Influential Marketing Blog

Inside The Non Profit Social Networking Survey

A few weeks ago, I received a link to "NonProfit Social Network Survey" - an effort focused on analyzing how nonprofits are using social media and networking tools to connect with their supporters and raise money. I was intrigued, but had a few additional questions for the researchers from that report. They kindly responded and below are their responses to my questions. The authors of the report and answers below are Aaron Biddar (referred to as "AB" below) and Jeff Patrick (referred to as "JP" below). If you have anything to do with nonprofit work, some of their insights and responses below should be illuminating. Be sure to check out the full report online as well.

1. What was the most surprising thing for you about the research?

AB: That the average Facebook Cause had only generated $500.00 while house social networks have been generating $10,000 or more over the last year.

JP: The very high level of commitment by nonprofits to Facebook and building their own house social networks.  75% of nonprofits have a presence on Facebook, and 1/3 are building their own house social networks. We're seeing a lot of interest, but we were surprised by how much commitment is ALREADY in place.

2. Why do you think Facebook seems to be emerging as the dominant social network for nonprofits to be on?

AB: It is the first social network that has found a way to tap into the “giving” generations.

JP: There are several reasons:

• Facebook is larger than and growing faster than any other social network.  MySpace growth has flattened out, Facebook has picked up significantly. MySpace total audience is smaller than Facebook.
• Facebook continues to get incredible press worldwide - so it ends up being the most obvious choice for nonprofits.
• Facebook makes it easy and provides options to nonprofits to create an initial presence quickly and for free. Think, Facebook Groups, Pages and Facebook Causes (nonprofit specific application for creating a presence and fundraising). 

3. Did you get any sense about whether these nonprofits were using these networks solely for community building or what percentage of them were raising real contributions?

AB: Mostly built for awareness, understanding that awareness will lead to future giving.

JP: Yes, we had several questions that related specifically to revenue from fundraising (and other sources). The quick facts here are as follows:

• 39% of nonprofits who'd raised money on Facebook community (any amount of revenue)
• 25% of nonprofits who'd raised money on their house social networks (any amount of revenue)

4. What role does content creation play in how nonprofits are using social tools?  Are many of them doing it, or are they just participating in social networks for conversations?

AB: User Generated Content is the key to nonprofits’ success.  User Generated Content is fresh, relevant content that other like-minded individuals will want to engage with on a regular basis.  The icing on the cake is the removal of the burden many small and midsized NPO’s have in continually generating that content.

JP: We asked about the ROLE of the social network: Marketing was the most important role (getting the word out about their organization and programs), followed by Market Research (better understanding their audience and their interests/needs), which was the second highest.

Anecdotally, I don't believe nonprofits see these sites as a strictly social platform - for meeting other people. I think most nonprofits see them as socially enabled platforms for promoting or delivering their programs and mission.

5. Were there any identifiable trends in terms of types of nonprofit causes or industries that nonprofits focus in and how prevalent their use of social networks were (ie - health oriented nonprofits versus environmental nonprofits, etc.)?

AB: There seems to be a good balance between health-related, environmental and religion.

JP: We did segment by vertical.  Some verticals were more clearly pursuing the technology than others. (NOTE FROM ROHIT: I am contacting Jeff directly to get more information on this, which he has offered to provide.)

6. What is one piece of actionable advice you think a nonprofit organization may be able to take from your research?

AB: Get your arms around the fact that social media is here to stay.  It is in its infancy but will absolutely become the core focus and hub for all marketing, fundraising and awareness efforts in the near future.

JP: Your peers (other nonprofits) are creating and experimenting with social networks in many different ways, and in relatively large numbers. They are allocating small but real budgets and resources to the projects, and some (a few) nonprofits are seeing real success (ex. 600,000 person community, hundreds of thousands of money in fundraising revenue).  Given this combination of evidence, it looks like the early adopters are paving the way for mainstream adoption. As a nonprofit, think about getting started - this social networking wave appears to have real potential.

5 Provocative Questions In Digital Advocacy From Changemakers

On Friday last week I had a chance to attend a "charrette-style" unconference called Changemakers put on by the University of California - Santa Barbara and their Center for Information Technology and Society. The attendees included people from the Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, Deloitte, Stanford, and thinkers like my friend and fellow Zero G buddy Doc Searls and organizer Dave Toole from OutThink. The day was focused on digital advocacy and the role of social media in furthering cause based communications.

As is sometimes the case with more discussion based conferences, I found the day raised more provocative questions than it answered. Sometimes it is the questions, however, that lead to the newest thinking, so I thought for a recap post I would share some of the biggest questions to arise in the hopes that they may spark a wider discussion:

Q - Does conversation online cause more noise than action?
A - This was the big question that came up early in the event and judging from a few responses to the question I saw over Twitter people feel pretty strongly about the relationships between the two. For my part, I think that conversations do play an important role in sparking action, even though it may sometimes be difficult to attribute some of that action directly back to the right people.

Q - Is an effort successful if it achieves it's aim, but without your getting credit for it?
A - Perhaps at the heart of this question is one of belief. Do you believe so strongly in the cause that you want it to succeed at any cost, or is the credit and visibility for yourself and your organization as important. This, I think, will continue to be a key question as we deal with the rise of the "blego" (blog ego) and newly minted online superstars every hour.

Q - What if our demographic doesn't use computers or social media?
I see this point coming up often in meetings both related to digital advocacy as well as campaigns in other industries - often targeted at older audiences. It is something of a false question, because often it is based on an assumption that simply doesn't hold true about how many people in that group are actually online. This is one of the fastest growing segments online and will likely continue to be in the coming years.

Q - How can the leadership of a community authentically claim to speak for a group?
This was a common question that came up from those who had organized groups online and now wanted to be sure that they were, as an organization, accurately reflecting viewpoints of those in the group. My advice on this point was to be sure that you were looking at whether a group was formed by affinity or demographic before making assumptions. A group of college students who are in the same graduating class may not believe in the same causes. If they have gathered to support an issue, however, then you can more easily speak for the group.

Q - What causes must be institutionalized and cannot be furthered by individuals?
One particularly eye opening moment for me at the event was when the conversation turned to causes where people affected by them cannot mobilize on their own. One example of this is homelessness, which required a coordinated effort in order to attack it. It also is an important reminder that no single strategy can work for every cause.

What do you think about these questions? Any big ones you would add?

Going To A Playground This Weekend? Upload and Rate It!

KaBOOM! is a nonprofit group whose sole mission is to inspire more playgrounds to be built so that kids across the country have more places to play. Using an open source model where they share publicly their expertise on building playgrounds to help local communities plan and execute a project to build a new playground through day long projects where volunteers all converge on a location to build a new playground. 

A big question, when it comes to building playgrounds, is where exactly they are most needed. As a solution to this challenge, KaBOOM! has an online tool called the "Playspace Finder" which is essentially a Google maps mashup of locations for places to play, as well as photos, ratings and listening of features and amenities. To get more playspaces into the tool, we are helping KaBOOM! launch their "100,000 Playspaces in 100 Days" campaign to get people to upload new playspaces. As an experiment, we have set up the system to allow people to submit new playspaces using Twitter.

All you need to do is send a Twitpic along with some details as a Twitter message update and KaBOOM! will add it to the Playspace Finder. Here's an illustration of the format:
FORMAT TO CUT AND PASTE:
[Twitpic URL] [Name of Playspace] [Address or nearest cross streets] [City/State OR Zip] [Rating (with asterisks)] [Cause code] #playhere

There are 6 charities the project is supporting, and for each playspace uploaded, one of the charities will get $1 - and we are working on adding some social media specific partners to the program in the coming week or two as well. Get the full instructions and more details on the KaBOOM! blog.

So if you're at a playspace this weekend, send us a message through Twitter and help out a good cause in the process. 100,000 playspaces is a big target - but I'd love to see us get there not just as a marketer supporting my client or as a blogger, but as a father with two boys who plans to visit plenty of these playspaces in the coming years.

Want to do more to support KaBOOM!? Here are a few more things you can do:

1. Tweet this message: KaBOOM! builds playgrounds. Help them create a map of 100,000 playspaces in 100 days: http://www.tinyurl.com/kab100k
2. Submit playspace via the online form (no twittering or blogging required!)
3. Blog about the campaign
4. Suggest a social media partner organization

How To Save The World's Dying Languages (And Stay "On Brand")

Whether we realize it or not, parts of our culture are slowly disappearing. As the world becomes flatter, entire continents choose to use the same currency, and people move around the world and merge cultures - the individuality of many places is eroding. Of course, there are great benefits to the new "fusion" culture that is arising from this ... but there is a real danger that traditions are being lost. One symbol of these cultures is language.

National Geographic paints a bleak picture for the future of language (though they do have a language revitalization program underway to address the issue by partnering with a group called Living Tongues). Still, they note that "every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth - many of them not yet recorded - may disappear."

Against this cultural context, Rosetta Stone (a leader in offering language training services) has a cause marketing effort underway called the Endangered Language Program.  As it sounds, it is an effort to catalog and archive some of the world's rapidly dying languages by working with members of the culture to save and record them. The "on brand" part of this is that they use their software technology and language learning methodology to help groups to do this themselves. And most importantly, once it is done, the language learning program is the property of the organization to distribute as they wish.

Why is this program so effective? Here are a few reasons:

1. It addresses a critical need for humanity.
2. It demonstrates the power of the product as an integral part of the solution.
3. It is a challenge not easily solved that will take time and resources.
4. It is urgent and needs to be done right now.
5. It is ownable for the brand as something unique to them.

Brands do all kinds of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, many of which have very thin connections to their brand. Rosetta Stone has the opposite. Not only is the Endangered Language program a perfect fit with the mission of their company, they need to use their own software and tools in order to execute it. Am I saying brands shouldn't do good just for good's sake? Of course not. But if you're choosing a program for your entire company to get behind, wouldn't you rather choose something strategic like this?  Kudos to Rosetta Stone for the mission of the Endangered Language Program, and for offering a lesson in strategic CSR any business can learn from.

The Do NOT Vote Campaign

As a parent, I appreciate reverse psychology. My kids are still at the age where it works, so I'm a big fan. Apparently when they become teenagers, it still works but only if you tell them not to do something. The problem is that it is usually something that you actually don't want them to do (ie - drive the car, try drugs, drink alcohol, etc.) Using the fact that teens and many young people can't help doing exactly what adults tell them not to, Hollywood has a new message for these young people. Don't Vote. It doesn't matter. It won't make a difference. Or so the video below tells you:

Actually, it ends up being a brilliant campaign not so much because of the creative message, but because it actually delivers a more important message that many campaigns targeted at getting people to vote don't mention ... that you need to REGISTER in order to vote. I wonder how many young people wanting to vote for the first time don't get the chance because they didn't register in time? As this video points out, the deadline to register in some states is as early as this weekend. So if you don't care about the issues and election, or if you do, go ahead and register at www.declareyourself.com. Consider this my public service announcement for the weekend. And I'll wait while you register too.

Obama Has A Drinking Problem

Got your attention? That's the brilliant tagline of a new campaign from the folks behind Tappening, a grassroots effort to tell Americans (and the world) about the dangers of bottled water and encourage them to switch to tap water. I have written about the campaign before as a good example of cause related marketing that encourages people to take action. They are continuing the effort with a very topical campaign designed to generate awareness and perhaps influence legislation as well. The campaign uses powerful facts delivered through blog posts with headlines such as "40% of bottled water IS tap water" and a simple website designed to give you enough ammunition not just to become more aware of the issue, but also to retell it to others. At the end of the day, it's a useful example for marketers not only for taking on a good cause, but doing it in a way that makes it likely for people to not just support the effort, but also tell others about it. They are meeting the most important criteria for effective word of mouth marketing ... actually giving people something to talk about.  Oh, and by the way, McCain has a drinking problem too - here are a few more ads from the campaign:

7 Ways To Publish A Book For Marketing

I love books. Not just for the power of conveying an idea through a printed form, but also for the emotional significance of actually holding a book in your hands. More and more recently I have been books become a brilliant marketing tool for everyone, from political candidates to technology companies. Along the way, there are several ideas that I have collected for how using a book could be an effective part of a marketing strategy. Here are a few:

1. Explain a complex idea - Some businesses or product lines are based on something complex that is not easily understood. One example of using a book to explain a concept like this was a book Microsoft was handing out earlier this year at CES about their Windows Home Server product. It was called "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?" and took a kids book approach to explaining why anyone would want a server in their home.
2. Commission an existing author or writer - This can be a great way to build on an existing author's profile and audience by working with him or her to commission a new piece. Hilton Hotels used this strategy as part of their Olympic marketing effort when they commissioned an award-winning kids author named Todd Parr to create a new book for them around their marketing tagline "Be Hospitable." Johnson & Johnson used a similar strategy back in 2002 with Understanding Children, a book they supported the creation of from Richard Saul Wurman (well known author and creator of the TED conference).
3. Partner with a "co-author" - There are two types of situations to use a co-author - the first is if you are actually a team and share similar ideas that you want to publish together. The second is to get someone who will do the actual writing while you help to provide direction and content. This second method is the one usually preferred by politician or famous person when they get a writer to help them create a "tell-all" biography of their lives.
4. Offer a book template - Though in a very different category, the Disease Control Priorities Project has an interesting way of distributing their content in a book form. You can go online, select various chapters from a group of publications and create your own book. The model of offering a template and letting people assemble their own books with your branding/message integrated is one that could work in many other industries.
5. Commemorate an experience - Art galleries use this technique often, creating limited edition books that commemorate their exhibits and the artwork contained in them. They work well because the art is so visual and many of these exhibits can be gatherings of work that will be dispersed after the exhibit and never again brought together - so the book seems very archival and worthwhile.
6. Organize a collaboration - There are some great examples of this technique - from Seth Godin's The Big Moo collaborative book a few years ago, to the Age of Conversation parts 1 and 2 (Disclaimer - I am a contributing author to Part II) which gathered together lots of contributors and invited them to write on a related theme to bring all these pieces together into a book. The resulting publication is often something that has built in marketing support as all the contributors will promote it to their networks.
7. Sponsor a branded printing - This may be the simplest way to use a book for marketing as you are basically using a book that has already been published which aligns to your product or brand in some way and reprinting a branded edition. Pretty much any book ever published can be reprinted in a branded version, usually with a new custom foreword or different cover depending on the number of units purchased.

Help Feed 1 Million Children A Day

This weekend I am gathering with more than 800 fellow South Asians for the annual NetIP Conference in Boston. The event is a three day long exploration of everything from the many innovations in microfinance being led by Indian entrepreneurs to book readings by Indian authors such as Anita Jain (featured in today's NY Times Book Review for her new book, Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India). My own session I led today was all about networking effectively, and throughout the weekend I was continually impressed by the power and diversity of the South Asian network and just how much of a difference many people from it are making in the world. One of the best stories to come out of the event was about a nonprofit organization that you may not be familiar with, but by all accounts it is one of the most ambitious, largest and stunningly successful in the world.

Akshaya Patra Foundation has a very simple goal ... to end the cycle of powerty in India by feeding 1 million school children in India every day. To really understand the scale of this, imagine the catering that goes into feeding an entire Superbowl stadium of people, then multiply it by 12. Doing anything for 1 million people on a daily basis is a near impossible task, and yet Akshaya Patra has pioneered a model for doing it that many other NGOs are now looking at as a template for launching similar efforts. The real power of this idea comes from it's simplicity. If you can offer hot meals to children every day, you are providing an incentive for them to come to school each day. If they come to school, they can end their cycle of poverty.

Aside from telling you about this foundation, this post is actually an extension of a call for help that one of the speakers at the NetIP event made. Akshaya Patra is one of the causes that you can vote for in the American Express Member's Project campaign. If they are one of the top vote getters in the contest, they have a chance to win a $1.5 million grant from American Express. Below is a great video that will give you a bit more insight into how Akshaya Patra works (including a look at their bread maker that can churn out more than 10,000 roti's per hour). Check it out and consider voting for them sometime before midnight on September 1st and help them fulfill their mission of feeding 1 million schoolkids each day.

Disclaimer: American Express is an Ogilvy client, but I do not currently work on any projects for them and have never worked on anything relating to the Member's Project.

A Revolutionary Idea: Branding Tap Water

Here is an interesting thought for a Friday afternoon: what if tap water had a brand?  When you think about it, all any kind of bottled water is doing is selling you a brand for something that is arguably no different than what you can get for free from the tap in most industrialized countries.  In fact, some arguments point out that tap water can even be healthier than bottled water because of the increased regulations around its filtration from many governments.  In a brilliant campaign to try and solve tap water's "branding problem" - Eric Yaverbaum and Mark DiMassimo are taking a marketer's approach to solving the world's increasing love affair with overpriced resource-sucking water bottles that are simply ending up in landfils.

Their idea is a simply yet powerful one ... that if people had a brand to associate with tap water and could visibly share that brand as a badge of honor, then they would.  Thus they created Tappening, an initiative that encourages people to "Think Global.  Drink Local."  The effort has a small website, and sells water bottles for $14.95 each.  It is also linked to a film about our incessant creation of landfill mass called Garbage!  Check out the site and the effort ... it's a great example of a green campaign taking on a cause by doing something that many cause related campaigns forget: creating a brand that people can get passionate about.

(via TrendCentral)

Guest Post: What's In a Name?

By Nedra Weinreich

I'm honored to have been invited to join the illustrious cast of bloggers here filling in. Congratulations to Rohit and his family on the birth of Jaiden Kumar! What a beautiful name.

I've been thinking about names a lot lately. Many would say that names are destiny. What you are called shapes your self-perception and how others respond to you. How do you picture a woman named Brandi? What does she look like? What is her personality? What kind of job might she have? Now picture someone named Susan. Do different images come to mind? What you call yourself and what others call you is important.

Now, what if everyone had variations of the same name? This is quite common in China, where there are more than a billion people sharing about 100 surnames, and 1.3 million people are named Liu Bo. It happens here in the US too, where we have plenty of John Smiths and Lisa Williams. In fact, my sister's best friend in elementary school had a name pronounced exactly the same as hers (though different by a couple of letters). It gets confusing pretty quickly, especially when you are searching online for someone with a very common name.

This naming issue has come to the fore over the past couple of years in my field of specialization, social marketing. No, I'm not talking about using Facebook and blogs and word of mouth. I'm referring to the over quarter-century old marketing specialty geared toward motivating health and social change. If you do a Google search on "social marketing," you'll see that most (but not all) of the results are websites providing information on this established field.

However, do the same search on Technorati, and you'll find that nearly all of the results are from bloggers using the term "social marketing" to refer to anything from using social media like blogs or YouTube, to using social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace, to anything vaguely Web 2.0-ish.

Yikes -- this gets awfully confusing for anyone who wants to learn, talk about, or search for information on either type of social marketing. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but an American Beauty rose and Rose Kennedy would smell quite a bit different from each other. The same shift is happening right now with the term "social advertising," which had a very specific meaning of advertising about social issues, but suddenly found itself with a new role as a result of Facebook's Social Ads (which spurred its own Facebook protest group).

Why is this issue important?

First, and most practically, people searching online for information about either type of social marketing are bound to encounter the wrong sites for their needs. Only those who already have some idea of what they are looking for will be able to effectively pick through the results.

Second, clarity saves a lot of misunderstandings and wasted time. When I'm talking to tech-savvy people for the first time, I generally have to spend the first part of the conversation explaining what kind of social marketing I do. And whenever someone else refers to "social marketing," I have to make sure that we both mean the same thing by the term.

Third, we health and social change social marketers have had a hard time building a brand identity for social marketing -- it's still widely unknown or misunderstood even among nonprofit and government agency people who have never heard of social media or Web 2.0. Mixing in the name confusion definitely doesn't help!

So, what can we do about it at this point? It could be that the new meaning has spread so well via "social marketing" that the genie is out of the bottle now and there's no going back. This would mean either living with the ambiguity or rebranding the old social marketing under another name -- I'm thinking "social change marketing" might do a good job of retaining the essence while clarifying the distinction (too New Coke?). Or we could work to stamp out all incorrect uses of the term while arguing for more semantic exactitude.  I've tried being the social marketing police for a while, but that loses its appeal when you feel vastly outnumbered. Looks like I'm going to have to use my marketing prowess to bring about change on this. Okay, then...

Be a better marketer when you buy classic Social Marketing! Avoid those looks of disapproval from your fellow marketers by using the term correctly. Everybody's doing it! Tell all your friends!

But I'd love to hear your ideas too.

Nedra Weinreich is a social marketing consultant and blogger at Spare Change.