Ada and I met for breakfast, and we were still on a high from Ada winning the award the night before. And she was a celebrity! People were stopping us on the way to session, to say congratulations! It was so nice to see.
Collaboration and face-to-face
Our first session of the day was a case study in collaboration between 2 charities on Face-to-Face fundraising (F2F). The 2 guys who ran the session (CEO's of Amnesty and WWF in Austria) talked about how they collaborated for success, and started off by saying collaboration was like a marriage...and then did a little skit to demonstrate!!
Basically, the only F2F agency in Austria up and left Austria, and so Amnesty and WWF were left high and dry. The interesting thing was that if both charities didn't do F2F, they couldn't survive. 70% of their donors were being recruited through F2F - approx 18,000 donors per year!
They talked about the process they went through to collaborate, and form as separate legal entity, which was an in-house fundraising agency for BOTH charities. They set up everything from the ground up, with an investment of 1.3m Euros between them. The agency had left F2F with a bad reputation in Austria, so WWF and Amnesty had to work extremely hard to ensure its success - which they have done well.
They don't mix the brands, so each month the street recruiters alternate who they are recruiting for, which works well for the charities and the staff, as the staff have variety and are more inclined to stay with the organisation. Through their efforts they have raised the profile of F2F in Australia, and have 2800 applications per year to WORK as a street fundraiser, and at present they are getting 4000 new donors per year (per charity). All in all, a perfect marriage...
Unfundraising - letting others ask
AJ Leon
@ajleon
Wow, what a session. Ada and I had learnt after our experience of sitting on the floor yesterday, to get to sessions early, and I'm glad we did. AJ's session was packed out. AJ has a creative agency in New York, and dedicates 20% of his time pro-bono to working with charities. Straight off the bat I could see he was super passionate and enthusiastic, and LOVED what he does. What does he do? He basically works with not-for-profits in helping them to use social media to fundraise. Social media is his life - he is a self proclaimed nerd. He looks nothing like a nerd, he wore jeans, a jacked, converse sneakers and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. Very cool! He apologised upfront in case he swore, blaming it on his New York background!
I didn't take this...stole it off his website! He didn't stand still long enough for me to get a photo!!
He basically used a case study of his to talk us through how we could use social media to fundraise. Some of my takeouts from his session.
The Macro Story - this is your organisation's story (What you do)
The Micro Story - a project (what you are doing)
Use social media to tell the micro story, the project that you are doing, not the bigger picture. People want to see how their money is making a real difference.
He talked about telling the story. His case study was a village in Africa, and how they needed to raise money to get fresh water to the village. They needed to $72,000 to do this, with a budget of only $250.
He talked about the 6 elements to a telling a good story online:
* a storyteller
* have compelling content
* use visual media (pictures and video)
* make it in real time
* soluble and sharable
* use a low risk platform
He built a simple blog on a free blogsite (a low risk platform), and got a local guy from the village to take photos & video on a smart phone, upload them to the blog and say a few lines about the photo. Great, so we have a story teller, compelling content (great story!), visual media, that was updated in realtime. Note - the blog site had NO fundraising ask, but did tease people about how they could be involved soon...
How did they share the story and get people involved? He tweeted about it, and then looked at people who retweeted, or replied to him. He did a bit of investigating into these people (as they are obviously engaged with the project - otherwise you would just read the tweets and do nothing. Retweeting or replying shows you are interested) and found a lady who ran her own blog and had 45,000 followers. It was a mummy blog, but that was ok. It was a market that AJ couldn't normally get to, and this woman was obviously an 'influencer' if she had so many followers. If she could influence even a fraction of her followers to be interested in the Africa project, that would be success.
SIDETRACK...
How do we find influencers?
1) Start looking in our own backyard and make a list
* who is retweeting our stuff?
* who is commenting on FB?
* who is commenting on our blog?
2) Establish a connection with these people. Take the time to look at them - their FB, blog etc
3) Go deep, not wide. It's better to have a small group of great people who are engaged with us, than to have thousands of people who aren't. Say hi to these people, retweet their stuff, comment on their blogs. Establish that connection.
AJ established a connection with this lady, and then invited her to come to the village. She did, and then blogged about it. He then put a fundraising ask on the website, saying there was only 100 spots available for the exclusive club - he created scarcity. People then wanted to be in this group who then got exclusive content about the project and the village. This club was a montly donor club, and he only needed 100 people at $12/month. The influencer was engaged with the project (the mummy blogger), she shared her experience in the village with her followers, and getting 100 monthly donors took....3 hours. 3 hours!! Insane!
The forumula:
1) the project ------2) the influencer ----- 3) experiential philanthropy (getting suporters to interact and engage with us)
All up, a fabulous session that got me thinking about whether we can replicate it back home. Choose a project (our micro story) and trial it. Very cool.
Lunchtime....
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