Category Archives: digital

what to prioritise if you have limited digital resources

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I wrote an article for the Lasa Knowledgebase website recently. Here it is: What To Prioritise If You’ve Only Got Limited Digital Resources and copied below for prosperity 🙂

 

What To Prioritise If You’ve Only Got Limited Digital Resources

Digital is a very broad area so it can feel overwhelming to get started if you or your organisation is relatively new to the topic. Laila Takeh lists the main ingredients to consider for a comprehensive digital presence.

This article comes with a big healthy caveat. As with all things you should talk to your target audience/s first to see what they’re using. It might result in your list being quite different to this!

1 – An up to date website

Having an up–to-date website for your organisation is still the topmost priority; without one your reputation may be damaged as most people (including potential supporters and funders) will check who you are by searching online. If you don’t have much time; it doesn’t need to be lots of pages, or constantly updated, as long as it’s clear, has contact details and other info that won’t date.

2 – Email newsletter / list

Email is still important, even with the explosion of social media, email is often how existing supporters and beneficiaries like to be kept up to date. And each email has a longer lifespan than a tweet or a Facebook post (it can be as low as 15mins according to Edgerank Checker).

Capture email addresses wherever you have touch-points with your target audiences, making sure you use the appropriate data protection opt-ins so you can regularly send email. And then, actually send email regularly. Once a month is enough, and it doesn’t need to be long.

An email address ages quite quickly as people move jobs or change accounts. Sending a regular email means your contacts are more likely to remember you both in terms of getting involved but also when they move their email address.

See the knowledgebase articles Best Practice For Sending Email Newsletters and 14 Email Dos and Don’ts.

3 – Analytics

Knowing how people are using your website and email is critical in making plans for what to do next, not just digitally but also in your wider work.

You can setup Google Analytics for free by inserting a small bit of code in your website and emails. Once you’re set up make sure you spend at least 30 minutes a month looking at the results and sharing them across your organisation. See also the knowledgebase article Reading Web Statistics.

If your website and email are very busy and more complex you’ll need more time. It’s worth it as it can help you decide where to best spend your resources moving forward.

4 – Facebook

The largest social network in the UK is still Facebook. Having a presence on thenetwork means a greater exposure for your organisation. It can be very time consuming but there are ways to constrain your efforts if needed.

The most obvious way is to make your Facebook page volunteer led, establishing yourself as the coordinator / facilitator. You’ll need to recruit volunteers into Facebook admin / ambassador roles and provide the appropriate guidance. You should then check the page and check-in with your volunteer/s once a week or more regularly.

If this still sounds like too much time in your already busy job, set aside up to an hour a week of your time. With an hour a week you should be able to do just enough; post a couple of times and reply to people who have posted on your page.

Whatever you do, you need to be able to keep doing it. A Facebook page left alone for too long will simply dry up and might give you a reputation problem.

5 – Google Grants

Around 90% of the searches done in the UK are done on Google. Hopefully your website will already be listed against a few relevant keyword searches but you can also buy search adverts to make sure you appear wherever you think relevant.

Fortunately Google offer a grant to charities so you can get access to search advertising for free. Once you’ve got the other priorities sorted you should apply and (hopefully) when you’re approved you can start to setup search advertising to get more people to your website.

You’ll need to put aside a bit of time to keep monitoring and updating your search campaigns once they’re live.

See the knowledgbase article How Google Grants Can Help Your Charity.

6 – YouTube

After Google, YouTube is the next biggest place people search. Setting up a YouTube channel for your charity is a great way to be found. Luckily Google (who own YouTube) also offer a charity channel account for free, and you can apply online for this too.

Once you’ve got a channel some simple videos explaining your organisation, and / or projects that have created impact, are the best way to start. They don’t need to be fancy if you don’t have the resource, interviews with supporters and beneficiaries are often a good format.

With a charity channel account you’ll be able to include overlays and links out from your videos. Make good use of these to capitalise on the exposure you’re getting.

See the knowledgebase article An Introduction To Effective Use Of Video On The Web.

7 – Twitter

Still not as big as Facebook but with a growing audience, Twitter is a great way to publish quick updates to easily tell people what your organisation is working on . There’s lots of journalists, bloggers and politicians using twitter to listen out for stories or political views. So gearing your efforts around engaging influencers can be a good place to start if you have limited time.

With political engagement the same rules apply as elsewhere, a large supporter endorsement (e.g. through retweets or posts on a specific hashtag) will help convince others that it’s an important issue.

See the knowledgebase article To Twitter or not to Twitter?

8 – Google+

Google+ (G+) is Google’s social network offering; it has some similarities to Facebook but also quite a few differences. There’s still uncertainty about G+ and its effectiveness. But with the integration of G+ with other Google products there is value having a G+ page to get the extra benefits on those other Google products, particularly in search results.

Checking your G+ page once a month might be enough if you don’t have lots of people following your page.

About the author

Laila Takeh
Laila is a self confessed digital geek who has been working in charity digital roles for over a decade. She is also the London Barcampnfp organiser, an unconference event for anyone interested in technology for non-profits – find out more on twitter@barcampnfp. You can find her tweeting @spirals and blogging at SpiralForms.

 

do we need a new label for online giving?

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love heart on padlockThanks to the Marketing Academy I saw Rory Sutherland speak this week. It was an excellent talk with lots of things to take away. One of them was the importance of language in creating social norms.

Rory talked about the phrase ‘designated driver’ and how it was born out of anti-drink driving campaigns. He told us how the label was seeded into TV programmes and other media to get it accepted into mainstream language. And how this new label meant ‘not drinking’ went from being unsociable to acceptable.

It got me thinking about how we might apply this learning in the charity sector. With my digital focus the first thing that came to mind was the difference in adoption between ecommerce and online giving.

For commercial organisations, ecommerce is often a higher proportion of their income than online donations are to many charities. I stand by my previous statements that charities might be behind because of the available technology. But reframing the question using this case study from Rory provides some interesting thoughts.

We need a new language for online giving, a label which makes it more of a social norm than it is. There’s a strong case for this, particularly if you are an endorser of CAF’s research into the giving habits of younger generations.

Looking back at the language around charitable giving I’m not sure its changed that much in the last few decades (please tell if you know different!). If this is correct it’s not surprising that online giving is not aligned with the modern media environment or younger generations.

So what could that new label be?

disintermediation: is it really that new?

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spring giving disintermediation eventThe folk at Spring-giving asked me to give a perspective on their disintermediation study. It’s not been an easy task, hence why this is appearing much later than the event.

I think that’s because I’m not sure how new it feels.

A proportion of individuals have always given directly to someone in need without needing intervention from a non-profit brand. Rewind the clock and you can see that’s how charities started (and continue to start).

Of course, technology is now a part of the journey, and that is new(ish). The convenience of crowd-funding platforms is a real enabler. Yet, that feels new mostly because we’re just in another tech adoption curve; we’ll move past the spawning of many platforms to a small set of reliable platforms that become the way to get something done.

We don’t know if disintermediation will result in more philanthropic giving than pre-internet – it just wasn’t tracked or published before. For example, I recently heard a charity praise their crowd-funding website for giving visibility of the fundraising by their local services. I’ve also pondered if the big successes in crowd-funding are simply aggregating money that would have been involved in smaller informal giving.

That’s not to say the third sector isn’t feeling a little bit unsure and perhaps even at risk due to the concept. You only need to look at the number of events and articles that have started to crop up to know that.

The perceived challenge is the fit with the way many charities currently work. Established charities have processes that help them comply with legislation, to manage reputation and brand, and to ensure investment in long-term sustainable impact as well as the short-term. All things that crowd-funding appears to handle very differently, if at all, at the moment.

But, there will always be people who just want to ‘do their bit’ without too much thought of who is handling the processing. For most, philanthropic acts are only a small part of their life. Based on the hypothesis that this has always happened and it’s just more visible now, what we’re really talking about is not a total shift in behaviours but about finding a way for both to work together better.

I think what we might need to adopt within charities is the Amazon approach; provide a user driven ‘marketplace’ alongside the brand. Provide choice transparently where the charity is facilitator. From what I’ve heard, Amazon’s business was strengthened by this rather than weakened…

what’s in a hashtag?

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This week I talked at #gagldn about the UNICEF #sahelNOW campaign we did earlier this year. It was an intense period where we worked hard to ‘do the basics brilliantly’ and break the media quietness around the emerging crisis in West Africa. Here’s the slides. Happy to answer questions, drop me a comment!

p.s. we all agreed you can’t do a campaign just based on a hashtag!

barcamp non-profits october 2012

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Last week was the second London Barcampnfp. As one of the co-organisers I don’t want to say too much as a few of our lovely participants have already done a much better job than I would:

[I’ll keep adding to this list as new posts appear]

My key take-out is; get the right people together and wonderful ideas are inevitable. But we need even more people, including more non-charity people as well next time!

So please spread the word, February 2013 here we come…

social media week september 2012

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Panel for smwbarcampnfpLast week was Social Media Week so the team and I tried to cram in as many events in as possible to maximise the free learning opportunity. Here’s a few of the key things I thought interesting to share:

Crowd-funding (from event by good innovation)

  • It’s community fundraising by another name.
  • Funders are often motivated by return incentives (think kickstarter perks) and/or that beneficiaries know more directly who provided the funding.
  • The best results come when the community is already interested and networked.
  • Cancer Research UK ‘My Projects’ raises a higher average total per page than they do on event sponsorship pages.
  • Action for Children ‘My Action for Children’ bridges the divide between local service managers and volunteers doing fundraising and the work of the fundraising team.

Social media engagement (mostly from events by @wearelikeminds & @barcampnfp)

  • If you cover lots of topics as a brand, fragmenting your social profile might help you increase engagement if the sub-group sizes justify the separate effort needed. More focused streams can allow you to focus the tone and content more.
  • Images drive higher levels of engagement. Hopeful images particularly. But if you heavily copyright you are restricting sharing potential, look at creative commons.
  • Influence is about driving an outcome, not just the conversation. Sometimes the most effective influencers are sometimes the least expected who suddenly have a reason to comment on your brand.
  • Social media can help organisations blur the divide between staff and supporters. But you need to invest in educating the whole organisation in digital.

Data (from all over the place)

  • Lots of people lie on registration / data capture forms, and thats the ones that don’t just click away. Social logins reduce both bounce and ‘dirty data’.
  • People update their personal details on their social profiles before they update it anywhere else.
  • Some employers are using Klout / Kred scores within their recruitment processes (yes – I’m very dubious too!).

Innovation (event by @nfptweetup)

  • Innovation is not just about the ‘shiny stuff’, everyday innovation is too often overlooked and focus on purpose why you’re trying to innovate is needed.
  • If you innovate in the hardest places, it should be easy to translate and scale the successes in the easier contexts.
  • Innovation is about knocking down doors, painting yourself in creosote or couscous (you had to be there), but mostly attitude and persistence.
  • Finally… UNICEF is hugely inspiring, I am constantly in awe – see innovation preso

Finally, finally … my week was brilliantly rounded off with drinks to celebrate UNICEF UK’s top spot in the Social Charity Index. More on that another time.

digital stats – integration’s worse enemy

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I love digital analytics, but the perceived concreteness can lead to some tricky situations…

Unless you’re only using one channel to showcase your brand (if you are I’m intrigued to hear why!?) your audience is almost certainly seeing you in more than one place. This creates a challenge for Google Analytics and other similar tools. While its easy to generate ‘last-touch’ reporting this doesn’t give you a true sense of why someone responded.

We talk a lot about this at work. We were quite aware during our East Africa emergency activity that integrated channels and messages perform best.

So we’ve been building up our understanding of multi-touch attribution, including using tools like Ignition One. But this doesn’t help if/when you include offline in your media mix. You still can’t fully understand what the impact of the full mix is.

The tricky situation this puts you in is particularly relevant if you’re still trying to build the business case for integrating digital. Individuals can interpret last-touch reporting in terms of ROI (return on investment) on a purely channel by channel basis. This can mean investment is skewed, and integration completely overlooked.

Unless you invest in regular market research studies I’m not sure there’s a real-time answer (until we all get micro-chipped!). So next step for us will probably be considering what ‘closest guess based on historic data’ models we can devise and use.

Where are you with your attribution models? Be great to compare notes!

what does a digital first organisation look like?

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I often mull over whether my digital transformation work will ever been done (in a good way), and what it will look like when we get there. I was thinking this over while scanning through a e-consultancy report on the evolution of agencies. There were a couple of role descriptions which I think go some way to painting a picture of digital first organisation structures:

‘T-shaped’ people
“staff who have a strong, vertical digital skill, but have either a breadth of experience outside of this vertical area or at least a useful level of understanding and empathy with other vertical digital channels and, notably, with traditional marketing practice and techniques.”

Chief creative technologist (More on this theme in the excellent chiefmartec blog)
“The three main areas of focus for the role are:
1. Helping the Chief Marketing Officer translate strategy into technology and vice versa
2. Choreographing data and technology across the marketing organisation
3. Infusing technology into the DNA of marketing – practices, people and culture”

I’m still undecided whether digital teams will cease to exist entirely. I certainly think there will be fewer titles with ‘digital’, ‘web’ or ‘online’ within them. Like the descriptions above, digital and non-digital staff will have more rounded skills-sets all around.

building a digital team

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So, it’s been a little while since I last posted. Don’t worry I’ve still been living all things digital (twitter and instagram prove that) but I’ve been faced with immense writers block. So this is me breaking it quickly and concisely.

Since I last wrote I’ve been to a few digital events, perhaps too many, many are on personal time so that’s one excuse I’ve been using for my lack of blogging. I’ve also spoken a couple of times on the digital transformation work I’m leading at UNICEF UK so here’s the presentation via slideshare.

Building sustainabledigifr laila-june2012

View more presentations from Laila Takeh

the future of digital giving

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This week I was one of a few charity and digital industry types at a roundtable discussion on the future of giving technology hosted by the Guardian. It’ll be written up by the Guardian as an article in mid-May but while my memory is still fresh I wanted to capture a few of my personal take-outs.

  • Technology adoption by charities:
    • Charities are behind the curve in contrast to commercial, partly due to expense of adopting the new while its less consumerised and partly because the technology expertise is missing in many charities.
    • There’s also the technology industry view that the charity sector doesn’t have a strong business case for investment (see previous post by me on Spring-giving).
  • Innovation in charity sector:
    • Some interesting models exist but often innovation comes from the ground up, but only where those ground staff are empowered to express their ideas.
    • In smaller charities the silos that stifle innovation don’t exist (mostly).
  • Giving trends:
    • There’s a question over whether digital channels are fund-catching Vs fundraising.
    • No charity wants to swap a channel which has a higher average gift for one with a lower average gift so sometimes a more convenient channel is a less effective one for the charity.
    • We need to separate the process from the reason, people don’t give because you have an SMS number they give because of the cause and key messages.
  • Some insights from experiences shared:
    • SMS giving has meant a lower average gift for certain charities, choosing ‘slumps’ as focus point for using SMS calls to action is a good mitigation.
    • Unexpected ‘social media’ response as seen with the tragic case of Claire Squires mostly demonstrate that giving is easier than it was before. They pose speed of response and decision-making challenges.