Power Hour Fundraising – Grist’s 1-hour Campaign

On Thursday, May 10th, Grist – an environmental journalism organization – ran a 1-hour long fundraising campaign on Twitter. It was a great way to use a small match, generate buzz on social media, and of course, bring in some revenue! Here’s the recap if you missed it.

Storified by Amy Peyrot · Wed, May 16 2012 14:33:47

I should probably admit up front that I’m kind of a data junkie. It’s got nothing to do with actually liking math or knowing tons of Excel tricks. I love data and metrics and benchmarks because they make my job easier – and they make me look smart and strategic.

Whether I’m trying to determine the best strategy for an online advocacy campaign or our next series of fundraising appeals, they tell me what’s working, what’s not, and where we need to focus our efforts. I do what the numbers tell me to do.

Case in point: Ever sit down at the beginning of your fiscal year with a blank sheet of paper and the charge to write your annual plan? (I know, no one uses paper anymore…) You sit there, thinking about all the tests you want to run and tools you want to try out… but then you look at the budget and staff time you have to allocate, and you quickly realize there’s no way you can do everything you want to do!

That’s where the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study comes in handy. Every year, I track our basic metrics against prior years so I can see how our program is doing over time. Then, I add in the Benchmarks stats so I can see how we’re tracking compared to our peers, year over year. Are we going up in places where other organizations are declining? Or vice versa?

Those inflection points make it pretty clear where my program is strong, where we could improve, and how much improvement we could realistically expect to see. Prioritization done! Then I can easily write up a plan based on the top three or four items I think we need to focus on in the coming year and not waste time on areas where our program is already strong.

Small potatoes? Okay, here’s another example where Benchmarks helped me remake our entire online program.

A few years back, I was looking at our metrics with the eNonprofit Benchmarks overlay, and I started to notice that all our basic email metrics–open rates, click rates, response rates–were falling. No biggie; everyone’s rates were falling. But what alarmed me is that our metrics were falling at a faster rate than the Benchmarks Study said our peers rates were falling (ack!). If we kept going at this rate, within two years we’d be below average across the board. And no one wants to be below average!

This wasn’t just an isolated metric where our program was underperforming. This was a sign that our supporters were losing interest.

I took it as an opportunity to reassess our entire online program. We pulled together a cross-department team of folks who rewrote the goals for our online communications. Then, based on those goals, we specified what types of emails we would send out–and what we wouldn’t. We set a limit to the number of emails supporters could receive from us each week. We clarified how email messages would be prioritized against each other and who in the organization had final say if we had more emails scheduled than we could actually send. And we created guidelines for staff about how to conceive of and write compelling emails that would get opened, read, and result in meaningful actions or donations to help the organization reach its goals.

The Benchmarks data helped staff at all levels understand why we needed to change. It was a hugely time-consuming process, to be honest, but the results have been great. And I’m happy to say that today we’re above average on most of our metrics. And where we’re not–well, that’s in my work plan for next year!

At the event, we received so many questions about our 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study that we couldn’t answer them all… so we’re answering a few more right here. Have a question we missed? Send us an email!

Q: I missed the webinar and in-person event. Are the slides available?
A: Yes! You can download the webinar slides here and listen to the webinar here. The Benchmarks study is a free download, as well.

Q: What’s the difference between online revenue and online gifts?
A: “Online revenue” is the amount of money donated, and “online gifts” are the number of donations made. So, if your campaign nets $10,000 from 100 donors, your online revenue would be $10,000, and you would have 100 online gifts.

Q: Did you assess where Twitter followers of international nonprofits were based?
A: No, we didn’t. However, all of the groups in our study are either primarily based in the U.S., or represent the U.S.-based affiliate of an international nonprofit. For example, we partnered with Oxfam America — not Oxfam International — in this year’s study.

Q: Do you have a sense of how list segmentation affects open, click-through, and response rates? Are groups segmenting more by issue interest and/or how active a constituent is?
A: Segmentation and targeting can improve response rates dramatically. For many of M+R’s clients, action alerts targeting core activists can produce response rates three to five times higher than the response rates of non-activists. Similarly, targeting prior donors can generate five to ten times the response rate of targeting non-donor prospects. However, this analysis was not included in our study. While many organizations target based on both issue interest and behavior, our own testing has found that prior behavior is more predictive than any other factor we’ve found.

Q: What’s the difference between the “Environmental” sector and the “Wildlife / Animal Rights” sector?
A: Groups whose primary focus is on animals were included in the “Wildlife / Animal Rights” sector. Groups that focus more broadly on protecting the environment were included in the “Environmental” sector, even if some of their work aims to protect wildlife. For example, a group like Defenders of Wildlife that focuses on protecting animals was classified as “Wildlife / Animal Rights” while Greenpeace was classified as “Environmental.”

Q: How did you optimize messages for mobile devices?
A: Good question! The optimization is done by using HTML and CSS. Curious about how we did it? Read more about it in our NTC presentation on this topic.

Q: Were email-driven online store purchases included in “email income”?
A: Nope, we left online store purchases out of “email income” in this study.

Q: My sector isn’t in the study. What should I do?
A: Look at the “All Sectors” numbers, or pick the sector most similar to yours.

Q: How does a new sector get added to the Benchmarks study?
A: We want to include as many sectors as we can, but we need a critical mass of groups to make it work. If you want a new sector in next year’s Benchmarks study, please email us to volunteer to be in the study! And if you can also help recruit other organizations from the sector to be in the study, the chances we’ll be able to break your results out by sector will be even better.

Q: Do email fundraising response rates include offline gifts?
A: Email fundraising response rates only include gifts made online.

That’s it for now, but check back for more Benchmarks analysis and answers.

So what’s next? Now that you’ve mastered the basics, here are five ideas to help you take your social media strategy to the next level.

1. Recruit (and engage!) volunteers. Could your organization use volunteers? Maybe you need on-the-ground volunteers (for events, canvassing, or administrative tasks in the office) or virtual volunteers who can help you with your social media content or blog. Either way, social media is a great way to identify potential volunteers. Take note of folks who are super engaged in your cause. You know the ones — they always leave a spectacular comment, come to your organization’s defense whenever someone posts an unfair criticism or inaccurate information, and even report back to let you know they’ve taken action. These are your superstars. Reach out to them privately and invite them to become more involved with your organization.

A few ideas for how to engage your social media superstars:

• Offline volunteering
• Invite them to volunteer at an event, for a phonebank, etc.
• Offer opportunities for them to help with administrative tasks in the office
• Ask volunteers to collect petition signatures in their own communities or host an event
• Online volunteering
• Assign them to a digital volunteer team to help with creating social media content
• Invite them to guest blog
• Ask them to write an LTE when the opportunity arises
• Train volunteers to be official online ambassadors

2. Cultivate relationships with journalists and bloggers. A majority of journalists use Facebook and Twitter professionally these days. Has your organization adapted its press strategy accordingly? Social media is certainly not a replacement for traditional communications methods but it can help strengthen them. Find and follow/subscribe to the journalists (and bloggers!) who are central to your issue area on Facebook and Twitter. Retweet, like, and share their material. Read something you like? Thank them or leave a thoughtful comment. Have something you want them to see? Flag it for their attention!

3. Use social media to help shape your organization’s messaging, tactics, and campaigns. What better way to see how a message, tactic, or campaign topic will perform than to give it a whirl? You can use social media to get a sense of which ones resonate, what criticisms you’re likely to receive, and what the feedback is overall. For some clients, we’ve helped identify an average response for an action posted on Facebook — then we use that to get a barometer of how our actions will perform with the email list. Social media is also a great way to involve your fans and followers in the internal planning process. Need creative ideas for your campaign? Not sure what to name your upcoming event? Ask for their input!

4. Get out of response mode and proactively seek out conversations. You’ve mastered the art of responding to mentions on Twitter and comments on Facebook. Now it’s time to step out of your immediate audience and bring the conversation to the masses! Use Facebook as the fan page and participate substantively in conversations on other fan pages. Seek out tweets related to your issue areas, such as “I just took a CPR class!”, even if they don’t mention your organization specifically. Find dialogue to participate in instead of waiting for the conversations to come to you.

5. “Socialize” your staff. You’ve mastered the organizational account, now it’s time for your organization’s staff to get social! Earlier this year, we encouraged organizations to start thinking about having staff represent your organization online through their Facebook profiles. If you’ve mastered the basics, now is the perfect time to get started. Organizational representatives can use social media to provide an inside view of your work and interact with advocates and supporters on a more personal level because they can take advantage of some of the functionalities denied to fan pages, such as joining Facebook groups and leaving comments on personal profiles.

Does your organization currently use any of the five tactics above? Do you have other ideas for taking social media strategy to the next level? Share your thoughts and comments below!

Some personal highlights were the release of our 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study (couldn’t make it to NTC but still want the scoop? RSVP here for our upcoming benchmarks webinar!) and these awesome illustrated notes the folks at Rally took during my colleague Steve’s session on using storytelling in nonprofit fundraising (based on the super-popular Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing).

We also LOVED having a chance to take a step back and think about the big picture with friends and colleagues we don’t see every day.

Here are some of our top take-aways from this year’s conference. What would you add?

1. Visuals matter. When faced with a problem, try drawing out the solution. Literally. Dan Roam, who’s well known for his back-of-the-napkin explanation of health care has got us thinking about how we can think visually.
2. One size does not fit all. Organizations attending the conference varied widely in terms of their online program’s size and capacity. While there were a lot of great ideas for how organizations could improve their online programs, each group should think through whether a tactic is appropriate for them, given their current reality and goals.
3. Focus your email strategy on producing great content. There is still a lot of concern over how to message your email list in a way that minimizes unsubscribes. While that’s certainly an important thing to consider, we think people are approaching this from the wrong angle. The focus should really be on writing and producing amazing emails that engage your readers (check our storytelling whitepaper for ideas).
4. Failures can be an opportunity to learn. A lot of people at the conference were eager to learn from mistakes. We should be willing to talk about our failures openly and learn from them.
5. We need innovation, not just iteration. At the conference, Holly from NTEN made a great point that organizations and the non-profit tech industry need to move forward through innovation, rather than iteration. However, in the sessions we went to, we found that most of what people were talking about were iterations of what we already know. Admittedly, even our own sessions were more about small changes than big. As online programs have advanced and matured, organizations are looking for more sophisticated sessions and ideas. Something for all of us to think about in the next year!

Click here to download the full presentation and code samples and click here to view the crowd-sourced notes from the session, which includes a lot of great questions and answers.

Thanks all to everyone who attended in person and online. Please comment below or shoot me an email (clefevre@mrss.com) if you have any questions!

Look no further – M+R and NTEN’s 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study is finally here!

The 2012 study is packed with the latest trends in online messaging, fundraising, advocacy, mobile communications, and social media. Here are a few of my favorite nuggets from this year’s study participants:

• There was a 19% increase in online revenue from 2010 to 2011, driven almost entirely by a 20% increase in the number of gifts (average gifts held steady).
• Advocacy response rates increased by a whopping 28% in the same time period.
• Although one-time gifts are still the mainstay of nonprofit fundraising, monthly giving grew faster than one-time giving.
• Facebook fan pages grew by 70% in 2011!

Join us (in person or online) on April 18th to dig into the study and what it means for your program.

Hope to see you there!

Founded by César Chávez in 1962, the United Farm Workers (UFW) has marked this special day for the last 50 years. Last year, we were honored to work with United Farm Workers (UFW) to help increase the event’s visibility online.

When he was once asked by a union member how he wanted to be remembered, César replied, “If you want to remember me, organize!” With his directive in mind, we set out to create a Facebook application that would not only honor Chávez’s legacy, but also bring the farm workers’ struggles from the fields into the homes and offices of people all across the country. The strategy? Create an app where users could donate their Facebook status with a Chávez quote to honor the historic organizer’s legacy and mark his passing.

But with so many Facebook apps out there, what made this one a success?

First, we worked to make sure the app would be as streamlined and user-friendly as possible. How many times have you encountered an app that’s confusing or buggy? We wanted to avoid these common mistakes and create the best possible user experience! This also meant requiring as few steps as possible.

All within a single step, users were presented with multiple options for their status in a visually straightforward manner. To keep in line with Facebook’s terms at the time (note: always check their latest platform policies!), the chosen option only updated the link preview attached to the user’s status. It did not pre-fill the actual status box. We were also able to track what option users selected. For those wondering, the historic quote, “The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people” beat out all the other options by a landslide!

But as with anything, promotion was absolutely crucial to the app’s success — and promote it we did! We joined the UFW in promoting the app furiously, employing tactics such as:

• Sending an initial full-file message to their list on César Chávez Day asking their supporters to use the app, along with an additional email to non-action takers in the afternoon;
• Pitching the app in advance to niche news outlets, including sites like Change.org;
• Featuring the app on the UFW homepage;
• Reaching out to our own personal networks, asking anyone we knew with a Facebook presence to use the app;
• Providing sustained updates on the app’s progress — including posting updates on well-known recent users (such as Senator Barbara Boxer and Carlos Santana!) and major milestones; and
• Promoting interaction by posting articles, questions, and asking supporters to share their own stories.

The result? Over 8,300 people used the app within the first week, resulting in over one million news feed impressions.

We’d call that a success! But what would César Chávez have thought about our César Chávez app? Jocelyn Sherman at UFW has some thoughts about that:

“It’s simple. When the union began, we had picket lines. We collected petition signatures in front of a store — one by one. Times have changed. The internet and social networking are this generation’s version of the picket line and holds tremendous organizing possibilities. As someone who knew César Chávez and how open he was to new technology, I can tell you he would have loved it.”

PS: Want to show your support for César’s birthday and his commitment to the dignity of all people? Donate your Facebook status to help mark César’s birthday today!

M+R’s Sarah DiJulio, Steve Daigneault, Cameron Lefevre, and Megan Yarbrough are all descending on San Francisco next week for NTC and they’d love to see you.

There are a few ways you can connect with us at NTC:

1. Come heckle us at the following sessions:
• 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks: Am I Normal? (#12NTCBench)
  Join M+R Strategic Services and NTEN as we unveil the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, which crunches numbers from 44 leading nonprofits. We’ll discuss how you can use this data to transform your organization’s work in 2012 and beyond. (10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Continental Ballroom 4 with M+R’s Sarah DiJulio, Megan Yarborough, and Cameron Lefevre and Stephanie Lauf from Planned Parenthood Federation of America)
• It’s Not You, It’s Your Stories: Why Fundraisers are Failing at Storytelling – and What They Need to Change (#12NTCNPStory)
  Attendees will get sage advice (based on the super-popular Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing) and see real-world case studies about storytelling tactics that work — and the tactics that don’t — from M+R’s Steve Daigneault and Sue Citro from The Nature Conservancy. (3:30 – 5:00 p.m.: Plaza Room A)
• Easy Reading on the Go: How to Optimize Emails for Mobile Phones (#12NTCMobileEmail)
  Is your organization ready for the mobile age? Come hear how to create a mobile-friendly experience for the growing segment of supporters who read your emails on their phones. We’ll look at current mobile trends and share practical tips and code for optimizing your email messages for the mobile age! (1:30 – 3:00 p.m.: Imperial Ballroom A with M+R’s Cameron Lefevre and Lindsey Twombly from HRC)
• Breakthrough Multichannel Fundraising: Find, Convert, and Cultivate Sustainers and Donors by Firing on All Cylinders (#12NTCFundr)
  Some of the most successful campaigns are a result of fundraising through online, direct mail, telemarketing, and other channels. M+R’s Sarah DiJulio will present data on multichannel successes and identify strategies for multichannel integration along with Clinton O’Brien from Care2 and Annalise Briggs from Mercy Corps. (1:30 – 3:00 p.m.: Imperial Ballroom A)

2. Come beat the afternoon doldrums with a special ice cream and cookies break at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 4th in the Grand Ballroom.
3. Or, if drinks are more your thing, we’ll also be co-hosting what promises to be a truly awesome progressive party with Change.org that night from 8 p.m. – midnight. Space is limited so please RSVP here for The-No-Need-To-Explain-Your-Job Party.

And we’ll be live tweeting from the conference and would love to get your take on various sessions (as well as our cookies and party) at @MRCampaigns.

If you can’t make it to NTC but still want to know more about how your nonprofit’s data compares, join our free eNonprofit Benchmarks Study discussion on Wednesday, April 18th – either in person in DC or via our webinar. RSVP here!

Hope we see you soon.

Although our official 2012 study won’t be released for a week (are you joining us at NTC for the unveiling on April 5th?), we couldn’t wait to share a sneak peek of some of 2011′s top trends in online messaging, social media, and mobile communications.

We’ve crunched the numbers from 44 leading groups, then translated all the data into a nifty infographic that shows how the nonprofit online world changed in 2011 — so you can get a sense of where your organization fits in the big picture.

So what are you waiting for? Check out what we’ve cooked up for you this year and let us know what you think via comments.

And don’t worry: if you can’t make it to NTC this year, you can still get the full scoop on the new Benchmarks study at our upcoming webinar on April 18.

Enjoy!