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!

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!

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!