See What’s Out There

It’s really the fine details that matter most when it comes to website design: the balance of text and images on a page, the user experience after submitting a form, how linkable text appears throughout the site.

But think also about how your website appears when shared on other sites, like when someone shares it as a link on Facebook. It’s important. When Facebook users scan a busy news feed, a strong image or a bold headline can make all the difference and lead to a better click conversion.

In many cases, a link shared will look something like this:

The image is random, the headline is muddled, and the description is non-existent.

But the good news is you can control how all these things appear. You can make it pretty like this (for the Girl2Woman website we built for Pathfinder International):

A bunch of our clients have asked how to make sure a web page shares beautifully on Facebook, so I thought we’d share this quick tip with other nonprofits as well. All you have to do is include the following meta tags in the head of the website or webpage you want to customize, and make sure the text and image match what you want.

Simple!

A good nonprofit video gives a sneak peak into an organization. It celebrates accomplishments. It digs deep into a global issue. But that’s not enough. It has to move viewers and give them the tools to take action.

What do you want your viewer to do? Share? Donate? Read more? Sign a petition? Volunteer?

More importantly, are you giving your viewer the tools to take action easily? YouTube is thinking about these questions, and they have already created tools specifically for organizations in the YouTube for Nonprofit Program that allow you to create annotations in your video that link to an external website.

Facebook Video clearly doesn’t have the flexibility of YouTube, but in the past couple months they’ve added a small video feature that’s worth mentioning.

If you upload a video to your Facebook fan page, a “Become a Fan” overlay button will automatically appear upon mouse over.

It’s a simple call-to-action that lets your viewer stay more connected in the long-term. If you want to increase your Facebook fans, you should be driving potential supporters to one of your Facebook videos so they can engage with your media and easily become a fan of your organization.

Watch one of our videos and become our fan!

If you missed your opportunity to donate to a nonprofit on Facebook during “America’s Giving Challenge”, which raised more than $1 million from more than 50,000 donations in 3 weeks, you now have another chance to give on Facebook.

A new program is going live today called the Chase Community Giving Program, between Chase and Facebook.

What this means is:

· For the first time ever, Facebook users will be able to choose from more than 500,000 small and local charities to decide which community organizations they want to receive donations totaling millions of dollars from a corporate philanthropy fund.

· Facebook users, now totaling more than 300 million, will be able to vote for which small and local non profits will receive donations totaling $5 million

· The eligible charity receiving the most votes will be awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will be awarded $25,000 each

· This $5 million Facebook effort is in addition to the bank’s traditional philanthropic giving, and if successful, the bank hopes to commit more of its annual philanthropy funds using this innovative method of giving.

We’ve already seen a lot of people casting their votes on Facebook, so now it’s your turn!

Last week we asked our friends on Twitter, “What do you have more of - Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or LinkedIn contacts?” Based on the responses we received, it looks like Facebook wins, followed closely by Twitter and LinkedIn.

It’s important to note that each social-networking platform has its own culture and use. Whereas you might connect with a business acquaintance on LinkedIn, you’re probably more likely to see photos of your friend’s new baby on Facebook or get in a heated discussion about a new website with another user on Twitter.

However, these cultures are not rigid. Facebook is rapidly transitioning from its college roots to a space for the professional world just as LinkedIn has added new applications like RSS feeds and SlideShare to make its user profiles more personal. And although many caution against joining too many social-networks at once, all three are worth looking into for both personal and business use.

Thanks to everyone who responded! Next week’s question: Do you have a secret for dealing with spam email? Just reply @See3 on Twitter.

Last week we asked our friends on Twitter, “ What’s your favorite social-networking site?” Check out some of the responses below:

Next week’s question: How many times do you check your email per day? Just reply @See3 on Twitter.

Even if your nonprofit is already involved in the world of social media, these 3 tips from David J. Neff of the American Cancer Society (which recently released the video platform sharinghope.tv) are helpful for expanding your online strategy:

1) Experiment - You should personally explore social networks before you make a profile for your nonprofit. That way you will understand the most effective way to publicize your organization and make meaningful connections on sites likes Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

2) Buy a Video Camera - You should be making lots of video and some can be done in-house, easily and cheaply. While these videos will never replace professionally produced material, they can supplement your online content and be an effective way to engage people on social networks. You can buy a point-and-shoot camera like the Flip video for under $200. For a higher quality consumer camera, we recommend the Canon HV30.

3) Research - Don’t just look at what fellow organizations are doing, pay attention to what big corporations and creative agencies are turning out. You may not have the same budget but social media helps to level the playing field. For example, Michael highlighted Office Max’s One Penny Campaign in a previous post. Take a look and you’ll notice how little money or production quality you need when the idea is compelling.

“Social Network Portability” is the new next thing. The idea is that you have a profile that you invest time in, say on Facebook. That profile can follow you to other interactions on other websites. So, for example, say I am writing a comment on Amazon. Why fill out a whole new profile, why not just carry my profile with me.

“Through Facebook Connect, members will be able to use their Facebook identities across the Web–profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook profile content, for example, could appear on other social sites, and Facebook event listings could theoretically connect with external event and invitation services.”

CNET’s News.com has what details there are at this point.

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

I went to several Web 2.0 sessions at NTEN, Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans last week. It was amazing how many there were, sometimes even two at the same time. They were all very good, and all the same. My one criticism of all of them is addressed at the end of this post. Also at the end, I have embedded the presentations of several of those folks I mention.

The first session I attended was specifically about social networking and led by Brian Reich of Echo Ditto, author of Media Rules!

Brian’s big point was that there’s a lot of noise to cut through and to engage people you must deploy quality, focused, niche communications. Volume and frequency are not primary considerations. Most importantly, participate with authenticity. This is something anyone studying the space knows. You must be a credible member of the community sharing useful information and thoughtful comments before anyone will respond to your asks.

A good tip Brian mentioned was to deputize people to grow your network for you. This is something we have been working on at See3 – methods to build a network of influencers in the social networks who will carry your torch. Giving people certain authority to speak on your behalf, and rewarding them with praise or titles or special invitations to events, etc. In other words, to formalize that relationship is a great idea. Another point Brian made was that perhaps Facebook and Myspace are not for your organization. You may find better success participating in a niche social network like Changents or Gather. I suggest another one to explore, Rethos.

Brian provided an overview of many of the social networks out there. He talked about LinkedIn, but he did not address LinkedIn for Good. I asked him afterwards if he knew of any case studies or saw any potential for using LinkedIn for Good, which launched last year with much buzz but seems like nothing but tumbleweeds rolling by since. His thoughtful response: “I know a bunch of people have tried (and there has actually been some discussion within the NTEN blogs and community about it) to use LinkedIn as a fundraising platform. The LinkedIn platform isn’t structured exactly to support direct fundraising, and I think people don’t necessarily appreciate when you don’t respect the medium. But I have seen groups use LinkedIn to form committees that do fundraising, to have people volunteer time from an in-kind standpoint, etc. So, if you use the right tools through LinkedIn, you can get that much closer to a donation–so I’d say that is a better path. All experiments still, but there is clearly potential.”

Brian emphasized that social networking is not for every organization, and that you must consider your goals, strategies, tactics, and resources, not assuming the use of any particular tool. This notion was echoed by the other presenters on this topic that I saw, but Brian said it the best and with the most authority: “If you leave this conference, go back to your team and say, ‘We need a Facebook strategy’ then I have failed…”

Beth Kanter led a mere four sessions. I attended two of them. The first was about ROI. Coming from a background in SEM and lead generation, I was so glad to see “Web 2.0 ROI” as the title of a session. Beth pointed out a great study on blogging ROI from Forrester. She asked the audience how many people use formal ROI evaluations with regard to social media efforts. I was glad my hand was up but sad it was one of only two.

The first panelist was Eve Smith from Easter Seals. They tried the Causes challenge – seeking donors on Facebook - and her biggest takeaway was that influencers are more valuable than donors. I assume what she means is that if you find the influencers, they will bring you more donors than you could find on your own. Makes sense.

Wendy Harman from the Red Cross gave her case study on Project Listen. She does an amazing job at communicating with and monitoring the blogosphere and reporting on coverage of her organization. Her take-aways from that activity are that internally, people love the feedback from bloggers, and externally, people love to know that you care.

Danielle Brigida from NWF presented a case study on Digg and StumbleUpon. It took her 7 months to establish relationships in the Digg community sufficiently to get good results (ie, popular stories). Just like anywhere else, you have to be a credible, authentic participant and contribute valuable information in order for others to reciprocate. In StumbleUpon, she saw results from being the source of quality, relevant info. I have embedded Danielle’s PowerPoint below.

Carie Lewis, who does tremendous things on Myspace and in other social media channels, gave a case study on HSUS’s video contest after the Michael Vick dogfighting incident. HSUS only got 22 entries but from a marketing perspective it was a success in part because Hulk Hogan did the promo video for the contest. She learned from the experience to require email in the voting tool, target people likely to submit videos, and do more blogger outreach. See3 has run many successful video contests (a few examples here, here and here). Video contests can be a great way to give your community something tangible to do and create great content for your organization in the process.

Justin Perkins from Care2 presented his famous social media ROI calculator. The big take-away here is that if you assume one full-time staff member getting paid $52k/yr dedicated to social media can yield even 10,000 new email addresses for your organization in a year (which I agree would be a lot), then your CPA is $5.20/name. Justin says “there are cheaper ways to acquire email addresses.” He respectfully refrained from plugging Care2, which uses a brilliant petition process to find supporters for your cause among their network of 7 million activists at the cost of between $2-3/name.

My understanding of Care2, based on comments from Care2 clients, is that the lists perform well, however the demographic is clearly progressive, and somewhat skewed to middle-aged women. So how much any organization should rely on Care2 for list-growth really depends on your mission, objectives, and your own community. There is a lot more to this discussion, such as all of the potential benefits to social media marketing beyond strictly list-growth, such as branding, fostering community, creating discussion, distributing media materials, participating in existing communities, and many other results more difficult to fit in a spreadsheet. Again, what are your goals.

Another Web 2.0 related session I attended was See3’s Michael Hoffman about online video, which he already summarized. My take-aways from his session: “viral to what end?” Michael made the point very well that everyone wants their video to go viral, but that is not a legitimate goal in itself. Views do not necessarily lead to donations and email addresses. You need a strategy for your video and your call to action. This relates to Michael’s other session on using microsites to convert views to action. He said it’s important to start with stories and to have a strong call to action. Now here’s the part where I criticize my boss. He showed this as an example of a direct response piece, which is a great video and performed well in the email appeal for which it was created, but not nearly as well as this one, which has a much stronger call to action and is the better example.

The last session on Web 2.0 I attended was called “The Next Latest Thing: The Future of Technology in Nonprofits” led by John Kenyon with Beth. I have to say, the title of this session was misleading. Upon reflection, “the next latest thing” seems cheeky, but “the future of technology in nonprofits” seemed like a fun exploration into the unknown rather than a run-down of the most contemporary tools everyone else was talking about. Nevertheless, what I liked about this session was that John did a great job of getting comments from the crowd after each point, creating some discussion and incorporating feedback into his presentation. What I also liked about this session is that John echoed many things we advocate at See3: tell stories, get user-generated content as a great way to efficiently acquire marketing material and ignite your audience, use media to engage people.

Now here is my criticism of all Web 2.0 sessions, as promised at the beginning of this post: most, if not all, of the case studies are from large organizations with communications teams and resources that allow them to try things like video and daily engagement in social networks. But what about the small organizations that have one person responsible for marketing & communications, and that person is also the network administrator, web manager, and events coordinator? What can they do? We cannot solve their problem of limited resources, but we can find their successful case studies and present them to inspire other organizations like them, which is a majority of nonprofits. I’d be happy to moderate that panel next year in San Francisco.

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Platform is all the rage. Facebook is a platform — meaning, you can develop your own applications on top of their functionality. YouTube is now a platform. What this means is that you can do more embedding YouTube into your site, allowing people to upload video to your YouTube channel from your site and having people leave comments on your site that will end up in your YouTube comments. What this does not do it give you a white label service like Brightcove. You will still have the YouTube watermark and still be part of the YouTube community. So if you are committed to YouTube as an organization you could create landing pages that encourage your constituents to comment on your site, making the video more valuable back within the YouTube community (because comments are an indication to search of relevance).

Here’s the details from TechCrunch:

In case there was still any doubt that Google wants to use YouTube to host all the video on the Web, it’s announcement earlier today to broaden its APIs makes it clear that is its goal. Once again, instead of making it easier to search videos elsewhere, Google is making it easier to host videos on YouTube. Except that the new APis allow people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other Websites. The key here is that the videos themselves are hosted on Youtube’s servers. This brings Google back full circle to the initial strategy for Google Video, which originally required videos to be uploaded directly to Google in order to become indexed. YouTube is gradually replacing Google Video—that is where most people upload videos anyway—but getting as much video from the rest of the Web onto its servers allows it to do many more things with it than if it simply indexed the videos elsewhere. It can search them better and throw up ads against them.

Specifically, the new APIs allow Web developers to:

* Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
* Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
* Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
* Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
* Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of Yahoo), and Move Networks. Partners already using the APIs include Animoto, Casio, Electronic Arts, Helio, KickApps, Slide, and TiVo. Yes, you can now watch YouTube on TiVo.

Of course, it is not exactly free. The videos will also be available on YouTube, where Google will make money from any associated ads. It is not clear how the ad revenue will be split, or even if it will be. There is nothing in the API that allows for a Website to insert their own ads. So that is a big question mark. (More on that after I speak with a YouTube exec later in today).

Update: YouTube product manager Jim Patterson confirms that there is no revenue-sharing built into the API, although he also points out that the API is open to YouTube Partners, who do share in the advertising dollars. He says:

“We are not introducing any fundamentally new way to monetize. Any video that is uploaded through our API is treated exactly as on YouTube.com. In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.

It is not a white-label service. We do offer a hosting service, but it is not a direct alternative to the companies that you mention. There are some big differences. It is a YouTube-branded experience. It is free. The price you pay for using it is you must participate in the YouTube community.”

In other words, YouTube feels that for the most part it is enough to direct traffic to third-party sites and let them tap into YouTube’s huge audience.