Frogloop

Lessons Learned When Your Community Revolts

2012-02-02T14:40:23Z

There are three pillars to building an online community and engaging on social media channels:

1. Honesty, transparency, and being upfront.

2. Listening and being responsive to members of the community no matter how lame or silly you find the questions or feedback.

3. Thanking your community for their support, feedback and guidance.

If you don’t practice these principals every single day somewhere along the way your community is going to revolt. And it won’t be pretty.

For example, yesterday, Planned Parenthood released a statement saying that the Susan G. Komen Foundation would not be renewing grants to support 19 local Planned Parenthood affiliates, which provided 170,000 clinical breast exams and 6,400 mammogram referrals to women in low-income communities through the Komen grant. According to Jessica Pieklo on the Care2 Cause Channel, last year’s grant totaled about $680,000.

Komen said that they cut their funding because Rep. Cliff Sterns (R-FL) launched a congressional investigation into whether or not Planned Parenthood was using public money on abortions. Since Komen has implemented more stringent eligibility standards to safeguard donor dollars “consequently, some organizations are no longer eligible to receive Komen grants,” said Komen in a press release yesterday.

How did the women’s community including many of Komen’s donors, Facebook fans, and followers on Twitter and Race for the Cure team leaders react?

They revolted.

Once the news began to spread, women and men of all ages flocked to Komen’s page on Twitter and Facebook and posted emotional and heart felt messages, expressing their sadness and anger over Komen’s decision to take away funding for breast cancer screening services.

What's more telling than this communal reaction is Komen's response to its own community's revolt. They went dark for 24 hours. Not a peep on Twitter or Facebook even as supporters continued to post thousands of messages on social networks and let's not forget the buzz that grew offline, around dinner tables, and office water coolers. Some members of Komen’s Facebook page even said that their comments were deleted.

Year-End Fundraising Up in 2011

2012-01-30T17:00:29Z

In January of last year I wrote up a quick summary on how some of our clients' end-of-year fundraising campaigns did vs. the prior year, and I thought it’d be nice to repeat the exercise to see how nonprofits fared in 2011.

The results below come from aggregate data from 14 organizations we work with – a big thanks to them for letting us include their data in this post. These aren’t necessarily the same organizations we included in our write-up last year; this analysis compares two years of data for these 14 groups.

So without further ado, here’s the scoop:

A lot more money – Every organization in this data set raised more money in 2011 than they did in 2010.

A ton more gifts – 93% saw an increase in the number of gifts made. Overall gifts in this group increased by almost 25% over 2010.

Lower average gifts – 79% had lower average gifts in 2011 vs. 2010. Compared to last year’s report, this is the one downward trend. Last year, this figure was pretty much split down the middle with half having higher and half having lower average gifts.

Better response rates – 71% had the same or higher response rates to their email appeals than last year. Of the organizations that had higher response rates, a majority (63%) had larger lists and sent to more people. Last year, most organizations saw lower response rates compared with the prior year.

More emails – 71% sent more appeals this year vs. last year. Last year this figure was 85%, so this trend may be slowing a bit.

Overall, this performance feels sunnier than last year’s. I’m particularly encouraged by the response rates to email appeals. When you look at M+R's eNonprofit Benchmarks reports, industry wide fundraising response rates have been falling regularly year over year. I don’t want to jinx it, but after looking at this data set, I thought, could the trend finally be halting or maybe even reversing? We’ll have to wait until the new eNonprofit Benchmarks report comes out in April to know for sure (you can sign up here to make sure you receive the report as soon as it’s released) – but fingers crossed!

Seven Tips to Write the Best Email Appeals

2012-01-29T15:47:44Z

Email is a numbers game. With competition for attention becoming more of a challenge every day, paying attention to the details and best practices matters more and more. Here are a few key tips from Samuel Mesquita, an expert email copy writer who spent years at ActionAid in the UK. You can read his full article here: "17 Things I Have Learnt About Charity Email Copy"

The ONLY bits that matter in terms of conversion are: 1. subject line 2. the first sentence 3. link copy 4. call to action. Write these bits FIRST. The rest of the email should proceed from them. These are also the bits which will have the largest impact in tests.
There should always be some version of the Call-to-Action above the fold.
The message must be about the recipient, not the sender. Always talk about ‘you’, never ‘we’. ‘You can stop the biofuels scandal’, not ‘We need you to stop the biofuels scandal’.
Email content is a less-than-zero sum game. Talk about three different things, and you won’t get three times as much engagement. You won’t even get the same amount of engagement, split three ways. You’ll get less in total. One message ALWAYS trumps two.
You have 3 seconds to convince someone to engage with your email. That’s all. If they read the first sentence, and they don’t know what you’re trying to tell them, they WILL delete your email.
Never, ever write a boring or cryptic subject line. Questions, or teasing ambiguity, can be very effective. But if you don’t mention the basic subject matter, it will get ignored by your most important audience: the people who actually care about that issue.
About a third of your readers will have their email set up so they only see the first 21 characters of the subject line. Frontload the best bit but don't try and cram everything in at the top.

What are your favorite email practices that have increased conversion rates?

From the Floor: Creating Change for the LGBT community

2012-01-27T18:46:44Z

Creating Change is the premier annual organizing and skills-building event for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community and their allies. The conference is run by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and attracts more than 2,500 people from all over the country. Presenters and participants come from all walks of life, including members of the business community, elected officials, students, faith leaders, and staff and volunteers of nonprofit organizations. Exhibiting with Care2 are organizations like GLSEN, The Human Rights Campaign, SAGE, The Trevor Project, The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, Immigration Equality, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The response by conference attendees to Care2's presence has been overwhelming.

"It's great to see Care2 at Creating Change. As social networking takes on more of an importance in our fundraising and advocacy strategies, it's great to be able to partner with an organization that supports progressive and LGBT causes," says Mardi Moore, Membership Manager at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Care2 has had a long history of working on behalf of the LGBT community to help organizations identify new progressive supporters and win critical campaigns, including the passage of the Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Attending the conference on behalf of Care2 are Kara Fujita and new Care2 Director of Nonprofit Services, Dane Grams, a 14-year veteran of the LGBT Rights movement.

"As Care2 continues to grow, you can expect to see us play a bigger role in helping the LGBT community achieve their goals," according to Grams. "Care2 is proud to partner with such great organizations and make a difference for the LGBT community."

Search and sign some of our petitions in support of the LGBT community, and visit our LGBT cause channel for the latest news!

By the way, if you are at Creating Change this weekend please by the Care2 table or contact Dane and Kara to say hi!

Email: Still Not Dead!

2012-01-25T04:02:36Z

Mark Zuckerberg is a pioneer of the social web. Over the last eight years he’s led Facebook from a scrappy startup to one of the most powerful and influential companies. But when Zuckerberg says that email is going to die because young people prefer to text, you can’t help but laugh at the irony since providing your email address is actually how you register for a Facebook account. Despite how the web has transformed over the years, email is the one constant that has remained and is not going away anytime soon.

For example: Looking to sign up for more information about your favorite nonprofit? You need to provide an email address to sign up for their enewsletter. Looking to purchase an item on the web? You usually need an email address to check out and buy the item. Looking to make a donation? You need to provide an email address. Want to send a document to a colleague; chances are you are going to email it at some point unless everyone who you do business with is on Dropbox or Google Docs (which by the way you also need an email address to sign up for).

Email continues to grow and to be the dominant communications tool. And despite what Zuckerberg and some others think, email is not dying because social media is taking over. Both channels are important and should be a part an integrated communications strategy to reach activists and donors.

"Social media is a great additional engagement channel, but we find the level of commitment and responsiveness much stronger in email. Email is still king in the demographic groups that are most likely to become donors," said Joe Baker, Vice President of Causes and Advocacy for Care2, a social action network which serves more than 700 nonprofit clients, across the spectrum of cause verticals.

Check out these email stats:

There are an estimated 2.9 billion email addresses. In comparison there are 750 million Facebook accounts and 300 million Twitter accounts.

By 2014 there will be over 3.8 billion email accounts.

188 billion emails are sent daily, though granted a portion of those are spam. Over on Facebook, 60 million Facebook updates are made and 140 million tweets are sent through Twitter (and many of those could be considered spam too!).

**Learn more about improving your emails by downloading our free white paper, 12 Best Practices for Email Marketing.

Six Tips To Kick-Start Your 2012 Fundraising

2012-01-21T19:39:04Z

Nonprofits receive up to 40% of their online donations at the end of the year since the holidays have people feeling generous, and donors also want to maximize those tax deductions before year’s end. But this doesn’t happen by magic – people donate money to your organization because they feel a connection to your organization and the issues you work on. They believe in what you do. That takes staying in touch with your donors all year, cultivating and deepening your relationships with them, and making sure your supporters have the information that inspires them to donate.

So how did you do in 2011? Is it time to make some resolutions for 2012, so you can raise more money in 2012? Here are some online marketing strategies Convio recently outlined in their whitepaper “Utilize Your Year-End Momentum” that you can start working on right now, so that when “that time” rolls around again, you’ll be better positioned to reach your online fundraising goals.

Build Your List

Make sure you’re capturing email addresses whenever and wherever you can. There are a few key ways to build your list. Paid acquisition is one of the fastest ways to build you list. Social action networks like Care2 and the Petition Site which has about 12 million unique site visitors per month, and is the 140th (on average) highest traffic website in the U.S does paid acquisition campaigns for hundreds of nonprofits. Their Petition Site has attracted 40,000 new citizen petitions this year alone.

Utilize the Google Adwords grants. As a 501C3 you can get between $10K and $40K worth of free Google Adwords.

Encourage those who respond to your postal mail, telephone appeals, and special events to sign up for your email list – offer incentives like special content, matching gifts, and online premiums.

Use Multiple Channels

Don’t be shy about reaching out to people across multiple channels. “Savvy organizations are adopting a multi-channel approach to convert online acquired prospects, using email first, followed up by mail, then telemarketing to maximize conversion rates. Our research shows that direct mail donors who also receive email give two times as much and renew at 10% higher rates than those just receiving email,” Convio said.

Segment Your List

The key to building relationships with your supporters is to know more about them. For example, what issue were they first recruited on? What campaigns have they taken action on or donated money to? Use that information to deliver the content most relevant to them.

Blackbaud Buys their Rival Convio: Now What?

2012-01-18T20:23:52Z

The nonprofit community was stunned yesterday when Blackbaud purchased long time rival Convio. According to Blackbaud President Marc Chardon, “Combining Convio and Blackbaud is expected to help create one of the largest SaaS vendors with over $440 million in trailing twelve months pro forma revenue.” So what does this acquisition mean for the nonprofit community, in particular for the 1500+ customers that use Convio? No one really knows for sure yet. But the community has a lot of opinions about the acquisition.

“When we are sitting in between the announcement and the actual change, we can go many directions with speculation - from hopes to fears," said Amy Sample Ward of NTEN. "Personally, I see this acquisition as another link in a chain of events over the last few years that are sending a clear signal. Whether it was the news like Ideablob shutting down, Causes leaving MySpace, or Blackbaud buying Convio, the message to individuals and organizations alike is this: we always have and will continue to have an opportunity to call for what we want and build it. If we choose to only invest in tools or platforms that we are not engaged with, we are putting too many eggs in one basket. If we invest in tools and communities that engage with us to build the solutions we need, we put ourselves and our missions in a better place. That said, I know Blackbaud has made efforts to engage its users and I hope that this kind of collaboration will only increase.”

Colin Delany, Editor of Epolitics.com says “some of us were on GetActive back when Convio bought it (2007?). I'm using Convio at a different organization now, and frankly I don't see any significant advantage the merger brought to customers, and all I really expect from this new development is less competition in the market. But of course, I'm only using Convio's CRM/advocacy/fundraising tools, not their "Luminate" Salesforce-based database, so perhaps I'm missing something that will make a difference."

"In any case, good thing we still have Salsa and NationBuilder," said Delany.

Here’s my personal take.

The Good

When two strong companies come together who already have a solid foundation in the market place, there is enormous potential to create an even better product and customer service. Of course there is a downside to mergers like this too, which we will discuss in “The Bad” section below.

Both Convio and Blackbaud have some incredibly talented developers, marketers, and leaders at their companies. Working side by side towards a shared vision can lead to some major product innovation if these relationships are properly nurtured and egos are left at the door.

New Book "Share, Retweet, Repeat" Reveals the Secrets of Viral Campaigning

2012-01-17T15:46:38Z

Books about online marketing are hit or miss. They’re either just too basic, or else they’re bone dry technical. But the latest contribution to the genre – “Share, Retweet, Repeat: Get Your Message Read and Spread” -- from veteran online marketing whiz John Hlinko, is a terrific read. In fact it should be scooped up by any Frogloop reader who aspires to getting their messages to “go viral.”

And that’s why we’re going to hold a February 1st drawing to give away three free copies of Hlinko’s book to Frogloop readers. To be in the drawing, all you need to do is write a comment on this post (a relevant one, please), and then click the button to share the post via Facebook or Twitter before midnight on Jan. 31^st. It will only take a minute and, trust me, you’ll be really happy if you win this book.

Hlinko’s book deconstructs the most successful online campaigns, dissecting their opening premises, their attention grabber “hooks,” their visual aids, their choice of messengers and their distribution and promotion tactics. In this way, he identifies which elements helped the most in making the campaigns "go viral." And his tips for using Facebook, Twitter, blogs and email are up to date and first rate. Most importantly though, this book is genuinely fun to read. It obviously was written to make us laugh while we learn.

It helps that Hlinko is possibly the most gifted wit in the progressive politics and advocacy space, deftly mixing satire and puns to grab you, make you smile, and get you to forward his stuff to your friends. Just read John’s posts on Progressive Exchange, sometimes in repartee with Sea Change Strategies Mark Rovner, and you’ll see what I mean. Or check out his bio, here. Hlinko is also a veteran of the commercial marketing world, having worked with leading ad agency creative directors. This enables him to provide great examples to illustrate points.

Along with Seth Godin’s books, and the great “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, this new online marketing gem -- “Share, Retweet, Repeat” -- definitely deserves to be on your shelf of really useful books about creative messaging and marketing. You’ll read it at one long sitting and then refer to it again and again.

Below is an Exclusive Interview with the author himself.

FIVE INSIGHTFUL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WITH AUTHOR JOHN HLINKO

CO: OK here is my one serious question for you: In talking about advertising options, you discuss Cost per Thousand ("CPM") pricing and Cost per Click ("CPC") pricing. Why didn't you include "Cost per Lead" (CPL) pricing -- such as we use for Care2 clients?

Steal These 42 Creative Pinterest Ideas for Nonprofits

2012-01-13T12:03:00Z

We’re about to see Pinterest use among nonprofit organizations explode. Pinterest has a lot of potential, especially for organizations whose stories lend themselved to visual storytelling.

Pinterest is a new(ish) and growing a image based social network and the newest darling of social media marketers. I’m always intrigued to see how nonprofits find creative ways to use new social media tools, but I didn’t think seriously about Pinterest’s potential for nonprofits until I read Joe Waters and Beth Kanter’s thoughts. Now I’m excited to see how cause communities embrace this emerging network to create value and mission impact.

A Matter of Demographics

Part of Pinterest’s potential is it’s unique demographic user-base. Joe explains the what makes Pinterest demographically unique in his recent Huffington Post piece, Why and How Causes Should Use Pinterest:

“The heavy presence of women 25-44 on Pinterest is what distinguishes it from other new social media platforms, which are generally populated by men 18-24. Here's a site that already has the audience everyone wants: women and moms who make most of the household buying decisions.”

Those buying decisions include donation and charitable decisions, and with women bringing in over half the income in 55% of US households, nonprofits should think about how they can engage Pinterest’s largely female audience.

Pinterest Guidelines

Beth explains that much of her attraction to Pinterest is due to her visual learning style and role as a content curator. Beth summarized some of the guidelines Joe shared for using Pinterest:

Infographic: A Peek Inside Donation Trends and Why We Support Charities

2012-01-12T22:02:03Z

If you’re like most nonprofits, one of your top priorities is to raise money to support your cause and programs. To raise money, you need to craft strategies to cultivate donors and move them up the engagement ladder. To do this effectively though, you need to understand what motivates donors to contribute money to charity.

The infographic “Where and Why People Donated their Time and Money in 2010/2011 Trends” provides some great data that is worth noting as you craft your fundraising strategies for 2012.

Donors said that the top five reasons that motivated an individual to fundraise were:

69% felt a personal or emotional connection.
50% said a friend or family member asked them to participate.
37% said it was a physical challenge (like a marathon to support a charity).
35% said it was to benefit the local community.
32% said they wanted to be part of a company or group team.

What channels are people donating through?

52% said that they donate money when they check out such at a grocery store.
49% said by check.
32% said through a gift soup.
31% said through a website.
27% said through a fundraising event.

The biggest U.S charities people donated to were:

The United Way with $3.9B
Salvation Army with $1.81B
Feeding America with $1.5B
American Red Cross with $1.08B
Food for the Poor with $1.04B