Well, it is early morning here, and I am up to try and get everything down on blog, to keep you up to date with the IFC Gala Awards dinner last night, where I had the privilege of watching our very own volunteer Ada Banks receive the award for Outstanding Volunteer in the Global Awards for Fundraising. It was a nerve wracking event, but I am so so proud of her, and wish you all could have been there to see her! She now has a wonderful trophy to show off, and is already planning on using it to try and get bumped to first class on her flight home!!
Today was the first day of IFC, and to say we were a little excited would be an understatment. We met early in the morning to sit down and plan out our day. Everyone at the Resource Alliance (who run the conference) was extremely helpful, and so we sat and worked out the best sessions to go to.
Imagine 1000 fundraisers in the one place – how amazing! Ada and I started the day by attending the first-timers session, where we played the obligatory 'get to know you' games in order to meet some other newbies. I actually met a lovely lady from Macmillan Cancer Support in the UK, who actually knows Grant Chapman! Some of you might remember Grant from Macmillan from when he volunteered with us at the end of 2010. What a small world it is! After that, we headed to lunch with the other Australians who were attending for another meet & greet session.
So, after all that meeting and greeting, it was time to get down to the business of learning. 1000 fundraisers from across the globe gathered in the conference hall, and the atmosphere was electric. The opening plenary session included a talk from Karen Osborne on Women in Philanthropy. She showcased women from across the world, and what philanthropy meant to them. It was a great way to open the conference.
Heading into the plenary...
Our first official workshop was ‘Digital Fundraising – less magic, more hard work’ and was put on by a lady from the Norwegian Cancer Society (@Beatre_Sorum -her twitter name). She wore pink tights and had a great down to earth presentation – I loved it! She talked about online fundraising, and gave a heap of examples, many of which were relevant to CCQ as a cancer charity. She encouraged us to tweet and blog about her session throughout, which was a great was to see her theory put into action.
Some learnings from the session included:
· People are more likely to ‘share’ a page on FB after they have completed an activity (eg. After they have done a Relay they will share the page. We could use this to our advantage and get people to ‘check in’ to a Relay or Daff/Pink site, as we know they are already engaged with us. Or do an online thank you video for them post event, and get them to share the link.
· Digital consumers are vey high maintenance! That means that we as CCQ can’t be anything less! In a perfect world, if they post a FB comment at 3am, they want a response ASAP, even if we aren’t around. They are used to the instantaneous world.
· Crowdfunding – people are jumping online and doing it for themselves (eg. A community FR activity). They aren’t waiting around for the charity to come up with the idea.
· That we need to apply Direct Mail principles to internet marketing, and not just put up crap online because we aren’t limited by space!
1) The ask – make sure we have an ask in our online marketing, be it for $$, volunteering etc
2) Frequency – make sure we ask often, even if it means putting an emotional video online to share, but make sure to include an ask at the end.
3) Target demographics – target our online customers by who they are, and identify commonalities between them. Talk to them how they want to be spoken to. Do we really know these people??
4) Emotions – make the ask or the online presence emotional. Honest and emotive stories from donors aren’t that hard to do, and it doesn’t have to be expensieve.
5) Being the solution to a defined problem – don’t be scared of defining success. What is it that this online marketing piece is trying to achieve? Funding for a specific project? Make it achievable.
· Digital marketing allows us to:
o Give proof of who we are, the value of our charity, and show that we are trustworthy, all in real time
o It gives us a lingering presence with donors. Being ‘Facebook friends’ means we get to be a part of a donors daily life
o Do marketing in an inexpensive way
o Have a 2 way communication with our donors/supporters
· Facebook, what works?
o Lighten up – even if our cause is serious, our tone on Facebook should be light. Studies show that online sales can correlate to your facebook activity, and it is even better when your tone is whimsical or funny, and not a serious ask.
o Be interactive – ask your FB friends questions, and get them to engage with us, encourage comments
· Twitter, what works?
o Microdonations – asking for a small amount, and hence have microgoals
o Great for advocacy (good also to ask key players for help – eg. A retweet)
o It’s good for short intensive drives
o Must have a good landing page and good #hashtag
o It’s great for tapping into weird and unusual demographics (using the same #hashtag gives a sense of belonging)
· Bloggers, what works?
o Make sure you do your research! If you want to align with a blogger, pick a good one. Aligning with the wrong blogger or using the wrong approach means a PR nightmare.
o Provide the blogger exclusive content. If they are blogging for us, can we give them exclusive video to share on our behalf?
· About websites
o We should be making it easy for people to give to us (derr!) but that means we need to make our donation and registration pages as easy and simple as possible. We can always go back and ask for more information.
o We should look to ecommerce website for good website usability – they are good at it! Colours, tone, language etc.
Beate’s top 10 tips
1) Make sure your website has a good landing page
2) Invest in conversion rates (eg. Converting visitors to donors)
3) Measure social media traffic
4) Have a good social presence – do what we say we are going to do
5) Good, effective and relevant sharing
6) Be specific – dare to define success
7) Do your research
8) Communicate visually – can it be done better through a diagram, or video?
9) Lighten up! Don’t be too serious.
10) Say please and thank you
After our workshop and a short coffee break (all I seem to do is eat!!) we headed off to ‘World overview of the best Fundraising ideas’. The session was jam packed and so we ended up sitting on the floor. You can’t book in for sessions, it is a ‘just turn up and first in best dressed’ set up. The workshop was put on by 2 consultants – 1 from America, and 1 from France (who Ada found distractingly handsome!) and ended up being pretty much about ensuring all your fundraising campaigns were multi-channel and integrated.
Some things I took away from the session:
· Audiences are becoming increasingly multi-channel (email, phone, mail etc), especially the younger market.
· Flanker brands – these are brands that are almost sub-brands, but support the master brand – eg. www.cancerqld.org.au would be our master brand, and we could create a flanker brand www.letscurecancer.com. Sometimes people will align more with the flaker brand if it is done properly. We can get the same message across, but in a different way.
· We went through several case studies of multi-channel campaigns, where organisations had one message to get across (e.g. Amnesty did a campaign to stop a woman getting stoned to death in Nigera), and they used DM pieces to try to influence opinion leaders (really clever letters, that came complete with an actual stone!), emailed uni students to start petitions and used mass media to create awareness.
· They also profiled another case study of animal abandonment where they:
1) Started a teaser website entitled ‘What is the crime?’ and encouraged people to comment and enter competitions about what the crime was.
2) They worked with influential bloggers to get people talking about the teaser campaign online.
3) They used social media to promote it.
4) Used SEM (search engine maximisation) and google.
Then they did the reveal…
5) Firstly through mass billboards at transport hubs
6) Then direct mail, press and PR
7) And finally the reveal happened on the teaser website and then the charity website.
A true integrated multi-channel campaign. A symphony of channels.
The other thing they spoke about was embedding unique URL’s into emails, tweets and facebook posts, so that you can measure exactly where your traffic is coming from, and hence track the success of a campaign.
So that is Day 1. A lot of learning in short bursts, so I am frantically taking in as much as I can, so I can share it with you all ASAP. Hopefully my brain dump isn’t too random, and you actually understand what I am going on about!
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