On charity marketing and volunteering

Lots of you have been asking about the launch of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s charity interest group, which launched on Tuesday with a special event at Cass Business School. I’m on the advisory board for the group, which brings together professionals with an interest in charity sector marketing to network and share best practice. The event was packed out with a good range of people from large and small charities, social enterprises, other nonprofits, agencies and freelance consultants.

Georgie Feinberg , Founder and International Director of Afrikids, and Professor Ian Bruce of Cass presented at the event and you can see the tweets from the event on the Storify on UK Fundraising. Vicky Browning from Charity Comms and Paul Marvell from the Institute of Fundraising also spoke, and were keen to express their interest in collaborating with the new CIM group.

If you’d like to find out about the next event, tweet me @zoeamar with your email address and I’ll add you to the distribution list. I hope to see you there.

Speaking of good charity marketing, my campaign of the week is CSV’s volunteer champions campaign. The aim of the campaign is to celebrate the work of volunteers past and present across the UK and to inspire a new generation of people to volunteer in their communities. I like the story it tells of how CSV has made a difference over the last 50 years. Anniversary campaigns are tricky because they can fall into the trap of being overly nostalgic, but this is just the right blend of celebrating past achievements and a clear call to action for the future.

With charities and their marketing departments under pressure, it feels like a good moment to celebrate the impact that charities can have through their volunteers and to tell their stories. The best way to do this is through good marketing. As Georgie Feinberg said at the CIM event, “A really strong marketing strategy can pull charities through tough times.”

Happy birthday LinkedIn

This week LinkedIn turned 10 years old. In that time, it’s gone from a tiny digital start up to a huge social network. It now has more than 200 million users, according to Mashable.

As some of you know, I am a huge fan of LinkedIn. It’s a rich source of incredibly valuable information. In the past I’ve used it to bring in corporate partnerships, secure a meeting at No 10 and for insightful market research.

I still feel that the charity sector hasn’t yet unlocked the full potential of LinkedIn. I’ve blogged in the past about how charities can leverage LinkedIn and how you can use LinkedIn and Twitter for networking.

The key thing is to get into the habit of using LinkedIn actively. I know many organisations which encourage their staff to sign up to LinkedIn and where people dutifully connect to contacts who they make. This is a good start yet I would like to see more charities exploiting its full potential as a key resource. For example, if you want to reach a potentially valuable fundraising prospect, why not research them on LinkedIn and find out how they are connected to your network?

In short, if LinkedIn isn’t a vital tool in delivering your charity’s fundraising, marketing and stakeholder engagement strategies then I think you’re missing out.

What do you think about LinkedIn? Let me know.

Leaders of charity communications teams shouldn’t forget about learning

This week I shared some thoughts in Ben Matthews’ blog post ‘How to build a high performing communications team.’  Ben’s blog contains lots of helpful tips which are particularly pertinent at the moment as many charities are restructuring their communications teams, and are aiming to get maximum value from their staff.

There are three other ideas which I would add to Ben’s excellent crowdsourced tips.

One, if you’re leading a communications team, you should never stop learning, and inspiring the people who work for you to do the same. That can only come if you keep pushing yourself and re-appraising what you and your team do, encouraging everyone to do things even better and to learn from mistakes. It’s what I always aim for.

Two, motivating your team in such uncertain times, amid restructures and budget cuts, is a big challenge for communications leaders. So don’t forget the value of good old enthusiasm and passion when taking your team with you. It may be worth more than the extra zeros that you crave in your budget. This principle is just as important if you have to pull together a multi disciplinary team from across the organisation for a high stakes communications project. One of the nicest compliments ever paid to me at work was by a colleague who told me that I had ‘galvanised his team’ when leading a big marketing project.

Three, as the comms leader you need to be a hub of ideas, useful contacts and information within the organisation. For anyone seeking inspiration in this area, read Alex Swallow’s brilliant blog about spreading power. A good communications leader will do this externally, but you need to do it internally as well. In my experience this makes an enormous difference in the way that colleagues engage with your team’s work.

What are your ideas for leading high performing communications teams?

Boston Marathon: how tech can help in disasters

 

Following the terrible events in Boston yesterday, I began to think about how I would contact my family and friends if I was in similar situation, and how I could support charities helping in the disaster response, either by donating or volunteering.

So, I was interested to see that US based nonprofit tech whizz Amy Sample Ward (@amyrsward) posted about Microsoft’s Helpbridge app on Facebook last night. The app allows people not only to send messages to loved ones to let them know that they are okay when they are involved in a disaster, but also helps users to donate to charities working on the response, or to volunteer.

Two other great services are Google’s Person Finder and the Red Cross’ Safe and Well , which allow people to help locate the missing. These were both widely used after the bombs went off in Boston yesterday.

All of these services are obviously useful to charities involved in disaster response or who may find themselves or their beneficiaries caught up in such a situation. Devastating as these events are, it is some small comfort that we have these digital tools at our disposal.

My thoughts are with those affected by the bombings.

 

Mobile is the new normal

Hands up if you’re going to Media Trust’s Go Mobile conference.

Matt Collins wrote a great blog this week on 5 ways charities should go mobile which contains lots of useful tips. It’s a subject close to my heart as I’ve blogged before about why charities may be missing out on opportunities to make the most of mobile. I’m a firm believer that charities must embrace mobile urgently if they haven’t already done so.

The Go Mobile conference looks great and I was interested to read about the closing keynote from Dan Calladine, Head of Media Futures at Carat Global Management , in which he will urge charities to ‘look … beyond distinctions of ‘mobile internet,’ and ‘mobile users.’’

This really struck a chord with me. I think that mobile is often talked about as if it is a completely separate channel, rather than one of many. Let’s look at how we all use mobile. I suspect that, like you, from morning to night, my mobile rarely leaves my side. It is completely integrated into my life. And I expect my experiences with it to be seamless. If I look at an email newsletter on my phone and click on a link, I am surprised if the site is not optimised for mobile. I expect to get SMS reminders about GP appointments and deliveries. I often watch TV whilst tweeting about it.

I’d recommend that any charities looking to make the most of mobile start with the very personal relationship which we all have with our phones. I can’t be the only one who says of my phone ‘it’s got my whole life on it.’ Charities have amazing and powerful stories to tell. Whether it’s through fundraising via SMS, text updates for supporters or mobile optimised content, mobile offers charities a unique opportunity to truly connect with people. It’s the ‘do- anything’ platform. How exciting is that?

We need to talk about leadership

Last week an article in Third Sector about leadership caught my eye. In it Geraldine Kilbride, a business psychologist and leadership behaviour specialist from London Business School, warned charities that their leadership is a decade behind the private sector. Unsurprisingly, the piece has provoked a strong reaction from charity professionals.

Having worked in the charity, private and public sectors, I have seen examples of good and bad leadership in all three.  Often these instances have more in common than you might think. The best leaders have a vision and the courage and energy to make it happen. For me, this highlights how the differences between the sectors on this front aren’t cut and dried. I think there is much that all sectors can learn from each other about leadership. Some of the most innovative organisations working in the charity world know this and are skilled at bringing people together to share best practice. Strategy consultancy I.G. Advisors and leadership development non-profit Common Purpose are both doing some great work in this area.

But the charity sector does have one very significant difference from the corporate world, which the comments on the Third Sector piece alluded to. There are charities who are uncomfortable with the term ‘leadership.’ I’m not really sure why this is. Perhaps it is seen as redolent of the private sector, or indicative of a hierarchy that may not sit well with the egalitarian and consultative nature of charities. Personally I would really like the sector to discuss leadership issues in more depth, and I hope that Third Sector’s article has kickstarted the debate. What does good charity leadership look like? How can we do it better? What qualities do boards and leadership teams need to steer the sector through the significant challenges it currently faces? Incidentally, The Guardian Voluntary Sector Network held an online Q and A on leadership last month which touched on these issues.

Of course, leadership doesn’t just belong to the most senior person in the room. Last week Kirsty Marrins challenged Macmillan, the RNLI and Mencap to put their organisations’ Harlem Shake meme videos to the public vote. The #CharityShakeOff (as covered on UK Fundraising) has had a good response on Twitter, so much so that the WWF and Beat Blood Cancer have now joined the contest too.  Kirsty spotted a great opportunity and brought the right people together to make it happen, and all of these charities will benefit from the money raised  as a result. Her spark of an idea has become something much bigger. That’s good leadership. It’s innovative approaches like this that will take the sector forward through the tough times we’re in.

Isn’t it time we talked more about charity leadership?

Can communications change the state of the sector?

NPC ran a very interesting event this week on the topic of whether the charity sector is weathering the storm, featuring presentations from Ben Page, CEO of Ipsos Mori, and Diana Tickell, Executive Director at Barnardo’s.  I didn’t attend, but followed the event on Twitter. You can view the Storify of the event here and read NPC’s blog about the event here.

The above tweet from CFG about the event caught my eye. It’s a great summary of how communications can help charities, and why it is vital for the sector in these incredibly tough times.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately as part of my role as an advisory board member for The Chartered Institute of Marketing special interest group for the voluntary sector. I’ve got lots more to say about it as we get closer to our launch event in May, so watch this space.

On Findus lasagne and the power of Twitter

It hasn’t been a good week for Findus UK, who had to withdraw its beef lasagne from sale after horsemeat was found in the beef.

I don’t envy the Findus PR team one bit. And their comms crisis may get even worse. The Food Standards Agency wants Findus to test the lasagne for the veterinary drug phenylbutazone, which could be dangerous to humans. (There is a good summary of the unfolding PR crisis on PR Week.) Findus have released a statement saying that the horsemeat was a ‘supply chain issue.’ I understand that they’re trying to distance themselves from the issue and limit liability but when a problem is this big I think that phrase could come back to haunt them.

Surprisingly, Findus don’t seem to have undertaken any social media outreach to help manage the crisis. If they’d done that, they might have been able to get control of the story sooner. I can’t even find a Twitter account for Findus. If they had one, they could have shared regular updates about the action they are taking, responded to customer queries and monitored what people were saying about them. Instead, all I can see in my Twitter feed is horsemeat jokes.

In my view Twitter is now one of the most influential and credible social networks, and what you say on it- even, in Findus’ case, if it is nothing at all- can have huge impact. This was brought home to me this week in a great blog by Matt Collins (aka @charitychap) about how HMV staff who were being fired took to the company’s Twitter account to vent their feelings. One of them even tweeted that the HMV marketing director was asking, ‘How do I shut down Twitter?’ Sorry, that’s not how social media works.

What you do- or don’t- tweet can make a big difference to how unfolding events are perceived. Findus would do well to remember that.

Is Vine the next Pinterest?

Last week saw the launch of Vine, the video sharing app from Twitter, which allows users to record and share 6 second looping videos. There’s a handy round up of Vine from Vasileios Kospanos on UK Fundraising.

There are already some great examples of charities using Vine, including Diabetes UK and Dog’s Trust. Check them on Kirsty Marrins’ Storify on Vine.

I also came across a great blog by Roberto Kusabbi on Vine, in which he urges everyone to get to know it as users first before diving in headfirst. He raises some interesting points about Vine’s potential (videos are embedded in tweets and autoplay) as well as its pitfalls (e.g. lack of data).

I really like Roberto’s ‘slow and steady’ approach, although I can see why everyone is getting excited about Vine. Vasileios tweeted me this morning about possible uses for it, including ‘silent auctions,job postings,thanking supporters,competitions’ amongst others. It could be a great way to engage supporters and thank donors. Diabetes UK have already done this- I like the spontaneous and immediate feel of their Vine.

I’m hoping that Vine will be a grower and not a flash in the pan like Pinterest. Some food for thought : I read a blog by Dorie Clark this week in which she says that organisations should focus on social media platforms that are the best fit for their audience, rather than trying to be everywhere all at once.

Vine is an interesting platform and perhaps it will be the next big thing in social. But let’s take it one step at a time. Isn’t a slow burn romance always better than a whirlwind affair?

How transparent is your fundraising?

 

This morning I took my toddler and newborn to a music class at a local church, (Emmanuel Church) in our area of North London. Whilst there I came across a great example of transparency and fundraising.

As you can see from the picture, on their noticeboard the church have displayed how much it costs to run the church each year, and then described what each individual cost element is. They’ve also said how much they need to raise each week. Beneath this (there wasn’t space to include this in the photo) they’ve explained how to donate, including regular and one off donation options.

This openness and level of detail about costs is refreshing. I’m not religious, yet I almost donated there and then. I don’t think I’ve come across any charities who are as up front about their costs. Of course all charities disclose their income and expenditure in their annual accounts, which are publically available. But isn’t there something to be said for disclosing costs as fully and frankly as this, where everyone can see them?

Contrast Emmanuel Church’s ‘ask’ with a donation box which I recently saw in a well known museum which simply said ‘donate’ and specified an amount. I appreciate that setting out the financial activities of a large charity at the point of donating might overwhelm potential donors with information. But perhaps saying what the £5 requested would help the museum do, and how it will help them achieve their mission might be more compelling?

We all know that in these tough times charities need to fight for every pound.  There are some great examples of charities who say what donations will be spent on (‘Just £3 a month will help do X’ etc). What I like about the Emmanuel Church ask is the transparency and the level of involvement you feel as a donor. I can see exactly how the church spends its income, and therefore what my donation will go towards. I know there will be some charities who baulk at this approach, saying that they wouldn’t want to disclose how much they spend on , say, office premises for fear that donors would criticise an entirely reasonable expenditure.  As a communicator though, I think that if you share information early on it is less likely to be a problem. The more that charities say what they spend their money on, including back office costs, the more donors will understand that charities have costs like any other organisation, and we are not just staffed by volunteers. More importantly, won’t potential donors be more likely to give, and give again, if they can see what their gift, however small, contributes towards?