Theo Socmed's Musings

Storytelling & Fundraising in a Digital Age

One of the basic fundamentals of good fundraising is the ability to share a story that’s full of human interest. It is often the personal stories of people that motivates a donor to give. This is particularly true if the story is told by a real person, the person it is about and not second hand via a fundraiser or copywriter.

OK, now take the art of storytelling and couple it with the technology of the digital age. What do you get? A whole new way to reach out and share these stories with a wider audience, locally and globally.

This is the basis of some exciting projects currently taking place in the UK, thanks to an organisation called “Tales of things and electronic memory” (TOTeM). TOTeM is a collaboration between University College London, University of Dundee, University of Edinburgh, University of Salford and is funded by the UK Research Council’s Digital Economy Program.

The basis of TOTeM’s work is to create “spimes”, objects that can be tracked through space and time throughout their lifetime. For example, I have a casement clock that belonged to my maternal grandparents. It’s a very ordinary clock with a nice chime, probably not worth very much, but to me and my family it is a part of our history. During the second world war it hung under the stairs in my grandparents home, until the night of the air raid. A bomb fell in the street outside their house. My mother, aunt and grandparents were, thankfully, unhurt, having taken refuge in their sunken air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. My mother, now 80 years old, remembers as a child scrambling over the debris of what had been their house and as she did, the clock, which was hanging on the one remaining wall, struck 6am!

Over the years the clock has hung in various homes until it succumbed to a weapon far more lethal than a Nazi bomb - teenagers! A game of “let’s be silly and throw a tennis ball indoors” led to one of the glass panels breaking and the pendulum being damaged. (It is now awaiting a clock repairer to fix it) If you saw the clock hanging there, it would just be a nice casement clock, a bit old fashioned, but pleasant to adorn a wall in many a home. Imagine being able to know the story behind it, the history of the clock, what it survived, who owned it, etc.

One of TOTeM’s first projects was to record and tell the stories of items in a Scottish museum. Not only to tell their stories, but to develop them too, but inviting the public to share their own experiences of these objects, by adding to it. People can share how they used similar items in their home, work, etc, or interesting stories about the item, etc.

“So what’s this got to do with fundraising?”You may be asking? Well, TOTeM has started to work in partnership with Oxfam. In a pilot scheme currently running in Manchester, Oxfam are asking donors of goods to about 15 shops to download a free iPhone app, “ShelfLife”, to record the stories behind items that people are going to donate. The items are then displayed in their shops with a unique QR Code attached to the label of each item. Shoppers can then use their smart phone to scan the QR code and see what the story is behind the article.

So far, they are reporting large rises in the sale of the ShelfLife labeled items, compared to those that are not labeled. It would appear that the art of fundraising by sharing human interest stories applies just as much to inanimate objects as it does to people! Also, the ShelfLife items are realising higher resale prices than non-labeled goods. So a provenance can be good for business, even in the charity shop world!

OK, Oxfam is huge, has lots of highly skilled staff and budgets to experiment with. But what about the local hospices and other small charities? Can they get onboard with this?

My resounding response is “Yes!” there may be a small outlay, but I’m talking £100-£150 and a bit of time and training. What would you need to get started?

• A cheap digital camera (or a smart phone)
• An inkjet printer A free blog or website (e.g. Tumblr, Wordpress, etc)
• A free QR Code creator app
• A staff member, or better still a few volunteers, to run the process

A donor comes in with an interesting item and is asked if they would like to share a bit about it. The item is photographed and the story recorded (it doesn’t have to be typed, it could be an audio recording using the Audioboo app, or even videoed using a phone or the camera). These are then uploaded to the blog or website. A QR Code is then made of the blog page and then printed off onto a sticker or tie on label and affixed to the item in the shop. Voila!

Virtually no techie knowledge is needed, more just the confidence to use the Internet and a computer, as well as a digital camera and/or smart phone. Maybe a national umbrella body like Help the Hospices could get someone to develop an app like ShelfLife that hospices throughout the land could use, or a commercial developer create one for independent charity shops?

If you wish to discuss how I could help you set up a scheme like this, or maybe you’re a museum, historic property or cathedral and want to see how you could develop something to share more about your exhibits and artefacts, please get in touch with me.

JustGiving extendes text donations to individuals

Really good news today that JustGiving and Vodafone have extended their text donations facility to individuals who are raising funds for their chosen charities. This is a real leap forward, bringing text donating to people like you and me. The best thing of all is it’s a free service, so no longer does mobile phone company take a hefty cut of the donation.

To read a fuller report on this development, check out Third Sector magazine’s article: Third Sector

Segmentation using Google+

Following an excellent webinar on Friday afternoon led by Jason Falls of Exploring Social Media about the new Google+, I am getting excited at the potential this new app from Google has for segmenting people.

As an ex database manager, I know the power of segmentation for charities and businesses in targeting the right people with regards to raising cause awareness, marketing, fundraising, etc. Segmentation, in database terms, is where you tell the database to look for people who match certain criteria, for example: women who live in Surrey over the age of 35 who have bought or dontated something in the past 12 months.

The database cleverly searches the records to make these matches. The result is a very specific target audience.

Now, Google+ cannot do this. (Sorry to disappoint you!) But what it does offer is something that Twitter and Facebook don’t. It has a function called Circles, whereby the user can create any number of circles to sort their contacts into. Not only this, but people can be put into any number of your circles. So let’s say you create the following circles for your charity:

•  Donors
•  Donors – male
• Donors – female
• Donors – local
• Donors – not local
• Donors - corporate
• Volunteers
•  Volunteers – male
• Volunteers – female
• Volunteers – local
• Volunteers – not local
• Staff
• Trustees
  
• Friends Group
• Suppliers
• Beneficiaries
• Beneficiaries – families

It would not be too difficult to add people to the relevant circles as you link with them via Google+. You have then built a Google+ database of sorts, where you can target specific messages to specific groups of people. For example, you’re summer fayre is coming up, you need to ask for helpers, donations of goods to sell and raffle, commercial people to book stalls and people to attend the event and spend their cash!

You can target various circles with each of these asks. Volunteers to help; Suppliers & corporate donors to book stalls; Donors, Friends Group, Volunteers, Trustees, Suppliers to donate goods; Donors, Friends Group, Trustees, Staff, Corporates to attend and spend money.

Yes, some people would get more than one message, but the messages would all be different, according to the particular circle you are informing.

OK, it’s not as smart as a regular database, but it is a great improvement over Twitter and Facebook, where one message goes to all. Anyway, who knows what Google+ developers will come up with in the future. Maybe it will be possible in the future to pull circles together and then search for those who are common to each?

I think Google are on to a winner with Google+. It’s still in the Beta stage at present, but the early signs are that it could be very powerful and it is important, therefore, that you and I are in there and ready to run when it goes official!

Social media plays key role in record-breaking fundraising appeal

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), the coalition of several key aid charities, has received a record-breaking £70m+ in donations for its Haiti Appeal.

A staggering 48% of the UK population has made a donation, according to the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). Never has a disaster appeal had such an overwhelming response from the public.

One of the charities involved in meeting the needs of survivors in Haiti is the children’s charity, Plan UK. Their director of fundraising, Jeremy Cooper, said that social media played a key role in mobilising support. “Within 24 hours of the emergency hitting Haiti, we sent an eAppeal to our supporters.”. He added, “Just minutes after the earthquake Plan staff were using social networking sites to circulate content and updates.”.

In the first week after the disaster, Plan UK alone raised over £100k and puts much of this down to the use of social media to get the message across to supporters.

No wonder then that more and more charities are looking to developing social media strategies to support their more traditional forms of communication and awareness-raising. One of the major factors that social media has over other more traditional forms of fundraising is its immediacy. Just as new services are discovering, people with access to sites such as Twitter can get facts and information out in a matter of minutes to hundreds of thousands of people.

This form of viral communication is not only fast, it is virtually cost-free, using applications that we all have on our mobile phones, PCs, iPads, etc. It’s also two-way, employing both messages from charities to supporters, but also feedback and input from supporters, something traditional communications lack.

However, it isn’t just specific disaster-led appeals that can make good use of social media. Charities are learning how to harness Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media to develop their campaigning, nurture potential new donors and grow their relationship with existing supporters.

Whatever your view of social media, from being a glib time-waster to being an incredible communications network facilitator, we will never return to just the old ways of raising funds and campaigning. Social media is here to stay and we ignore it at our peril.

Apple: still playing sour grapes to charities

It’s sad to see that Apple, a company with such high standards and ideals, is still refusing to allow charities easy access to online donations via its iPhones, when every other mobile phone system does.

According to Third Sector magazine (14 Sept 2010), a company called GetGiving has developed an app that would enable donors to make donations simply via their iPhones. But, yet again, Apple refused permission for online donations to be made via an app (which I assume means it doesn’t go through their preferred financial system) and insitsted that apps must link potential donors to  a website where they can then make donations. The latter probably means they want it all to go through their iTunes shop/site.

Come on Apple, this isn’t doing much good for your cred and is making your sweet Apple flavour (or flavor, for our friends over the pond) turn quite sour as a result. Surely it isn’t going to harm your empire that much to allow generous individuals who want to do a bit of good in the world by donating small sums of money to charity via your incrediable phone devices?