, to answer your questions…

1. How do you get people to use them?

We believe that it is best to see charity badges in the context of a toolkit that enables constituents to reach out to their friends on behalf of an organization. This toolkit is both a marketing program and a set of technologies. Just as putting a Donate Now button on your website doesn’t mean anyone will actually do that, so too just having these badges doesn’t make anyone use them. One successful strategy we have employed is to look for cohorts among an organization’s broader set of constituents. For example, we are working with some programs that run trips and have service programs, where the alumni can be tapped. Giving a cohesive group a group goal creates a virtuous circle of peer pressure — for example, those returning from this alternate Spring Break, or those who volunteered in 2006 — are seeking to raise a total of $x by y date. Getting buy-in in advance of a launch is key. Identifying the influencers is also a key step - their buy-in will have a greater impact. In terms of a broader audience online, we are mapping online communities that discuss and act on particular issues and identifying the influencers (for example, the most popular bloggers on a specific subject). Relationships needs to be cultivated first, but having a good lay of the land in terms of who can influence a wider community is a key step. With a relationship, compelling content and a discrete campaign, organizations can then mobilize these influencers. We also believe that the toolkit needs to be more than donation processing. SplashCast, for example, allows you to create a custom video/photo channel that can carry real content about the work of the organization - critical for making the kinds of emotional connections that lead to support.

2. Consistency of donation processing

It is certainly best to use a tool that links right into the same data collection framework that you already use. It is also important to look at costs. Network For Good might have significantly higher processing fees that you have with your own merchant account. On the other hand, our opinion is if you have an opportunity — because you have an uber-networker like Beth Kanter on board, for example — then you shouldn’t allow the consistency issue to stop you. On the other hand, you need to have a very good, clear, rigorous process for getting the data into your main database even if it’s time consuming (and this, as well as any difference in processing costs or fees, should be considered a cost when reviewing whether the effort was worth it.)

3. The buzz from sites that encourage donations through alternate tools

There are many sites launching these days designed to encourage philanthropy and connection to nonprofits. Some of these include: changingthepresent.org, kiva.org, change.org, globalgiving.com, justgive.org, universalgiving.org… They vary in emphasis, stage of development and quality of offering. It is very easy for nonprofit managers to panic, and think they need to be in all these things, that they are missing major opportunities. While it is important to be aware of the landscape as much as anyone can be, there is no free lunch. Any site or community or new effort needs to be worked to be successful. Our advice… lay out the opportunities and only do what they can put their resources behind. I also think the overall impact of all these sites today is very very small relative - insignificant — to overall support. Pay attention, participate where it makes sense, but keep things in perspective.

For some perspective, I recommend Tate Hausman’s (from dotOrganize) article in the most recent N-TEN Connect newsletter. In this piece he demonstrates that most organizations simply need to get their own basic data/email/donation systems in order and put first things first.

Michael Hoffman
See3 - Media for Nonprofits

And then Tanya Zumach replied as well. Tanya is a nonprofit consultant who used to work at Mercy Corp.

Betsy, thanks for starting this discussion!
Michael, thank you for your thoughtful response.
And Tate’s article is great, too.

OK, with all of that out of the way…

When presented with these opportunities and partnerships and portals and more, I always very carefully evaluate them by these criteria:

1) ROI. Always my number one bottom line. Even for the supposedly “free”
opportunities, there are costs involved - time in setting up, maintaining and monitoring, back-end data, etc. I look at the results from others who are participating, ask what results others have seen, ask how the most successful ones implemented the tools. Bottom line - maybe my time be better invested in developing a strong renewal campaign or in tweaking and testing my donation page -things I know I should be working on. (Also second here the comments others have noted about data integration, etc.)

Also, what are the hidden costs? I was always amazed when people asked me to promote these things to my list - my most valuable and profitable asset.
Does it make sense for me to ask my donors to jump to another platform or social networking page or somewhere else to *maybe* get a 10th of my normal average gift on my own site? Probably not - but every now and then the potential is there (see #4).

2) Brand Integrity. This is interesting - and important to consider. We hear that “Web 2.0″ is supposedly moving the power of brand interpretation to the user (personalized content syndication, consumer generated media, etc.). But carefully consider the true essence of your brand and how that guides your interaction with supporters. Does it support your brand to allow users to put your mission and work in their own words? Sometimes, yes. But remember that your strongest opportunity to share your brand values and make strong, lasting connections with donors is on your own site. If you’ve already done that, great - spend some time working on how to use these networks, but if you haven’t - work on your own site first.

Also be mindful of how your story and your brand is presented in context of the tool(s), networks and sites involved. You may find yourself side by side with messages, images or other organizations that might be in contradiction with your values, or that might dilute or confuse your message.

3) Donor Care and Cultivation Potential. One of the biggest drawbacks that I’ve seen with some of these opportunities is that you don’t get donor contact information (or poor or incomplete info). You lose the potential of further cultivation, and if they never really directly interact with your organization (because they hadn’t visited your site or received your normal (assumedly high-quality) donor care) they probably aren’t as strong prospects. Consider the cost of acquiring a new donor and what you lose if you don’t get this info and sometimes it can be a deal-breaker.

That said, I also consider what opportunity I have to build even stronger relationships with my current donors who are really looking to do more - perhaps this is a fantastic option for a particular group of donors.

4) Potential. Sometimes opportunities arise where the potential is just so dang strong, and even though the initial calculations from #s 1-3 above don’t pencil out (or more likely you just don’t have enough data) you just have to go for it and see what happens. Perhaps the potential to reach a huge audience is there (and makes sense for your organization and goals).
Perhaps your donors have asked for something like this. Perhaps this is the next YouTube and you just have a feeling… After all, if we don’t take some risks to try something new we may never see something that’s really great take off.

Cheers to innovation and to people trying to help us do good! I look forward to continuing this conversation here and at NTC.

Tanya

———-
Tanya Zumach, ePMT
Senior Director of Online Strategy
Metropolitan Group

UPDATE: Beth Kanter, who really started us off with testing and blogging about the fundraising widgets, was a little late to this thread, but her response is worth posting here as well. (A little late in Internet time means about 8 hours…) Beth is the nonprofit blog guru, a trainer and consultant to nonprofits. Beth knows what she is talking about with widgets. She raised $50,000+ for the Sharing Foundation as part of a Yahoo! contest which then matched it with another $50,000. So, $100k+ from a little fundraising widget and a lot of networking. Wow.

Hi Betsy:

Great questions!

Sorry I missed this thread, been involved in an interesting discussion about the whole notion of technology stewardship in a community of practice context. It’s about guiding people in a community to effective choices about technology — it’s about when to say yes and when to say no - even there is a lot of hype surrounding a particular new or cutting edge technology.

I’ve been thinking a lot of about technology stewardship as it applies to charity badges and widgets. I think we might do a disservice to nonprofits to focus on widgets as “powerful tools.” It’s about personal fundraising, it’s about effective campaign strategy and execution, it’s about mixing both online/offline and range of techniques, and finally it’s about having the basic capacity to make it successful.

With that said, I started tinkering with widgets back in October and shortly after ChipIn launched, I set up an action learning experiment for a personal fundraising campaign on behalf of the Sharing Foundation.

My reflections on the campaign can be found here:
http://widgetfundraising.wikispaces.com/

Widgets are fun.

For that particular campaign, I asked other bloggers to post the widget on their blogs - and lot of people did. Most of my effort when into crafting a personal, compelling campaign message on why I felt it was important to support this project (sending a young Cambodian woman to college).

The money went into a paypal account — TSF has one set up for several other online projects they are involved with.

The Network for Good/Yahoo badge campaign was connected to our network for good account. A big incentive to enter that campaign was the matching funds from Yahoo. There were 20-25 TSF board and volunteers who were involved with the initial campaign. (Note: I put the badge on my blog and it was also on the TSF Web site replacing our regular network for good button during the campaign. I asked some other people to put in their blogs too.)

The key to the success of the campaign was the fact that everyone on the board forwarded the messaging to their golf buddies, church and synagoge members, social clubs, neighbors, friends, family, PTA, employees. Board members also got on the phone, went to Rotary meetings with their laptops, knocked on doors, asked other parents while at kids soccer games, etc. It was all person-to-person fundraising - either face-to-face, on the phone, or via the Internet.

Hard copies of our messaging also went out in church bulletins during the week after Christmas. In addition, we outreached to both our organizational as well as personal email lists - many of whom are parents who forwarded to out to their networks. I also got all the tech savvy monks with laptops to forward the information to the Cambodian community - and crafted pitch in Khmer.

One reason why the personal fundraising online is a good match for Sharing Foundation culture - is because we do mostly grassroots person to person fundraising. The widgets are simply an extension of the way of have been fundraising over the years.

What I learned was this:

1. Make sure your technology capacity - as well as your fundraising campaign is place.
2. Design a small modest experiment that uses the principles of personal fundraising 3. Reflect on the results of that small experiment — what worked? what didn’t? Then plot a larger campaign involving more people

Danny and a crew and our client from the American Jewish World Service got back recently from shooting in Uganda. This shoot followed shoots in India and El Salvador where we documented the amazing work that AJWS is doing on the ground in these countries. We are all very excited to see the media products that will be developed from this material - of which there will be many. Here’s a few photos from the Uganda trip so you can see why we are excited. You will notice a shot of a river. This is the Nile up at its source, and where the crew took their day off to go rafting. You can also see the puddle-jumper they flew in to get around the country. And you can see how beautiful the people are.

I just got an email from Senator Barack Obama with a video of a preview of his announcement tomorrow (that he is running for President.) What is interesting to me is that the Brightcove player has the embed code disabled this time - unlike Obama’s first announcement. Embed code would allow me to embed the video here for you to see. A link means you have to go to the site to see it. (Here’s the video.) The reason you want to provide the embed code is so that people can distribute their message to communities of people far beyond the number of people your site can reach by itself. It might be that because this video is intended for a group of early supporters that they didn’t need it. We will keep watching.

UPDATE - 2/12/07:
If you go onto the Obama site you can watch the announcement. When you click on it, it opens a Windows Media player… Gasp! When you go to the BarackTV link you are back in the safe haven of Brightcove, where you will see the player and it does have the embed code back.

I am on the Board of Directors of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps and one issue we have been talking about is keeping alumni involved in social action after they have left the formal program. We will actually be presenting at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in Philadelphia in July this year on issues of how the new web tools and video can help service organizations recruit and fundraise and keep their alumni involved.

Rachel Chertok, the National Director for Alumni and Leadership Development at AVODAH pointed out that one issue she faces is what I call the “shadow of the uber-activist.” There are people out there who seem to do everything. They buy all the “right” products, they live in the dark, using solar energy, they take a shower in the water they used to brush their teeth and they show up to every rally and march while blogging about it and raising money for saving the orphans in eastern Africa while sipping their organic Chai (soy) latte from an independent coffee shop. And the normal people think, “I’m no activist! I can’t keep up with that.”

Rachel and I have been talking about ways to demonstrate that there are many ways to get involved and approach issues. There is no right or wrong way, and our goal is to get people to understand that doing something is better than nothing at all and that they shouldn’t be so hard on themselves. There is a dynamic which makes it easier for people to do nothing rather than feel inadequate.

What reminded me of this was a story in today’s Times about dirt floors, or “earthen floors” as they are called. You can take some mud, sand and stuff, pour it on your floor, smooth it out, let it dry (for about a month) and seal it with wax. Why? Not sure. But this is an environmental thing, and from the photos they actually look quite stunning.

The couple [installing the floor] are part of a new breed of environmentally conscious homeowners who are willing to forgo traditional floorings like hardwood, carpeting and concrete for the supposed benefits of earthen floors: a reduction in heating costs and environmental impact and, at least in the eyes of some, an improvement in looks.

So it looks good. But…

But lest anyone get the wrong impression, dirt is neither easy nor trouble-free — nor is it entirely practical, as women who wear pointy four-inch heels will find. In a lot of places, the dirt often “cracks horrendously,” said Bill Steen, a natural builder in Elgin, Ariz., because “they just pound it into place.” Mr. Steen and his wife, Athena Swentzell Steen, have led an effort to modernize the techniques, adding sand and fiber in carefully calibrated amounts to control cracking.

So, to each their own. And if this is something that helps save some trees, then more power to it. But I couldn’t help thinking what a crazy country we live in, with people buying giant TVs and having cosmetic surgery and all kinds of wacky consumption and the voyeurism of reality TV… and dirt floors too. Danny just got back with a crew from three trips for the American Jewish World Service, to India, El Salvador and Uganda. In these countries a lot of people have dirt floors also.

When Time Magazine cynically said “you” are the person of the year, this was probably the first time many people had any inkling of this thing we call Web 2.0. The web is no longer what it once was — a brochure, linked to other brochures. It has become a world where consumers are publishers and even the simple act of visiting a web page becomes an act of publishing - by increasing the popularity of an article which is then reflected in it’s position on a page, or by adding your profile to a list of visitors (see the recent readers section of this blog in the bottom right side of the page).

This Web 2.0 revolution has been made possible by technology that separates content from how it’s displayed. A simple case of this is the “print version” of an article at CNN.com or any other site. The print version isn’t another version at all, its the same exact content being pushed into a different style sheet. Take that concept further and you have the phenomenon of widgets and embeddable media players. In other words, if I can push the content into a style sheet on our own website, I can also push the content into a totally different form that can live anywhere on the web, or even on a desktop.

At See3 we believe that this Web 2.0 revolution is compelling because of another, less talked about revolution that has taken place at the same time — broadband. In the last two years we finally crossed the threshold of critical mass for broadband penetration, meaning that the web can finally have the kind of rich media integration we have talked about for a decade.

See3 works with organizations first to create compelling content with a focus on visual media - coming to engagements knowing that video content is driving increasing web usage. We then package this emotionally powerful media into portable toolkits that can be published a million times in a million different places. And we identify where to find the “influencers” by mapping the community of bloggers and websites written and read by people predisposed to care about our client’s issues. All of this work is in the context of the strategy to align organizational resources so that they will effectively and efficiently get people to act and care and donate.

Here’s a really nice intro to Web 2.0 concepts and development from Michael Wesch a professor at Kansas State University’s anthropology department.

Our mantra to nonprofits is document, document, document. We want organizations to document the interesting and innovative things they do everyday and then use a growing library of material to nimbly create visual media products, from event videos to direct response web clips.

One of the benefits of documentation over time is that the organization can look back on where its been and reflect on its success. The same is true of individuals. My wife Jessica was digging through stuff at the house when she came across a 10-year old video tape. It turns out that it was a local Baltimore news report called “Israel through Baltimore Eyes.” The report featured a family that had moved to Israel from Baltimore, us. Wow, I have aged a lot in the past 10 years (though Jessica is as beautiful as ever). Have a look:

The Super Bowl was a real disappointment, and not only because the Colts won. I thought the commercials were pretty bad as well. Stuart Eliot in The Times made an interesting connection between all the violence in the ads and the Iraq War. I think the most interesting story on the ad front was the continued popularity of user-generated content. My brother’s theory is that everyone is trying to be cool like YouTube, but I think that’s only part of it. The Doritos commercial was the result of a user generated ad contest - a tactic we have seen nonprofits use successfully (though not at this level). The ad received more than 140 million impressions BEFORE the Super Bowl. Given that the Super Bowl will give you 90 million impressions, it was a home run before it even ran. I also thought this ad was one of the most clever of the night, and it cost about $12 to make.

Today I am in Washington and will speak in a couple hours at the Make Your Documentary Matter conference. This conference, put on by the excellent folks at the Center for Social Media at American University, started with a very interesting program last night about video on mobile phones. We heard from someone from PBS who did a literacy test using Sesame Street characters to send letter information to cell phones that parents will share with their kids. This seems quite ahead of it’s time and while the program showed that the kids learned their letters, I wonder if that was simply because their parents were engaged in the issue - something that could have been achieved more simply and cheaply another way.

An even more interesting talk was given by someone else with a PBS affiliate, talking about the upcoming American Experience event, We Shall Remain, which will document Native American history. As part of this project, they are giving cell phones with video cameras in them to Native Americans around the country. These phones, the Nokia N93, are amazing. With 30 frames per second video, high level optics, and even editing capabilities within the phone, these are way above what we have seen to-date in this area. What is also interesting is that the phones have removable memory cards, so you actually don’t even need the cell network to use them. The participants can mail the cards in when they are full or complete a shoot. The speaker, Benjamen Walker, pointed out that some of the most viewed videos on YouTube were shot with cell phones — Saddam’s hanging, Michael Richards, the UCLA student who got Tasered.

I will try to write more later from here or on the plane home later today.