Tips for putting together a well-planned mobile fundraising strategy

Guest post by Ben Rigby
Co-founder, The Extraordinaries

If you’re like most people working at a nonprofit, you probably had a “Holy Mobile!” moment in January 2010 when an outpouring of donations followed the devastating Haiti quake. This, you expected.

But what you may not have anticipated was that $41 million of these dollars flowed through mobile phones via “premium text messages.” The Red Cross received 4.1 million messages valued at $10 each, 95 percent of which were from first-time donors.

You breathed in … hard. Did you miss mobile? Where did all of these donors come from? Did a fantastic fund-raising opportunity pass you by? How do you jump on the bandwagon?

If any of these thoughts raced through your head last January — or if any are racing now — not to worry. Mobile giving is just about five years young. There’s plenty of time to put together a thoughtful mobile fundraising strategy.

Best of all, many of the kinks have been worked out. There’s never been a better time to start a mobile campaign.

How does it work?

As it turns out, the Red Cross used just one of several common methods to generate revenue from mobile phone owners. These methods are:

1. Text message donations
2. Text to voice donations
3. Text message warmers
4. Mobile Web site donations
5. App sales
6. In-app sales
7. Sponsored apps

Text message donations

1Using this simple method, your nonprofit advertises the availability of your designated fundraising phone number to potential donors. Donors send a text message to this number indicating that they would like to donate. Voila! Your nonprofit receives a check in the mail 30 to 90 days later.

This is precisely the kind of mobile fundraising campaign run by the Red Cross in support of Haiti. Hundreds of nonprofits around the U.S. — and around the world — are running and have run similar campaigns with great success.

There are some gotchas, processing fees and common frustrations, but overall, setting up and operating a text message donation campaign is a fantastic way to reach donors at the moment of inspiration. Mobile Active, the excellent and definitive source for all things mobile, has an exhaustive writeup covering the details of setting up and operating a text message donation campaign.

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If you’re interested in using Facebook Places to engage with your local constituents, you need to first claim your Facebook Places Page. (Didn’t know you had one, did you?)

The benefit of claiming your Facebook Places Page is having the ability to publish content to those who have checked into your Place, which Facebook recently introduced to bring location-based functionality to your social network.

For example, let’s say that at your next fundraising event, you have attendees check in via Facebook Places. If you’ve claimed your Place, you can publish post-event stories to the attendees’ news feeds to get wider distribution of news surrounding the event.

See the screencast above for how to claim your Facebook Places Page.

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Looks like it’ll be a full house Tuesday evening for “Tilting the World: The Power of Games for Good,” with Nicole Lazzaro, president of XEODesign and XEOPlay. I’ll be your humble moderator for this Net Tuesday event.

Details:

When: Tuesday, Sept. 14. Doors open at 6 pm for socializing and snacks. Program program begins at 6:30 pm.

What: What would the world be like if we solved the world’s toughest problems with play? You’d have the warm feelings of generosity and gratitude from volunteering and tap into some of the most powerful human motivators on the planet: the emotions behind play. Because emotion and action are intertwined, games create experiences for people to change their worry into excitement for simple habits that can change the world. Come join us for a discussion of how to Tilt the world, using gaming for good, and get a behind the scenes peek at Tilt’s upcoming global meta-game.

Where: TechSoup Global, 525 Brannan St., Suite 300, San Francisco

Cost: Free, but registration requested on Meetup.com.

Live stream: Justgood.tv plans to live-stream the event.

More: Refreshments will be served.

Tilt: Flip’s Adventure in 1.5 Dimensions is a change in perspective game about how simple choices add up to bring about real change. A simple Tilt from portrait to landscape and the game delivers a “Powers of Ten” experience from cleaning the soil by planting mushrooms the progresses to cleaning the air with Flip’s eco-machines. Players who Tilt the real world such as reducing their carbon foot print through the magic of social media also earn points in the game. The approach comes from the recognition that a collection of simple habits and small goals often creates the situations that cause the most alarm.

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If you turn on your television tonight, you’ll see an imposing array of musicians, actors and athletes who’ll be participating in the Stand Up to Cancer benefit concert. The fundraising event will be broadcast live and without commercial interruption on all major networks and several cable stations — something you rarely see.

This year in the United States alone, 1.4 million people will be diagnosed with cancer. To help them lead full lives after diagnosis, Stand Up To Cancer will bring out the stars to help raise funds to fight this scourge. Two years ago, the fundraising telecast aired across more than 170 countries, raised more than $100 million and started a groundbreaking grassroots movement to build public support for cancer research. This year they hope to go even bigger.

Celebrities announced to appear tonight include Kathy Bates, Sir Richard Branson, Michael Chiklis, George Clooney, Baron Davis, Dorothy Hamill, Anne Heche, Cheryl Hines, Randy Jackson, George Karl, Dr. Jon Lapook, Rob Lowe, Jane Lynch, Marlee Matlin, Shareen Mitchell, Olivia Munn, Lisa Niemi, Kelly Osbourne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Will Smith, Sam Trammell, Denzel Washington and Renée Zellweger.

Musical guests include Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, The Edge, Herbie Hancock, Kris Kristofferson, Lady Antebellum, Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Martina McBride, Aaron Neville, Dave Stewart and Stevie Wonder.

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Facebook Places can create more awareness for your organization

You may have heard that Facebook released a location-based tagging feature a couple of weeks ago called Places that works similarly to Foursquare or Gowalla. The basic idea is that Facebook users can  share when and where they hang out with their Facebook friends (and sometimes the universe).

And if you’ve kept up on what’s new with location-based marketing, you’ve read about the companies that have emerged in response to our need to “check in.”

Great,  brands are benefiting from local social. But how can you use Facebook Places to create more awareness and money for your nonprofit?

To get started in location-based social media marketing, consider the following ideas.

Shiny is never a replacement for strategy

No matter what social tools come on the market (and believe me, pretty soon you’ll see tools way cooler than Facebook Places), they cannot take the place of a well thought-out strategy. For more on tools vs. strategy, read Tactics: Actions, Not Tools by Geoff Livingston.

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Mother Jones’ move into social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

 

Publisher’s message to other nonprofits: Know your goals

‘If you know Mother Jones, you probably think of us as primarily a print magazine,” says publisher Steve Katz. “That’s not really true anymore.”

For the past year, I’ve been working with Jon Funabiki of San Francisco State’s Renaissance Journalism Center, a talented team of producers and five nonprofits — including Mother Jones — as part of the New Media Lab. I wrote about its kickoff summit last fall at Socialmedia.biz.

One of our goals has been to help nonprofits adapt to the sometimes daunting social media landscape, and Mother Jones provides a fascinating case study of a journalism publication that is transforming its business processes and newsroom culture to embrace the new realities of the mediasphere.

At the conclusion of our second New Media Lab Summit in San Francisco the other week I sat down with publisher Steve Katz to discuss those changes and Mother Jones’ participation in the New Media Lab. Here’s our 11-minute interview:

Watch, download or embed video on Vimeo

Mother Jones began in 2009 to build out its presence on Facebook and Twitter. Today, its Facebook Page has 21,756 people who liked it and its main Twitter account has 20,953 followers, in addition to its staffers’ accounts, like Katz’s.

“We’ve seen how we can use Twitter to generate journalism,” Katz says. One example came when staff reporter Mac McClelland visited Louisiana after the Gulf oil spill. Her tweets and photos turned into a blog post on the Mother Jones site, which was updated and expanded into an article for the next issue of the magazine. Katz calls it a “really cool and visible [transparent] iterative reporting process” that helped to throw a public spotlight on the issue of media access to the spill. It also had the side effect of dramatically increasing her Twitter following from about 300 to 5,480 today.

Many nonprofits are still hesitant about embracing social media, but Katz says that after watching the changes taking place in people’s online behavior, “we knew we had to be there and wanted to do it in a smart way.” A lot of the team members were already using the tools in their personal lives, he says, “and it became really obvious that this would be a tremendous benefit to Mother Jones as an organization, as a journalism outfit — and it has.”

Staffers use Facebook and Twitter to engage in conversations, to test out ideas and to generate leads and background information. Next, Mother Jones will be sending a reporter to Haiti to do an update on the aftereffects of the quake, and they plan to deeply incorporate video into their work.

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Image by jeffisageek on Flickr

Print out this cheat sheet to keep tab on the top tags

By Kim Bale
Socialbrite staff

Sending a tweet into the Twitterverse without a proper tag is like stocking a library with no regard to author or subject matter. Your messages may go unread and opportunities to connect with others may be missed.

Make room for a hashtag in your post — that will add your tweet to an existing (if somewhat hidden) thread, given that Twitter now turns hashtags into links. Bottom line: When used judiciously, hashtags are definitely worth the precious extra characters.

Last year we wrote about how nonprofits can use Twitter hashtags. But hashtags have evolved a bit since then. You may want to download and print out our new 40 hashtags for social good flyer so that you always have the right tag ready for your tweets.

What’s a hashtag? Our social media glossary says this:

A hashtag is a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. Similar to tags on Flickr, you add them in-line to your Twitter posts by prefixing a word with a hash symbol (or # sign).

How to create your own hashtag

Hashtags are useful when discussing a specific topic, trying to reach a certain demographic, aggregating tweets about an event or trying to raise awareness of a cause. Twitter now creates a link whenever anyone adds a hashtag — click it (say, #cause) and you’ll see a thread of most recent tweets that contain the same tag.

Anyone can create a hashtag. Just affix the # symbol to the beginning of a word, tweet it — and you’ve got your #hashtag! A hashtag can be included anywhere in your tweet — in the middle or at the end. It doesn’t matter if the hashtag is uppercase or lowercase.

If you’re holding a conference — for example, #SoCap10 or #SoEnt10 — or a special event or tweet regularly about a specific topic, you’ll likely want to use a hashtag. Be sure to announce the hashtag in advance so your followers will begin to use it. Need help with a fundraiser you’re organizing? Tag it with #Fundraising and it will come up in this list:

How to find the right hashtag

How to choose the right tag? Start with our flyer, then visit to search.twitter.com, type in the hashtag and see how other people are using it. You can also go one step further and search the hashtag on an analytics website, like Trendistic, What The Hashtag or hashtags.org, to see how it’s trending over time. This will clue you into which hashtags are most popular (#nonprofit was used an average of 384 times per day last week) and which hashtags you should avoid because they see more action than the freeway at rush hour. With an average of 500 #green tweets a day, it could be difficult to separate yours from the masses.

Can’t find the right hashtag for your tweet? Create your own. Just remember to keep it short and recognizable so others will use and search it. The longer your hashtag is (say, more than 10 characters), the less likely other people will be to retweet it.

Before you create your own, check out these existing hashtags for social good and start a conversation.

Have your own favorite, or spot something we missed? Please add in the comments below!

Social change & activism

1. #socialgood: This hashtag can be used to discuss any topic related to social good.

2. #cause or #causes can be used to discuss subjects related to social causes.

3. #volunteer: Use this when talking about or looking for a volunteer opportunity (it sees more traffic than #volunteers or #volunteering).

4. #4change: This hashtag was created to flag a monthly chat on how social media is helping to foster change.

5. #giveback: Use this hashtag to talk about giving back to the world and your community.

6. #dogood: Support the Do Good Movement and share your good deeds with the world.

7. #crisiscommons: This hashtag is used largely during disasters to create crowdsourced solutions that contribute to disaster relief.

Nonprofits & foundations

8. #nonprofit: This versatile tag can be applied to any tweet concerning the nonprofit sector (and is much more popular than #nonprofits).

9. #philanthropy: Tag your philanthropic news with this hashtag.

10. #charity: Mark your charitable tweets with this hashtag.

11. #charitytuesday: Share your favorite nonprofits with your followers every Tuesday.

12. #nptech: Use this for tagging nonprofits’ use of technology.

13. #foundation: Use when discussing news about foundations (it’s much more popular than #foundations).

14. #grant: Use this tag to reference all things grant related.

Social businesses

15. #socent: Use this tag to discuss social entrepreneurship. (There’s also a #socentchat hashtag for a Twitter conversation held the first Wednesday of each month.)

16. #socialbusiness: Use this to refer to business working toward social good.

17. #changemakers: Use this when discussing change through social entrepreneurship or when referring to Ashoka Changemakers.

18. #socialadvertising: Use this to discuss advertising as a form of activism.

19. #BOP (Bottom of the Period Pyramid): A favorite among entrepreneurs, this can be applied to a variety of tweets from topics concerning frugal spending to untapped resources. Be aware, however, that this hashtag gets a lot of use by those outside of the nonrofit sector. The related #bopbiz might be a better choice.

20. #entrepreneurs: Great for connecting with talented entrepreneurs.

21. #csr (Corporate Social Responsibility): Use this for tweets about sustainability and holding corporations responsible.

22. #microfinance: Use this when discussing microfinance or extending financial services to the low-income sector.

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The Change-maker Daily, from a Twitter list created by Socialbrite.

 

And a Q&A with a representative of the new service about what’s ahead

By Jessica Haswell
Socialbrite staff

Do you love Twitter‘s serendipity — the cool way it surfaces links that hit just the right spot — but aren’t too thrilled with the free-for-all jumble of tweets that race past you?

Struggle to find the jewels amid the chaos no more: paper.li is a fresh new take on Twitter that organizes not just the tweets but the content from the links. The free service assembles the heart of the Twitter content you care about into one graphically pleasing magazine-style layout.

This morning the Swiss-based start-up answered a few questions about what’s coming down the road — including a paper.li online newsstand. See below for the Q&A.

Anyone can create a paper.li in under a minute — see below for how to do it. Your paper is updated every 24 hours, making it easy to stay on top of the tweets of the folks you follow. In a word, it offers context. Not only that, but paper.li enables you to reply, retweet, follow, unfollow or favorite through pop-up tabs on the site.

There is currently no other website quite like this, but I’m sure that won’t stay true for long. (For a different example, check out The Twitter Tim.es.) For a nonprofit, business or any organization, this is a fast, easy, terrific promotional tool to educate your followers about your cause or mission. It merges a diverse collection of links about niche subjects into one slick package.

What do you think of paper.li? Please leave a comment below.

How it works: Publish your paper in a hot second

Interested in setting one up? Here are the steps to take:

1) Go to paper.li and click the “Create your own daily paper” button.

2) Sign in to your Twitter or Facebook account to authorize the app’s access to your account.

3) The site creates a paper for you — click the “my paper.li” link. You can also also click “create a newspaper” to add a Twitter user you follow, a #tag (though this doesn’t always work) or a Twitter list.

Shazam! You have a newspaper!

Noted blogger Robert Scoble calls paper.li “a Flipboard for those of us without iPads.” Rita King tells us: “I like paper.li because it’s amazingly accurate in its perception of what will interest me.”

And educator Kathy Gill adds: “I love it because it’s another form of discovery. It’s a great way see what other people thought was important in the prior 24 hour period. It puts an ephemeral Tweetstream into a snapshot that is more than minute here-or-there by letting you look at a stream.”

Here’s how the Causes Daily looks:

The Causes Daily

Tips on creating your publication

There’s no catch. The service is free, permitting anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account to create up to 10 papers. It’s a creation of SmallRivers, a small start-up in Lausanne, Switzerland, located on the Swiss Institute of Technology EPFL campus. The service rolled out earlier this year in “alpha” (the stage before beta), so expect to see a lot of changes in the coming months. Follow the latest developments on the paper.li blog.

Here are some other things you may want to know:

• The developers wanted to keep things simple, so currently you can’t do any tailoring or fine-tuning of your publication. That is, you can’t decide which tweets or accompanying media to highlight; paper.li uses an algorithm to highlight important or newsworthy content, though how it “guesses” which items to highlight is a bit of a mystery.

• The service pulls some of the tweets you send, but most of the publication’s content comes from the people on Twitter whom you follow — not the people who follow you. For accounts like Socialbrite, which has an open door policy of following back just about any legitimate Twitter user, this makes for a less focused newspaper experience. However, using a Twitter list or #hashtag is an easy way to bring a focused theme to your paper.li. A site like Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop also solves this by creating niche Twitter accounts, posting updates to each — and following nobody. Thus, the Alltop Social Media Daily grabs updates only from @Alltop_Social because Alltop_Social follows no one.

Q&A with one of the site’s developers

Here are some questions we put to the site’s developers. Ed from SmallRivers responded earlier today:

How will readers be able to navigate paper.li newspapers? One can search by keyword, but there’s no directory of papers created.

We are working on a paper.li “newsstand.” You’ll be able to search papers there with many more criteria than only keywords.

Will future releases let publishers customize the display of their papers?

To a certain extent, yes. But we really want to keep it as simple as possible (and that’s THE challenge…).

Will publishers be able to mash up multiple tags, lists or accounts into a single newspaper?

We are working on enabling users to build more targeted papers. Multiple criteria is one of the ways we are currently looking into.

Paper.li is still in development. What are some of the upcoming features you’re planning to include in future releases?

Sorry, we can’t disclose now.

We see this as an easy way for nonprofits to create a pretty cool promotional vehicle for their cause or mission. What benefits does paper.li offer to nonprofits in particular?

It is clearly seen as a good place to show the output of a distributed collaboration. We see many nonprofits promoting new hashtags (specially made for paper.li) and inviting their supporters to contribute. It is also seen as a relevant “resource center” (see World Wildlife Fund‘s WWF Climate Daily).

Will there be a cost for creating newspapers at some point?

Not for the types of papers you can see now. But some advanced features might be premium (small monthly fee).

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Guest post by Manny Hernandez
Diabetes Hands Foundation

After more than three years, the Diabetes Hands Foundation finally has a Wikipedia page. But it was a long, painful journey.

Because I couldn’t find much when I Googled “Wikipedia nonprofits,” I decided to share the lessons we learned so that you can begin on the right track to get your organization listed.

Build your reputation and ‘notability’ first

No matter how important you think your work is — and I am sure you are doing amazing things for others in the world — your organization needs to be notable, according to Wikipedia’s guidelines, before it can be worthy for inclusion on Wikipedia. Quoting:

An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. All content must be verifiable.

Don’t kill the messenger! This set the rules of their site and it’s worked for them so far, though the jury is still out on this one. So, your blog? Not typically a reliable, independent secondary source. A passing mention in an article in your local newspaper? Not notable enough. If you come to think of it, these guidelines are what keeps the site as encyclopedic as it can hope to be.

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