Category Archives: charity

how the digital advertising standards affect charities

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Its been a little while since the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) broadened their remit to include digital. In preparation for the launch I pulled together some quick notes that I thought others might be interested in. So here they are.

In summary – if you’re following best practice already, particularly the Fundraising Standards Board, you’re likely to already be doing all the right things. But it’s definitely worth double checking!

 

What’s covered? (extract from ASA’s website)
“Advertisements and other marketing communications by or from companies, organisations or sole traders on their own websites, or in other non-paid-for space online under their control, that are directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods, services, opportunities and gifts, or which consist of direct solicitations of donations as part of their own fund-raising activities.”

“There are three important aspects of the scope:

  1. It applies to marketing communications ‘directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods, services’ etc: this phrase conveys the primary intent of marketing communications coming within the extended digital remit: to sell something. It is understood that a marketing communication may set out to sell something in a myriad of different ways. It need not necessarily include a price or seek overtly an immediate or short-term financial transaction or include or otherwise refer to a transactional facility.
  2. The promotion of causes or ideas: The scope doesn’t cover marketing communications promoting causes or ideas but does explicitly apply to marketing communications which consist of direct solicitations of donations as part of fund-raising activities. This takes into account of the potential for consumer detriment, especially financial loss, arising from these marketing communications.
  3. ‘non-paid-for space online under [the advertiser’s] control’: this phrase covers, although not exclusively, advertisements and other marketing communications on advertiser-controlled pages on social networking websites. Social networking websites have a significant consumer reach, are popular with children and young people and play an increasing role in public policy debates.”

Complaints to ASA generally relate to: Misleading Price claims, Availability claims, Delivery claims etc, Offensiveness, an Harm.

    Relevant exclusions

    • Press releases and other public relations material
    • Editorial content
    • Political advertisements
    • Corporate reports
    • Natural listings on a search engine or a price comparison site
    • Claims in marketing communications in media addressed only to medical, dental, veterinary or allied practitioners, that relate to those practitioners expertise
    • ‘The Code is primarily concerned with the content of marketing communications and not with… products themselves’
    • ‘Heritage advertising’ where its not part of your current promotional strategy and is placed in appropriate context.

    User generated content including customer reviews is outside of remit unless incorporated in marketing message/s or strategy eg user contributed photos of people enjoying your product displayed under a ‘marketing headline’. Planting of marketing related comments incognito is illegal

    Impact for charities

    • Not the whole of a charity’s website is in remit – just those places which are geared to getting donations or selling a service or product.
    • Campaigning material online is not covered where it’s not immediately linked to a donation. Although obviously if then published offline as advertising it is within remit as all offline advertising is.
    • PR material which is seen to be selling directly to consumers is likely to be covered – although PR is otherwise outside of the remit.

    Key considerations?

    • Claims need to be true and accompanied by all information necessary for the consumer to make an informed decision.
    • Must not omit material which is needed for the consumer to make an informed decision. Eg any criteria required for refunds to be possible, qualifications and limitations need to be stated,
    • Must hold evidence for any claims you wish to make, particularly those which consumers may want proof of.

    What can you do to be prepared?

    • Get training: ASA is offering training on 29 September 2011 ‘Advice:am – Digital advertising’ £170
    • Get an audit: ASA – a standard audit costs £800 + VAT and takes up to 10 working days to complete.
    • Get advice on individual bits: Advertisers seeking advice on individual marketing communications on their website may continue to use CAP’s free Copy Advice service.

    web managers meet up: Comic Relief digital production

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    I attended a Web Managers meet up recently (here’s the web managers linkedIn group). One of the speakers was Rae (@raepizer) who is Digital Production Manager at Comic Relief. She gave a quick run through how they work and some of the lovely stuff they’ve produced for this year’s Red Nose Day.

    Rae’s talk was great and of one the things that stood out to me was the daily stats meeting across the teams. I’m definitely going to try to get this started for our peak campaign times at work.

    Here’s my notes for anyone interested:

    Digital staffing:

    • Digital Production Manager with a permanent team of around 12 front end digital staff including a Senior designer and Senior developer
    • Within the team they have a tech standards person who sets standards and guidelines and oversees them – they work with the separate broadcast team to get the right video format and convert etc
    • On top of these they can have up to 20 digital contractors at once
    • They work closely with other key separate teams; Back end and CRM, Donations and hosting platform, Marketing, and Broadcast team. (I think I lost some of the detail here so happy to take additions!)

    How they operate:

    • During the campaign period they have daily stats meetings across the organisation to inform how they optimise and help them be reactive
    • They have a kids steering group for all the kids related areas
    • Audience segment breakdowns are based on TV programmes eg hollyoakers
    • This year they’re going to focus on facebook, twitter and YouTube – last year they did more but it wasn’t a good use of time vs effectiveness
    • Usability testing is done each year for each new site- they do one new design per year to keep up with drupal updates and build on learning from previous year
    • For their mobile site the design was done in-house but the build outsourced.

    Their ‘products’:

    • Start in May for September school site launch – they also did a CD-Rom this year as research showed school technology was behind the times and this format was best for them
    • January is when they do the big new site launch -most years approximately 2 week before the official campaign launch
    • They generally put up four new website news articles a day
    • On the Red Nose Day site the most popular sections are the Shop then the Kids area
    • At its peak the donation pack form takes more donations per second than amazon.

    should charities innovate in digital?

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    In digital there is always a new trend that’s causing buzz, at the moment its Quora. It’s easy to get excited by the potential of many of these new trends but when you work in charity its hard to justify investment when something is new and still relatively unproven.

    For a long time I thought charities had the most constraints. However people I’ve spoken in other sectors have said they think it’s even harder to break away from the norms of their comms routines and channels.

    I once spoke at an event for pharma comms professionals and was astounded that some of the things I saw as standard digital practice were seen as groundbreaking in the pharma industry. The sector is just so heavily regulated and very fearful of being taken to court.

    yoobot case studyIn a conversation with someone from a mainstream publisher they told me how they had a specific team for innovation and if you wanted to do something different you had to pass the concept to that team first. This meant the everyday small bits of innovation ended up taking much longer to come to fruition (if they did at all).

    I’m fortunate to have been involved in some great projects which have innovated in the third sector digital space. I’m personally thrilled that our British Heart Foundation yoobot.co.uk site has even been featured in a best of the web case study book (The Internet Case Study Book).

    I can’t imagine being in an environment where you literally just operate. But I think it’s important to recognise that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes. I also think that charities are the perfect breeding ground for digital comms innovation. Here’s why:

    • the bottom line is not the only objective – with diverse objectives comes diverse thinking!
    • it’s not just a day job – less top down, more bottom up.
    • we often have hard to reach audiences or complex messages – the traditional approaches just don’t often make the grade.
    • staff resources are scarce – you have to ‘muck in’ and try different things because there aren’t enough people.
    • we’re used to working with little or no money – when there’s no/little money involved the impact of failing is reduced meaning you’re more likely to try something new.
    • charity comms can look home made and be accepted – supporters generally accept a bit of roughness round the edges from charity digital comms (but perhaps only a little!).

    Of course at the end of the day there are barriers to innovation no matter what sector you’re in. But I think the key things are to recognise that innovation can start small, and that being afraid to fail means you probably won’t innovate.

    fluffing your lines – project management at its best

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    Recently I was reminded of the performers principle of carrying on regardless even if you fluff your lines. This being based on the knowledge that no-one apart from a few knew what was supposed to happen in the first place and so, in most cases, the majority will assume the reality of what happened was planned.

    I think it’s useful to bear this in mind when a project isn’t quite going to plan. There are so many times when the only option held as acceptable is the ideal. But true project management principles recognise what the lowest possible acceptable state is, as well as the highest.

    Now don’t get me wrong, as a client to an agency, I always shoot for the moon. I see it as my personal responsibility that the charity gets the best for every pound we spend. I owe it to every tin shaker who has volunteered (and all the other supporters too), as well as every beneficiary who needs the charity.

    However the principle of ‘fluffing your lines’ and still getting a round of applause is very helpful to keep to mind when times are looking gloomy. The other positive is that phasing new features in gives you something else to talk about after the initial big bang!

    pondering.. what makes a charity compelling enough to reccommend?

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    Over Christmas I found myself thinking about whether there is a pattern to what makes someone recommend a charity. I think it must be different to commercial organisations but I can’t really be sure. I posted my ponderings on twitter and it started a conversation I thought I’d repeat here.

    So here you go – a mini crowd sourced checklist and the seed that started my resolution to blog!

     

    spirals Laila Takeh
    Today I am pondering.. Is there a pattern to what makes a charity compelling enough for someone to recc’d it
    rachelbeer Rachel Beer
    @spirals there are probably some common factors, which would be fairly easy to guess at, but a pattern… I’m not so sure
    spirals Laila Takeh
    @rachelbeer thx- I agree. Been thinking.. exc. supporter’s personal experience of the issue – personable, honesty, good storytelling..
    rachelbeer Rachel Beer
    @spirals and showing impact/positive outcomes as well as the need, sharing useful inform, perceived to be an authority on the issue/cause…
    spirals Laila Takeh
    @rachelbeer Think another important one is collaborating with others where there is shared issue/s. Not being megolomaniac
    rachelbeer Rachel Beer
    @spirals … and perceived to be good value for money/effective. I think showing appreciation for supporters is a big one in the mix, too
    spirals Laila Takeh
    @rachelbeer there must be some sort of checklist somewhere already. Hmmm
    rachelbeer Rachel Beer
    @spirals good one
    rachelbeer Rachel Beer
    @spirals I’m not sure there is. I was thinking about blogging it – do you have a blog?
    spirals Laila Takeh
    @rachelbeer toyed with blogging but not stuck it out yet. Perhaps that should be my 2011 resolution 🙂

    will charities make money from social networking?

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    This is another blog post I drafted a while ago…

    “With the social networking space being pandemic I know a number of charities in the UK are trying to work out ways they can capitalise on the phenomenon. It’s obvious that tapping into existing social networks and being available as a ‘friend’ that can be added to your MySpace/Bebo/Facebook, allowing users to wear their hearts on the web, meets many charities awareness raising aims. But how justifiable is it to spend the amount of time necessary to boost the profile sufficiently enough for it to take on it’s own viral life?

    Someone said to me recently that the way to capitalise on the social web phenomenon is to get users to do something for you without them realising. But of course the condition of this is that it has to be something quite addictive, useful to the individual or integral to the way they live. Ok, so if that’s our criteria I can see a few charities will be able to come up with the ideas. But what about the others?”

    Reflecting back on this I think the criteria (addictive, useful, integral) can be broken down more explicitly when it comes to charities. So here’s my attempt at a question list to help when thinking about if a concept is worth investing in.

    1. EMOTIVE: does it evoke an emotion? or ‘capitalise’ on an existing emotional state?
      Charities are by their very nature emotive. It’s where every charity starts – a belief that there is something that needs social change or support.  But today’s culture is soaked through with ‘asks’ and so you have to really evaluate if your idea will stand out and create awe/shock/fun/sympathy/pride.
    2. REWARDING: does it make someone feel empowered?
      For health and development charities this is a big one as many people feel dis-empowered by health problems or the state of the world. The social gaming industry has this factor nailed – i think there’s lots to learn from this area.
    3. CONVENIENCE: does it help you do something more easily? OR does it help you do something you couldn’t have done previously?
    4. EXCLUSIVENESS: does it make you feel one of a special few? is there a limited edition nature to it?
      This one is pretty hard with digital media as it’s expected, and needs to be, very open in order to be perceived as shareable – I’d suggest there needs to be some complementary activity offline.
    5. COMPETITIVE: is someone already doing it? is it popular? could you do it better?
      At BHF we created a recipe finder app even though there were quite a few out there already. However what this meant is we knew there was a market for the app and all it took was to spot our unique selling point – our expert heart health nutrition advice.

    And of course you then need to weigh this up against the effort and costs.

    facing the cold

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    This is a stub of a post I wrote a while back. I’m currently reading the Networked Nonprofit and this pondering is particularly relevant in that context.

    “Charities often publicise the democratic governance they abide by, rightly so. But many are struggling to make space for the very open platform of consumer involvement that is the web.

    Too scared to try. Perhaps they don’t have enough confidence in themselves? but why would that be? What makes them doubt?

    The loudest people are generally the highly opinionated with extreme singular views. Hence it’s the bad comments that get heard. The quiet majority are really the ones we want to hear from – its our job to give them the space to be heard.”