Posts tagged fundraising
MyCharityPage : A Facebook for the Third Sector?
Dec 7th
Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”
. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling.
Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site.
It may well be that MyCharityPage sees itself in a similar way and that the copywriters or reporters got a little carried away. It wouldn’t be the first time that reports were written about the web that tried to compress it down to variations of the site-du-jour. But the emphasis of the reporting on MyCharityPage also makes it seem like a strange proposition as there are already so many options for charities to reach out to supporters on existing sites (where they already are) that it hardly seems worth the effort of already overstretched web communications officers to set up profiles on a site that is solely focussed on the sector and so unlikely to bring in new supporters.
Just as for musicians, what would seem helpful would be a site that set out to help charities manage their profiles and activities across the burgeoning world of social networking sites. That may well have the spin-off of also hosting profiles for those charities, but it would do it by simplifying their operations rather than adding yet another point of focus to an already crowded landscape. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by MyCharityPage, but I’m already hearing enough commentary from people who are confused about where to focus their limited resources that it will take a lot for MyCharityPage to impress.
Facebook for non-profits: why there’s a lot further to go
Oct 21st
The non-profit blogging community has been awash with discussions of how to use facebook, particularly for fundraising. Most of the commentary is sensible, in so far as it goes. Any non-profit looking to engage facebook users would be well advised to create a group and explore the use of the causes application, but a strategy to really propel growth in engagement with a campaign will need to go beyond that.
Soha El-Borno has a piece on techsoup entitled Promote Your Cause on Facebook in Six Easy Steps which covers the basics of getting a cause established on the site fairly well, but it’s striking in two respects:
Firstly, the example of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Inc. who have nearly 50,000 members in their group but have raised less than $1000. Everyone may be quite literally contributing their two cents, but that doesn’t seem like much of a return. Others have done better, but none of the groups mentioned seem to have achieved a particularly significant return.
Secondly, the suggestion that you should use your facebook cause to get media attention is not likely to stand for long. It’s worth doing while you can, but facebook is already flooded with causes and a facebook presence won’t be remarkable for long.
But what is really striking is that there’s very little discussion of taking your cause’s presence beyond, well, a mere presence, and perhaps raising some funds. For fundraising campaigns, that’s probably enough and the challenge will simply be to increase returns, but for campaigns seeking social change a greater degree of engagement is needed. And that’s something there aren’t any real examples of as yet.
Part of the problem is that facebook does very little to help us manage our attention. As a facebook user I regularly check the “news feed” but am well aware that it is far from comprehensive in the information from my friends that it shows me. It worked well when I had a dozen friends listed, but as soon as it grew over a hundred the system wasn’t able to keep up. Groups are very easy to sign up for, but keeping track of activity is not. I can go to the groups’ individual page, but that’s way too time consuming for someone used to getting everything they need in an aggregator. I can go to my ‘groups’ page, but at best that will tell me that a new post has been added to a group. I still have to click through: the information doesn’t come to me. Facebook have a great opportunity to really improve how our attention is managed, but their interface is nowhere close to realising it.
As Allen Benamer notes in Convio Facebook App not recommended for use right now:
The best Facebook Apps increase interactivity between and among users themselves.
The popularity of facebook games such as scrabulous bear that out, but so far those apps have to do most of the work for themselves. Facebook doesn’t make it easy. If campaigning non-profits want to really take advantage of facebook to deepen engagement and grow their active supporter base, they’re going to have to look to those interactive apps’ examples, to step beyond “causes” and work around facebook’s significant limitations.