Charity benchmarking survey
A breakfast briefing by Shirley Ayres and Rob McCarthy, CEO, GOSS Interactive launched the interim results of the charity social media benchmarking survey.
The interim results revealed some interesting insights including:
- 36% said the biggest challenge they faced was "budget"
- 57% were under pressure to reduce costs
- 72% believed delivering services online is efficient
And contrasting this, over 50% said that they collected less than 5% of their donations via their website.
Charities who whish to benchmark them selves, and receive the full survey review for free can register and enter here.
Plenary
The day 2 plenary looked at the big change in dynamic needed with social media which gives a voice and legacy to service users as well as looking at the importance to learn and understand how the tools and platforms work.
How social media can engage every citizen in changing their
world - locally to globally
Bill Liao, Co-Founder of Xing, Neo.org, weforest.com, international social entrepreneur and philanthropist. @liaonet
Bill opened by highlighting the importance of shifting context to display leadership as only leaders change the world. He then went on to his 13 commandments of social media.
Bill Liao's 13 commandments of social media
- Understand social media as it is not what you expect it to be. The ability for everyone for say something online creates a meritocracy.
- Tell a story really fast with a clear agenda and purpose. Don't confuse people online as you can lose them forever.
- Don't automate social media tasks as you lose authenticity and become a spammer.
- Be authentic - do not lie online - you will be outed. Give up being bright - being too smart can harm your authenticity.
- Tune social media to appropriate venue/channel eg Facebook and twitter for branding building.
- Measure everything to gain insights using tools like twentyfeet or Marketing Dashboard.
- Get a well articulated message. Face-to-face passion is transferred - the passion is lost online and the message no longer works. Get a message that works online.
- Enable everyone with the right tools to see all interactions and contacts in one place.
- Focus on delivering value immediately - give something away. Video is fantastic to add value. Use fiverr to get good video clips of people saying your message. Plus Google likes video. As well as delivering value; make it funny. Ensure your followers blog authentically with backlinks to ensure natural SEO.
- If you can get buzz (recognition over time) do so with a goal of getting followers to recognise your name and brand offline. Buzz is not about numbers of followers. Building real followers take years of painstaking time. Facebook followers are better then twitter followers as there is no spam filter on twitter.
- When you have real followers you can build trust. Beware of ambiguity. Beware of staff/supporters who don't get the message. Ambiguity can lose your followers trust.
- Make sure brand and story are perfectly aligned. Organisations need to understand the context of the story. Always take the opportunity to use broadcast media to support social media. The simplest way of doing this is humour - but being too funny and you become a clown.
- Social media is about everyone having a voice, so give everyone in your organisation a voice (all needs to be aligned). For this you need a core vision and story to communicate.
Bill ended with this viral video.
The advent of game changing digital services: Cyber Mentors and its approach to online service delivery
Sarah Dyer, Director of New Media, Beatbullying
Transforming service deliver for online efficiency savings.
The old model
Beatbulling developed a social service provision over time. The core of the model was about peer mentoring at a local level. They trained and tooled up mentors to transform lives with a cascading peer mentoring model, targeting the most vulnerable to train with integrated interagency approach....all offline.
They wanted to understand if social media could deliver social returns, social capital and bring about real change. Can young people be kept safe, given a voice and have their privacy protected online? Can young people get back into work/training using social media?
The challenge
The offline model could only go so far. So beatbullying were challenged to either go regional and develop slowly or deliver a support methodology online. The risks were enormous with months of planning in house on the practical, technical issues and design of a new model before taking it to all staff. Mini project teams were built to develop ideas of how to deliver the model online. Then they had to understand the volunteering model of how they would deliver programme online.
The pitch
How to get the money - beatbulling went straight to government (Gordon Brown) with lots of lobbying. Balls under Brown gave £4m for the sector. Beatbulling pitched for some money for their start-up project; this competed with £2m of offline funding already committed, but they could not do both on and offline.
The launch
Used contacts to help the technical side on a budget of £50k. The team went into a development phase to understand the social media landscape in an 8 month development process.
The site offers a safe moderated environment with cyber-mentors where cases can be escalated to councillors/local authorities if needed.
Launched in March 2010 with traditional communications, the team then adopted a constant iteration phase and liaised with the Information Commissioner's office on topics such as how young people can give consent.
The results and measurement
- 600% increase in service delivery.
- 80m hits a month - chat is all stored and analysed.
- Benchmarking evaluation is captured at the beginning of the process and throughout the journey to understand the development to prove the efficacy of what beatbullying are doing online.
- 1.3m registered users
- 20 child protect cases per month
- 6500 mentors trained
Offline effects
- 40% less "incidents of concern"
- 33% less truancy
- Empowering vulnerable young people for change
Next steps
Taking lessons learnt to re-build from scratch with a new platform, with a scalable solution that can be re-sold. Currently the team is going through investment readiness process for £2m. Additionally new services will be launched; resync and minimentors.
Online efficiency
Cost of 1-2-1 interventions:
- Online £60
- Phone £250
- Offline £600
User led, user oriented and completely online: Lessons from the revolutionary online network, Mumsnet, influencing the choice of baby care to the election of a Government
Justine Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO, Mumsnet
Mumsnet was born from a disastrous family holiday.
The community was built in 11 years with no marketing budget just word of mouth and press coverage.
Results
- 1.5m unique visitors monthly
- 25,000 user comments
- Average user session 12 minutes
Success
Justine put success down to users having 24 hour access to peers, local listings and the site/content being trusted. 8/10 mumsnetters consult before buying something.
What mumsnetters users want:
- 76% advice
- 75% information
- 59% recommendations and reviews
- 36% debate
- 30% support
- 23% friendship
Campaigns
Used success as a stepping stone for campaigning.
"Career women make bad mothers" campaign reaction which included lobbying the ASA, agencies and the media. Within 24 hours ads were pulled and replaced with "sexist ads are bad for business".
Political webchat now seen as a right of passage which can be leveraged. 1st political campaign on miscarriage, created a 10 point standards code of practice. Many points have been adopted by government already.
Lots of other fundraising by mumsnetters such as "a mile for Maude".
For the "Let girls be girls" campaign mumsnet asked retailers to stop the sexualisation of childhood and work in partnership with mumsnet. Government is also reviewing the issue in the Bailey review.
Dos and don't of social media
- Do engage
- Don't patronise your audience.
- Don't fake it
- Don't sue your audience
Online communities vs social media: what's right for you and your stakeholders
Lawrence Clarke, Head of Consultancy, SiftGroups
Lawrence suggested building different communities
- Community of purpose - where people come together and collaborate.
- Community of circumstance - sharing common issues.
- Community of practice - learning from each other.
He also suggested making effective connections by using organisational assets to create conversions. A barrier to this is a cultural and structural disconnect.
- Influencing
- Supporting
- Networking
Online communities on organisation sites enable conversations, thought leadership and collaboration to be related to assets.
A strong online internal community (intranet) allows internal collaborating facilitating external collaboration by the whole organisation.
The ideal is to be unique in your niche so you can influence it.
Expert panel: Breaking down digital barriers and engaging trustees and stakeholders in social media
Panel Chair: Caroline Diehl MBE
Panel Members: Bill Liao, Emma-Jane Cross, Tom Latchford, Rob Hayter, Lawrence Clarke, Alex Morrison
Photos from Howard Lake on Flickr.
This interactive session explored the culture shift needed in the third sector to unleash the full potential this has to offer.
Some quotes from panelists:
"Getting started in social media or want free help - learn as you go along and ask peers and use your own communities of practice."
"Use offline for major donors and build 1-2-1 relationships."
"Use LinkedIn API to profile potential major donors."
"Go to major donor siblings and engage with them."
"Even digital natives need champions/mentors to help and encourage them to use new technology."
"Use small project teams to get all staff enthused and involved in social media."
"Don't be afraid of the silence - just because they are not talking does not mean they are not listening."
"Listen to people to make them feel heard"
"Get your story tight, succinct and easily repeatable."
"Every day - introduce people to each other you know should know each other."
"Use bit.ly links for AB tweet message testing."
"Guest blog for good SEO."
Win a website review.
Delegates were also invited to win a website review. Enter free draw here.
Posted by Pete Stevens, 15th June 2011
