Charities see potential in tapping young Web users to promote their causes online

By Wailin Wong

Tribune reporter

April 30, 2008

Online social networks used to be just gathering places for friends and long-lost acquaintances. Then the marketers arrived, followed by politicians and job recruiters, all looking to tap into a growing mass of young people who are spending much of their time on the Web. Now, non-profit organizations are testing ways to raise money through these networks, betting that the Internet’s viral nature will open fresh avenues for fundraising and marketing.

It’s a big change for non-profits as they shift from direct-mail campaigns and relying on the checkbooks of older givers to the unpredictable whims of Web popularity. Though the transition is nascent, charities see potential in recruiting young activists who already use online networks to broadcast their identities and make connections.

Actress Cynthia Osuji of New York is a case in point. She became interested in a women’s health non-profit when she received a mass e-mail about auditions for a Circle of Health International-sponsored benefit production of Eve Ensler’s “A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer.” The group also was seeking board members to plan the show.

After Osuji, 26, won a spot in the cast and joined the board, she added a copy of the show poster to her MySpace profile. Out-of-town friends who couldn’t attend the show ended up making donations and two “Facebook friends,” casual acquaintances who learned of the benefit through the site, came to the March performance.

Osuji said the show brought her back into community service, an activity she hadn’t pursued since high school. “Violence against women and women in conflict [areas] is something that’s very personal to me,” she said.

Circle of Health International has its own Facebook page, and 26-year-old Matt Bieber clicked on an application called Causes that allowed him to invite more than 100 of his 200-plus contacts to publicize the non-profit on their profile pages. His recruitment effort was akin to distributing virtual bumper stickers with the option to donate through the site. Eleven of his friends added the non-profit to their profiles.

Sean Parker, who helped create Causes, said, “If you can activate a group of people and get some of those people to replicate the process … you’ve got the basis for a movement.”

Outside of general communities like Facebook and MySpace, there are also social networking sites dedicated to philanthropy such as YourCause.com, HopeEquity .org and actor Kevin Bacon’s SixDegrees.org.

Now established institutions like the MacArthur Foundation and the Case Foundation want to know more about the tie between digital life and philanthropy. They are funding studies of online social networks, civic engagement in the Millennial Generation and philanthropy in virtual worlds like Second Life.

“We’re not claiming [online networks are] the panacea for philanthropies,” said Ben Binswanger, the Case Foundation’s chief operating officer. “[But] we think it’s way too early to dismiss it as an Internet fad. … We’re going to keep pushing down this path because we see enough spark here to make it interesting.”

Power to engage

For non-profits, the power of social networks is engagement, not necessarily sheer dollar numbers.

“If you send out a direct-mail piece, you never know if people open it up or not, unless they mail a check back to you,” said Steve Byers, director of development and communications at Kansas-City based WaterPartners International, which promotes safe drinking water. “With the online community, we know which pages they’re clicking on. … They want to provide feedback and interact with the organization in ways that are very exciting and challenging.”

WaterPartners created three fictional characters from Ethiopia, India and Honduras and placed them in a virtual village on Second Life to illustrate the challenges of accessing potable water. The avatars also have profiles on MySpace and Facebook, and shots of their Second Life village are posted on photo-sharing site Flickr. While the amount of money raised so far is tiny, Byers said he could see online marketing and fundraising slowly displacing direct mail.

“I’ve been in fundraising for over 20 years, so this is really kind of a brave new world for me,” he said. “I’ve really had to rethink my whole approach to fundraising through the Internet.”

Clearly, online fundraising is in its infancy. A survey by The Chronicle of Philanthropy showed that online giving for 187 large charities totaled $1.2 billion in 2006, up from $881 million in 2005. But of 147 organizations, 103 said online donations accounted for less than 1 percent of total contributions in 2006.

“There is no really large, significant fundraising happening on social networks, but there’s a sense in the non-profit community that that’s where the prospects come from,” said Michael Hoffman, chief executive of Chicago non-profit consulting firm See3 Communications.

Building relationships

Some non-profits that have a presence on social networking sites have discovered a new relationship with users.

Carie Lewis, the Humane Society’s Internet marketing manager, said she finds herself responding to lots of mundane questions on pet care as a result of maintaining a presence on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. More important, Lewis said she’s discovered supporters outside the organization’s traditional demographic of women in their 50s.

“It was a lot of work, but it really paid off for us,” Lewis said. The Humane Society has raised more than $33,000 on Facebook from users who have set up pages to protest everything from puppy mills to seal clubbing in Namibia. The amount of money raised is small, but convinced Lewis’ bosses that the online efforts have merit.

“Traditionally, I think non-profits focus on high-value donors, and what MySpace provides is an enormous network of people who are able to get involved through volunteering, offline events and donating in smaller amounts,” said Lee Brenner, who oversees activism-related content on MySpace.

Link [Chicago Tribune]

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

The Obama campaign has already responded to the gas tax issue with a new ad. What’s amazing is how short the cycle for new creative has become. Can your organization produce something new in two days?

Link [Obama Ad on YouTube]

There is a new comScore report about online video.

Some highlights:

” U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos during the month, representing a 3-percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66-percent gain versus February 2007.”

“In February, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 3.6 billion videos viewed (35.4 percent share of all videos), gaining 1.1 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.”

“Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.”

And, if you are still not sure you MUST have a video strategy consider:

Other notable findings from February 2008 include:

* 72.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube.com (42.6 videos per viewer).
* 50.2 million viewers watched 539 million videos on MySpace.com (10.7 videos per viewer).
* The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
* The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos.

Link [comScore Press Release]

Hat Tip [Jeremy Liew]

One problem that nonprofits have had is the lack of traffic to their sites, or lack of focused traffic to their actionable pages — such as donations or volunteer opportunities.

Greg McHale, a technology start-up veteran and the founder of cMarket, a auction management service for nonprofits, has started good2gether to solve this problem. What he is doing simply put is creating a database of nonprofit content and then syndicating that database across the websites of local media, such as newspapers and radio stations. The content is fed into a page next to articles based on the context of the article. So, for example, an article about literacy in Chicago would show information on a Chicago nonprofit fighting illiteracy. A click would take the visitor to the good2gether page, where the nonprofit can also sell corporate sponsorships — I assume the price of which is split with good2gether.

It is an interesting model and given that it’s free for the nonprofits it’s a no brainer to give it shot. Here’s Greg talking about it in his own words:

Link [what is
good2gether]
Hat Tip [Deborah Elizabeth Finn]

WebsiteOptimization.com has some interesting information about how web pages have grown in size and complexity over the last few years. You can read the whole story here and below is a piece of the story about multimedia that interests us in particular. Of particular interest is how many videos are abandon and how broadband is still catching up to allow for a seamless viewing experience.

The Growth of Multimedia on the Web

The use of streaming media on the Web has increased by more than 100% each year (Li et al. 2005). From 2000 to 2005 the total volume of streaming media files stored on the Web grew by more than 600%. More than 87% of all streaming media is abandoned by users in the first 10 seconds, however, wasting up to 20% of server bandwidth (Guo et al. 2005). [I wonder if that's still true.] While only 3% of server responses are for videos, they account for over 98.6% of the bytes transferred (Gill et al. 2007). In true Pareto fashion, about 10% of the most popular videos on YouTube account for nearly 80% of the views, making caching an appealing performance enhancement (Cha et al. 2007).

Overall, for videos longer than 30 seconds, about 13% of home and 40% of business users experience quality degradation with their streaming media, caused by re-buffering, stream switching, and video cancellation. For sessions longer than 300 seconds, the results are even worse. As broadband penetration has increased, videos have grown in size, bit rate, and duration (see Figure 5).

In 1997, 90% of videos were under 45 seconds in length (Acharya & Smith 1998). In 2005, the median video was about 120 seconds long (Li et al. 2005). By 2007, the median video was 192.6 seconds in duration (Gill et al. 2007). The median bit rate of web videos grew from 200Kbps in 2005 to 328Kbps on YouTube in 2007. So by late 2007, the median video weighed in at over 63MB in file size. On YouTube, the average video size is 10MB, with over 65,000 new videos added every day.

MoveOn has to be running what could be called the most successful video contest ever — if the measurement is participation.

Their Obama in 30 Seconds contest invited people to make a 30-second spot, positive only, to help elect Barack Obama. They got over 1,000 entries, which is great. But they are, as of this writing, rapidly approaching 4 million votes to the contest. Now, there are many YouTube videos with millions or views, but in this contest each person has to vote for each video in three categories, so this is a higher level of engagement.

The whole thing is set-up beautifully. They are using Amazon S3 to host the video in their own player. They made the embed code available as well as a permalink. They require votes (out of 5 stars) in three categories, Positive Message, Originality, Overall Impact. They serve up the videos in a random order to make sure every video will get lots of votes.

Now, if success is electing Obama we don’t know how effective it is yet. But it shows the video contest is here to stay and making high quality media is easier than ever.

The quality of the videos varies greatly. Here’s a nice one I saw, but then because of the random serving I couldn’t find it again on the MoveOn site, but found it on YouTube:

[Link to video]

Sometimes when we meet with organizations they wonder how important this whole Internet thing really is to their organizations. The folks at South Park continue to have their pulse on the national mood. What happens when the Internet goes down?

Hat Tip [Fred Wilson]
Link [South Park Studios]