Why persevere with Twitter?

Back in early 1984 as a very raw recruit to the IT world, a man showed me the first Apple Mac. "Look he said, I can create a picture and rub it out again with the mouse!" Mm I thought, that is just a solution without a problem. For a year or so, it looked as if I was right, but the Apple Mac caught on, found its niche in publishing and design and the rest is history. I feel rather the same about Twitter at the moment. I have an active 'Facebook' community, but I can't really get my Twitter gang to take off. I'm on the edge of a few interesting groups of Twitterers but its not in my mainstream. I can't help noticing that all the people I interact with on Twitter are social networking evangelists, (is it still as some describe it, a 'geek haven?') which makes it seem a rather cliquey and specialist community. I get limited use of enjoyment from it, and if that is my experience, then why should charities engage with it? Because, like the Mac, it is going to catch on when a critical mass appreciate its power.
Here are a few things I have noticed to keep me going on Twitter:
1. Media influence. In May this year, Twitter attracted attention as the first site to break the story of the earthquake in China. More recently the BBC used Tweets to get the latest on the Mumbai terrorists. In Twitterworld everything happens in the present moment, with tweeters using SMS and handhelds as well as PC's to post, so a big Twitter network can potentially get a response to a disaster faster than any other medium.
2. Fundraising to date. Anyone who follows Beth Kanter will have read her stories of successful fundraising campaigns kickstarted by Twitter - I liked the one about the person who realised if every one of the 12000 people in her network gave $2 she could raise $25000, or how Beth herself raised $2,500 in 90 minutes for Cambodian children by sending out a Tweet from the Gnomedex conference.
3. Etiquette. It took years for email etiquette to develop, but the web is full of advice of the do's and don'ts of Tweeting - like everything else in this world, reaching maturity seems to be happening very quickly. Here's a couple of examples for people at home and at work.
4. Its addictive. Rumours of Twitter fatigue are not hard to find, but there seemed to be a rash of them at the start of this year. Anyone who has marvelled at the hours their children spend instant massaging on MSN should appreciate how addictive this can be. Twitter is MSN for grown ups - most Twitterers are in their 30s and 40s.
5. New ideas keep on coming. This is perhaps the biggest factor of all. I track a number of tags with social networking themes, and in the past month, the most common thread in the blog posts and other sites I have read has been new ways to use Twitter. For example this one from 22/12 on leveraging your Twitter network, an update on the $2 per Tweet story, or finally this report which shows the latest 'State of the Twittersphere' - if you have any remaining doubts that you should be investigating Twitter, look at the shape of the graph below. In the meantime, I'll keep Tweeting, and look forward to some innovative uses of Twitter by UK charities in the New Year.

VAT in the Fundraising Department?

Database managers of fundraising systems could be forgiven for sitting on their heels and staying well out of the accounts department when the Government announces a change in the rate of VAT. After all, while many fundraising systems were originally based on sales ledgers, most charities do not have a sales ledger in the conventional sense and do not charge VAT on any of their fund raised income. There after all no VAT on a donation. Accountants will no doubt be talking to their suppliers about exactly what to do, and users of Iris accounting products will find the help desks ready with all the answers, but fundraisers may get overlooked.

Pausing to think about my charity clients however revealed quite a few scenarios

1. Corporate agreements may result in a conventional VATable invoice. Although the company is making a donation, because it is based on a service such as a proportion of sales of a particular branded product, VAT is applied.

2. Magazine subscriptions - online and offline. The rules around VAT on subscriptions is complex but certainly some of our clients do have a VAT element in their annual charge.

3. Membership subscriptions. Again, some do, some don't, depending on the components contained within the membership benefits. Most charity memberships are not subject to VAT but some of our clients do have a VAT element to their membership.

4. Product Orders. This is the most obvious section - whether bought online or offline that charity mug or T-shirt (or in the case of our CLAWS customers, that dog lead or cat collar) is going to attract VAT.

So, dig around in your system, find where the VAT rates are stored, and change them on Friday night ready for Monday morning.

One last consideration - are your items advertised gross or net? In general terms B2B items are advertised net, hence charities' understandable moans about adding VAT every time they buy something, and B2C is advertised gross - you don't expect to pay £11.75 for 10 litres of unleaded advertised at £1.00 per litre. If any of your subs or products are advertised including VAT, you may have change all your ticketing and your online pricing to reflect the new VAT rate - don't assume the system will do it for you - it might - it just depends at what point VAT is calculated in your system.

So, no VAT in fundraising? Quite the reverse unfortunately - good luck with the change over!

Cartoon Campaigning

I came across a site which encourages you to create campaigning cartoons using a simple drag and drop interface. Click here to see my feeble effort about my current rage. Its a kind of 'cartoon blog'. I have seen some really excellent examples of this including a 45 frame cartoon of stick men that gave a simple explanation of the root cause of the credit crunch while causing me to laugh out loud (its strong language may not appeal to all however). This is surely a highly effective tool in the hands of the right people. You need that mix of artistic flair and caustic wit, and while I may not have it, surely most organisations will have someone in their midst with these talents. Ask around!

Social Media and Segmentation

I read with interest a blog post this week listing six common fallacies about Social Media Marketing. The main message is that it is not a quick or easy fix; it takes time, effort, and understanding, but it can reap great rewards. The same has always applied to traditional marketing. Sure the occasional mailing has hit the jackpot but mostly response rates climb only as the marketers really begin to understand their audience. I recalled fondly a client of ours called Tim who was a marketer at what was then John Grooms (now called Livability) claiming that he understood the profile of his donors so well he was regularly getting 42% response rates on warm mailings. And so pleased was he with this knowledge, he was extremely cagey about its make up.

Of course, Social Media is quite different - you can't segment your market because you don't know who they are, you don't approach them, they approach you.

Or is it? surely the same rules apply, just with a different emphasis. Another article claims to have a scientific method for calculating ROI on Social Media -well its got to be worth a look. Just as on a traditional database you have your regular donors, your appeal respondents, your eventers and your catalog purchasers, so in terms of social media you have your web segments. The eventers will be on Facebook and Myspace, the campaigners will read your blog (may even be Tweeters on your behalf), the moaners will be on the discussion forums, the corporate supporters may be tracked through Linked In, and so on and so on. As with all segmentations there will be overlaps, with some supporters being in several segments. The next step should be to capture all this information into the back office database to gain a deeper understanding of who interacts with you through which social media.

In fact the logical extension of this analogy is 'social media cross marketing'. Just as traditionally, any charity will try to upgrade a Christmas card purchaser to be a regular donor, so maybe the natural ambition of the social marketer is to upgrade, for example the Facebook cause subscriber to all kinds of other interactions - some will work naturally, some won't work at all. It just goes to underline the main point of the 'Six Fallacies' - the chief ingredients of social marketing success are hard work and trial and error.

Friend Ranking and profiling

So I read a few articles about Friend Ranking, and I got to thinking, is this so very different from traditional database profiling? Well of course it is, but its useful to set out the differences, or as the teachers used to say, “compare and contrast”.

In a traditional database, you would go about profiling like this: (skip this bit if you’re an old hand)

1) Extract your data and send it off to an agency for wealth screening. Load the new profile codes back in. American services offer more detail than in shy old England, but even here a lot of information can be gained

2) You have been creating links between all you contacts as you go – employees/ directors/trustees/board members/ family members and so on. (One major art institution I have worked with for a number of years monitors over 100 of these relationship types.) Then look for patterns where people have more than two or three – very often they will overlap with each other because they come from similar backgrounds.

3) Combine step 1 and step 2 and find out who is wealthy and is giving and who is wealthy and is not giving and who knows who.

4) Create an action plan for each of the prospects unearthed through this process. Apply Henry Drucker’s Seven Heavenly Steps, and off you go.

FriendRanking is a new tool offered by SocialMedia that will measure people’s influence by their interactions on social networking sites. The original purpose of this was to try to maximise response to advertisements by including references to your most influential friends.

Step 1 You create a presence on Facebook and other similar social networking sites.

Step 2 The ranking system scans your ‘friends’ and their interactions with each other to find out who influences who.

Step 3 You create an ad which relates to you, but which references the influencers of the people on whose pages it pops up.

Step 4 You turn these ads into appeals for your cause, and you have a sort of peer to peer fundraising network going on, with the profiling, such as it is, all done automatically done for you.

So what’s wrong with that? I have some problems with this approach:

1) The key to success on the Internet is permission – people always initiate their own actions on the net and anything that comes unasked for will not be popular

2) Social networks are supposed to be just that – Social. People do not want to have a financial proposition put to them when they are just trying to make friends. Maybe it could work on the professional networks like LinkedIn, but I have a (totally unproven) theory that LinkedIn subscribers use that network for self promotion, not philanthropy.

3) The whole point about traditional profiling is that you build a list of your best donors and prospects. While ultimately a successful Friendranking campaign might just generate some funds, if you have no direct relationship with either the influencer or the donor, how are you going to maximise the value of that relationship?

Will it just go away? No because Facebook already tried this with Facebook Beacon, and it did not take off – the fact that someone else is trying suggests that the developers are convinced that it can be made to work, its just the approach that needs to be perfected. I think we are going to have to take Friend ranking seriously whether we like it or not!

RSS - really simple syndication or local government gone mad?

Last week I was asked to take over the running of a Wordpress site set up to campaign against the housing targets set by the Regional Spatial Strategy for the area where I live. The reason for the photo is that one of our main defenses is that building on the floodplain near us will heighten the risk of a re-run of July 2007 floods round Tewkesbury.

Sorry - this blog is not supposed to be a rant against the whole system of RSS planning and the predict and provide model (daft thought they both are). The interesting thing about this new challenge is that I am now going to have a practical vehicle through which to attempt to engage my supporters.

The site generates a fair amount of comment from those who are prompted to read it by email or word of mouth, but I want to start generating buzz through other means such as cross posting to other blogs, persuading folks to sign up to the RSS feed, and generating a few bookmark entries in Delicious, Digg etc. One of the issues I have come across quite early on is the tag issue, or to use the jargon of social networkers, folksonomy. How do you know what tags really cut the mustard in a given area? I latched on to the NFP tags through acquaintances on Twitter, but if I don't have any friends on Twitter in the housing debate arena, that's not much good. Time I acquired some maybe!

Well the housing debate is all hotting up with the Regional Spatial Strategy (those initials again) coming up for debate in the Commons at the end of October. Hope I can make some noise before then.

The right to software?

Here is a quotation from a blog by I read the other day about Saas versus open source; Michelle Murrain writes: "SaaS based on proprietary software violates the basic software freedoms". The author goes on to indicate what these freedoms are, namely the ability to see the code, change the code, release the code to others. Well I have two problems with this. Firstly, Michelle seems to be defining Open Source software, but I don't see 'Software as a Service' as being necessarily open source at all. Secondly, the implication of this piece is that we should be moving to a world in which all software is Open Source.

Let's deal with SaaS first. A good example in fundraising software terms is eTapestry whose home page even features a link to Software as a Service. It works like this: the client signs up, enters details about their charity and the services they require, and within moments has access to an online database where they can store donor details. In etap's case, its free up to 500 records and then you pay according to service usage. Its not surprising to me then that the Wikipedia definition of SaaS says "From the software vendor’s standpoint, SaaS has the attraction of providing stronger protection of its intellectual property and establishing an ongoing revenue stream". True, there are some SaaS services which are free at the point of use, and some which are Open Source, but most will start charging at some point, and as such will very much not be Open Source for the reasons stated by the Wikipedia article.

Would it be a perfect world in which SaaS was open? The trouble is, how do you finance Open Source software? You can't charge license fees for something which changes all the time and which you don't own. As a client, how do you hold your software service provider accountable? Sure we just expect Google to work, but if you are going to run your charity on a database, you are going to want someone to fix it when the emailing doesn't work or when the reports are all wrong.

The thing is, the phrase which really jars with me is 'basic software freedoms'. It reminds me of the debate we had back in the miner's strike about the 'right to work'. We all want to work, and we all want software to be available and bug-free, but we cannot expect this to be available as a 'right' - you have to earn it, whether by writing it, or paying for it, but it won't just turn up on your plate, not now, not ever.

How safe is your Donor Data?

Had just sent off a piece to our marketing department on data security when I received my invitation from the Institute of Fundraising Technology Group to attend their session on this very topic (Sign up here)- so seems this is an issue on a few people's minds. I had started my piece by describing a cartoon I saw in a national paper recently, which showed one commuter saying to another ‘I never buy the Times anymore – there’s always those secret papers to read on the train these days’.

I sometimes wonder if stories of data loss is like those shocking crime statistics, that when you investigate them a bit further, you find out it was always going on but just not reported in the same way. Surely, in the days before the Data Protection Act we were always leaving large volumes of personal data lying around in some form or other? Well, maybe so, but actually we were constrained by the technology. For my first ten years in this business, all our client data was stored in Oracle databases on Unix platforms. Its not easy to leave that kind of stuff around on the train.

However, data sticks with Excel spreadsheets are a totally different proposition, especially now Excel 2007 has the 64000 row limit removed. We should not be surprised by the spate of recent embarrassments. The MOD, the HMRC, and the DVLA have all been in the news for the wrong reasons - I dread the day when a national charity features in one of these stories because the knock on effect for donor confidence could be severe.

So how do we minimise the risk of that happening? The key is to ensure that users can access their data, and move it around without removing it from the network. Let’s look at some scenarios. If data needs to go outside the organisation, perhaps to a mailing house or database supplier, there are two safe routes – you can encrypt it using a tool such as Private Crypto before emailing it, or you can copy it to an FTP site with a secure user-friendly utility like Filezilla. If you need to use data at a branch for a local event or mailing, most database packages will allow browser-enabled access to your central database across the Internet. If you need to share a report which contains thousands of rows of name and address data, and you don’t have a database with easy remote access, or it is not appropriate to grant access to the target audience, why not upload it to a secure document sharing site such as Microsoft’s Windows Office Live which is a freely available cut down version of Sharepoint? The IT For Charities site also has a number Internet Resources for UK Charities which should give you a few more ideas.

Of course as with all IT issues, the management side is just as important as the technical aspect. Database packages now make it easy to export data to spreadsheets, and from there to data sticks. Guidelines should be clearly set then, so everyone understands that when dealing with large volumes of personal data, leave it on the network or the Internet where it can easily be secured, not on the train next to the MI5 secret papers!

First posting

Well, this is me and my first blog. I don't suppose many persons will read this first instalment, in fact I'd rather they didn't but you have to start somewhere.

Or do you? Why do this at all? Why inflict my second hand and/or half baked thoughts onto an undeserving blogosphere? Well, pretentious as it may sounds, for professional reasons. Oh yes. The more I research the web on behalf of my dear employers to find out how people in my sector are exploiting the web in innovative ways, the more I find that the answers come from people like me blogging. Previously, I would have had to attend a seminar or workshop to pick up the latest trends and ideas that are now constantly available on the web. The problem is the overload. I now get far too much from the web - I've got feeds from Twitter, delicious, yahoo groups, not to mention the normal email lists I subscribe to, and I need to understand more about how it all hangs together so that I can become a more efficient harvester of this information. Then I need to apply it one step further and work out how this world interacts with my normal professional world, which is donor databases. And they surely are related, but not as obviously as you might think. So I will be coming back to that later, which relieves me of the need to explain that now.

Now, if you look at the leading exponent of this game, you'll fine that they include about three hyperlinks in each sentence, be it to other areas in their own blog, or other sites on the Internet. This apparently ensure a much higher visibility for their Blogs, but I have to admit, it is seriously irritating. If you were to follow every link, it would take you hours to read each posting. Its like following all the 'QV' marks in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable except not nearly so interesting.

So I am not going to include any hyperlinks in this article at all, but be warned gentle reader, I will succumb.