See What’s Out There

At the 2009 Convio Summit, Michael Hoffman was joined by Ramya Raghavan of the YouTube Nonprofit Program and David Neff of American Cancer Society for a session about online video.

We created a YouTube playlist of the session, which you can watch and share below. For more of our videos, check out the See3 YouTube channel.

Session description:

This session will cover how using videos to tell stories and drive support can be an effective strategy for nonprofit organizations. In this session we’ll discuss using constituent-generated videos to reach your audience on YouTube and your web site, walk through the great examples of using video on Convio-powered pages and share practical tips on integrating video strategically and technically.

It’s been a busy start to the week at the 2009 Convio Summit! At the conference, Nonprofit Live TV interviewed See3 CEO Michael Hoffman about creating a video strategy, video as a transaction, and why story still matters.

We also had the chance to speak with Convio staff and users during the three-day event. Watch what attendees took away from the last day of the conference.

If you want to see more of the Convio Summit, take a look at the videos featured on the See3 YouTube Channel.

We are having a great time at the Convio Summit 2009 in Austin. Today at lunch Vinay Bhagat, Convio’s founder and an expert in nonprofit web marketing spoke about trends online.

One thing he talked about was video and social media and how these new online tools have become more important to nonprofits. He was kind enough to give a shout-out to See3, telling the crowd to come and meet us. (If you aren’t at the Convio Summit you can still meet us, just call the office 773-784-7333)

Here’s the video:

We are here in Austin at the 2009 Convio Summit! We are speakers, exhibitors and sponsors and are really excited to now be a Convio Authorized Solution Provider.

Here’s what our booth set up looks like.

MoveOn has been a leader in using the web, and email in particular, to get their message out. If you don’t know MoveOn, they started with a simple email during the Clinton impeachment — lets move on — and it grew and grew.

They are no strangers to using video either. They have had video contests, and have made lots of 30-second spots. They have used the web to fundraise for these spots.

Today I saw something different from MoveOn. Eli Pariser, the Executive Director of MoveOn.org Political Action did a direct response video. It came in an email with a little text and a large screen shot of a video player window. It said:

Dear MoveOn member,
I recorded a video message for you about this election year—it felt too important to put in a regular email.

Watch it here:

The here is this page on the MoveOn.org site.

The page is their standard fundraising page (the kind you get with services such as Convio or Kintera). In the video he even points down to the donation form from his YouTube box, asking the viewer to donate right now to kick of the 2008 campaign activities.

At See3 we’ve been exploring this direct response video technique for a while. We think that in certain circumstances it can work well and we will try to find out how this does relative to non-video landing pages.

The last session at the Convio Summit in Austin was well attended, and a fun way to finish the event on Friday. Called “Web 2.0 – New Outreach and Fundraising Techniques,” the topic of this workshop is something every nonprofit marketing manager and online communications professional wants to talk about. The presenters were Carie Lewis of the Humane Society, and Tim Fullerton of Oxfam America, who both gave great insight on what’s happening in the trenches – actual day-to-day examples of how nonprofits can work online communities to gain new supporters, coming directly from the people writing the blog posts, friending people on MySpace, and testing new strategies.

Carie opened with an intro to social media. She says social networks are “not just a bunch of lonely teenage boys.” 84% of people comment, 82% message others, and 39% create content. She notes that people really rely on social networks for influence on decision-making. To me, this confirms as viable the strategy of finding those community leaders who will carry your torch for you, and then messaging them with content to distribute to their friends. She acknowledged it can be very time consuming, and reiterated a suggestion See3 often makes to our clients: get interns and volunteers!

Both HSUS and Oxfam’s primary efforts are on what Carie calls “the big four”: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I agree based on sheer traffic volume, the first 3 are no-brainers for any nonprofit to start. However, neither Carie nor Tim discussed social bookmarking or social news strategies in any depth, and Digg, Stumble Upon, and del.icio.us certainly have enough traffic to warrant a deep approach.

On MySpace: Both Oxfam and HSUS prove what we already know from Greenpeace and others – MySpace is a great place to get new advocates. How did they get so many friends? One at a time. When she started the MySpace page, Carie literally requested friends one by one. Tim started by seeing who was already talking about Oxfam. They recommend spending an hour per day building your network. Oxfam now has a very nice custom page. They both use the MySpace blog, which reminds us again to speak to the community where they are, don’t try and drag them over to your main blog. HSUS is now getting 200 friend requests/day. Of the people that friend them, 29% found their page via search, and 13% came from their website. If you are a small organization, you won’t get that traffic. But 36% discovered them through a friend’s profile. This shows the viral potential of raising awareness in the social networks. Tim says MySpace is not good for fundraising, although we have seen some examples of orgs running successful fundraising campaigns, such as Dollars for Darfur.

On Facebook: I think everyone agrees it’s very early. So far, the only real strategy to analyze besides creating groups is the Causes application. Tim says it’s great to see thousands of people join the Oxfam cause, but he does not know who those people are and has no way to follow up with them. Carie says HSUS has raised $20k through the Causes app, though I’m not finding that in my search of Causes. Regardless, very few orgs (though some) have raised real cash via the Causes app. Developing custom Facebook apps may be the way to go, as already discussed on this blog.

On YouTube: everyone loves video. Oxfam ran a campaign against Starbucks with a video being crucial to the resulting success. HSUS ran a video contest during the outcry over the Michael Vick story that received 22 submissions, over 43,000 views of the contest intro video (featuring Hulk Hogan), and garnered 2,000 new list members. They ran their contest on YouTube, but See3 has a private label, fully customizable video contest hosting, management, and marketing solution.

On blogging and blogger outreach: They both moderate every single comment on the blog (they recommend not to allow auto-posting), and someone responds personally to each comment. They also suggest: make it personal, using your real voice; don’t reprint press releases or other web stories; be concise (advice I am not following here ). There was a question from the audience on blogger outreach, from someone who got no traffic from buying an ad on a relevant blog, and got no love from the blogger either. Carie and Tim say customize and personalize each message to bloggers, warm them up, and sell your story. Carie suggests offering exclusivity on a news story in return for promotion, and reminds us to always ask them to link back to your blog. Shana Glickfield of Issue Dynamics Inc., a blogger and consultant on blogger relations, added that your first contact with a blogger should not be an ask. You should touch base with them prior to your campaign, send them swag and information of interest on an ongoing basis.

On Second Life: Tim and Carie both say stay away. I say wait for the MacArthur Foundation’s year-long exploration of the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds, and for significantly increased daily activity on Second Life, and in the meantime focus on video and other live action social media opportunities.

Some final thoughts from my trip to the Convio Summit this week:

1. Some commentators misread notwithstanding, the Convio Open initiative is significant, and the Facebook application builder, while not nearly perfect or complete, represents a great short-cut to building a custom application for Facebook for most Convio customers. Having content go directly from your CMS to your Facebook application pages makes having a Facebook app much more manageable to most and keeps the interactions with Facebook users within your primary CRM tool.

2. I am not sure going public will be a good thing for Convio. On the plus side, raising $80+ million can go a long way toward building out a more robust product, buying competitors, beefing up marketing, etc. On the downside, there will be new pressures for short-term performance that might not always be in the customers’ best interest.

3. The founder of GetActive, the software company that merged with Convio earlier this year, is leaving. Sheeraz Haji became the President of Convio when the merger was announced, but at the summit in Austin, through a video message, Sheeraz said he was leaving. (He just had a kid, so he couldn’t make the trip.) My guess, the whole merger was a way for Sheeraz to exit and find the liquidity in an IPO they could never have achieved alone. Lets hope Sheeraz decides to do something innovative in the nonprofit space. And lets hope that enough of the great spirit of GetActive survives in Convio.

4. I have heard that many GetActive customers have received a lot of hand-holding and positive experience with the whole migration issue to the Convio platform. What I heard at the summit was that this is not the universal experience. To have a successful IPO, Convio must be successful in the migration of GetActive customers. If enough of them bolt, the public market will have issues with this offering.

5. Convio is growing annually at more than 50%. Given how small they are relative to Blackbaud (which has over $200 million in annual revenue and a billion dollar market cap), it’s not enough for them to be a successful public company. I don’t see how Convio can get enough top-line revenue with their existing product in their existing market, without taking every Kintera customer — and that’s not going to happen. Threats are everywhere — for example… Salesforce + third-party applications being one, and an increasingly robust Drupal + CiviCRM being another, plus all kinds of low-end players. So, expect to see Convio adding some new products or reaching out to some new markets to get the growth they will need.

6. Quentin Tarantino is the man. He came into the Tex Mex place I was in on Wednesday night in Austin. (Guero’s Taco Bar, for you Austin people.)

7. The team at Care2 are great. I enjoy hanging out with them. While lots of people run in lots of Web 2.0 directions, the folks at Care2 are focused on giving nonprofits clear ROI for their fundraising and advocacy dollar. If you are a progressive organization, an environmental organization, an animal organization or a medical organization, you should talk to the folks at Care2 and see how they can help you grow your list.

I just left session about Convio open. I will write more about the API later, but everyone is really there to see the Facebook opportunity.

Convio has built a Facebook application builder as part of their Open initiative. For organizations on the Convio platform, the Facebook application is a no-brainer and a HUGE improvement from Causes.

The main difference between Causes and the Facebook application powered by Convio is that with Convio your application on Facebook will have all of your content delivered directly from your Convio database and CMS. So the pages of your app have your content and to change this content all you have to do is use the Convio backend in the way you would normally do. Causes uses information created within their program and data from Guidestar. It doesn’t allow people to take your organizational actions or sign-up for your newsletters the way Convio’s application does.

They have also made it easy to build.

There are a couple of limitations to this. First, you can only create one Facebook application. So if you have different initiatives going on, you can’t create different applications for each using this tool. My assumption is that you could custom build a Facebook application using the API, but if you wanted to use their Facebook connector, you would have to only have one. Another thing mentioned in the session is that using conditional content is complicated. So it might not be so easy to deliver specific messages to specific people within Facebook the way you might elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see how many organizations roll this out in the coming months and to track the success with it.

Some video I shot with my Flip:

Intro to Facebook and their application builder:

Why Convio’s Facebook app builder is better than Causes

Today is the first full day of the Convio Summit. More than 700 people are here in Austin, both clients and partners, to learn about what Convio is up to, and to learn from each other about best practices for nonprofits online.

This morning’s keynote address was from Convio CEO Gene Austin. He made an engaging presentation, the highlight of which was his demo of their Facebook application. He started by putting on a baseball hat backwards, saying he needed to get into his Facebook clothes. He then described (in a very funny way) how upset his college-age kids were by being “friended” by their father on Facebook.

I am genuinely impressed by what I am seeing here. The main thing for me is the level of transparency they show in terms of issues. Gene Austin talked about issues they had this summer with their infrastructure, he talked about their “patient investors” and the IPO as a way to reward them in addition to being fuel for further grown, and he talked about the GetActive merger in a very transparent way, admitting that some things were good from Convio and some things better from GetActive and that it took a couple quarters for them to figure out where they were taking it.

The biggest buzz here is about the API and the initiative they call Open. “The proof” of the success of the Open initiative, Gene Austin said, will be 12-18 months from now — when we see what people are doing with it. The other thing he did that was interesting was take a big swipe at Blackbaud. He said, “we got religion” on the issue of openness. Our product can stand on it’s own and we are confident. Blackbaud, in contrast, wants you to only use their products and only live within their system. “We don’t think that’s good for the environment.”

In addition to conections to Facebook, they have built connections to Raiser’s Edge (without the benefit of a Blackbaud API). They have also built connections to Flickr, a Plaxo tool for importing contacts and Salesforce. He described how much easier it was to work with Salesforce, with a published API, than to work with Blackbaud.

More to come from the Convio Summit 2007

Convio is announcing the launch of their API and open platform, called Open. They join Kintera and the gold standard of open API’s Salesforce.com in allowing outside developers to tap into their data and extend the functionality of their applications.

How is this useful?

Imagine you run one program for your main donor database and another program for your email and online data. Until recently, the main way to deal with this was cumbersome import and export of data from one system to another. With an API, you can write new software code that hooks one application into another. Or, more likely, you can use code developed by a third-party that does what you need.

Convio’s system is looking really cool. And in addition to the typical API, they also announced a Facebook application builder. This will let an organization create a Facebook application by tapping into the functionality and content they are already using with Convio. I will learn more about this this week when I attend the Convio user group meeting in Austin.

In the meantime, read the terrific write-up about this from Michelle Murrain at her blog Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology.