Nov
18
How To Launch A Social Media Charity Campaign
Between charitable appeals, Kickstarter campaigns and, well, a recession, it seems there have been a lot of social giving requests in social media lately. Some are awesome. Some, less so. We’ve done this a few times with pretty sock-rocking levels of success (this is the one we were most proud of) so I thought I’d do a little public service announcement on how to kick ass at begging for money.
1. Tell me what’s going on.
Lead with the story. What’s going down? Did somebody’s kid get sick? A fellow blogger lost their job? House getting foreclosed on? Tell me specifically and in words an 8-year-old could read and understand exactly what is happening. (If you don’t have time to get into details because it’s urgent, link to details somewhere else, like Wikipedia or the Cancer Society or something.)
2. But don’t tell me TOO much.
I am busy and I don’t know who the hell you are. Make it easy for me to scan. BIG! BOLD! HEADLINES! Some people want to know every detail. Some people don’t give a shit about details, they just want to know what the hell you’re asking them to do. Give me details if I want them, but let me skip them without missing the point.
3. Tell me why I care.
This will usually be because a situation is particularly heinous or because it involves somebody I should know or care about. Just giving me the facts isn’t good enough – tragedies happen all the time. It would be lovely if we opened our wallets every time we heard that something bad happened, but if that was the case we’d be broke by half way through the six o’clock news. Tell me why YOUR cause is important to ME.
4. Tell me what went wrong.
In my mind, this is somebody else’s problem. We like to believe that social safety networks are working and strong, so if you’re asking me for money, something has to have broken. If you’re raising money for a village in Africa, tell me why foreign aid workers aren’t doing something about this. If some woman is about to lose her house, explain to me exactly which politician fucked her over. If somebody can’t pay for their kid’s medical procedure, give me the details on why their HMO is being a dick. Why hasn’t this problem been solved already?
5. Invoke emotion.
Do not be unbiased, objective or reasonable. Make me scream in outrage. Make me call my husband in tears. Tell me about their children and their foster puppies and their mother who just happens to bear a striking resemblance to Rosa Parks. Remember, the money that I’m thinking of giving you is coming out of my boob job fund, so you better make me feel damn good about giving it. You do that by making me feel damn bad about our tragic victim.
6. Use social proof wisely.
People like having those little tickers or thermometers or whatever that tell you how near they are to their goal. Good in theory, but it can really backfire. In a world where people can raise $100,000 in an hour on Twitter, being a quarter of the way to your goal of $1,000 after a week just makes me think your cause sucks.
There might have been a time when we saw one of those things that wasn’t going well and we’d rally around the underdog, either out of social responsibility or guilt. If those days ever existed, they’re not here anymore. If your campaign is going badly, take the ticker down.
7. Tell me what you want from me.
Money? Tweets? Children’s clothes? Be very, very clear. You don’t know who I am or under what circumstances I’m reading your plea. Maybe my kids are screaming. Maybe I’m drunk. Maybe I just got back from the hospital myself. If a classroom full of ADHD preschoolers couldn’t understand your appeal, you’re not being clear enough.
8. Tell me why it’s going to help.
Your money goes to X. Your gift certificates are important because they help with Y. Your blankets are needed because of Z. No matter what you’re asking for, somebody out there is going to think it’s stupid or wasteful or selfish or inefficient. If you ask for clothes, they’re going to think you should be asking for money. If you ask for money, they’re going to email wondering why they can’t send clothes.
(The same is true when you DON’T want certain types of donations. Every time a natural disaster occurs, the Red Cross gets flooded with calls from people offering old blankets, and every time, the Red Cross says no, they’d rather have the money. After enough people told them to go fuck themselves, they started explaining that it costs more to ship the blankets from Duluth to Kenya than to just buy the blankets in Nairobi. ”OH” says the people, and they whip out their checkbooks. Why matters.)
9. Tell me exactly what to do next.
For the love of God, have an action plan. Click here to donate. Send checks to this address. Drop off cans of food at your nearest fire hall. Remember, I’m drunk and my kids are screaming at me and my uncle is in palliative care. Just because your cause is the most important thing in the world to you doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t have time to read your fine print.
Oh, and don’t start appealing until you have an action plan. Don’t tell me today that you’ll have a place for me to drop off my canned goods four days from now. By then, I will have moved on.
This is a great list, but I’m stuck on #4. In the cases you use as examples “what went wrong is perfect”–it’s a really specific way of saying why should you care.
But what about organizations that are raising money to create something awesome (new children’s theatre, make space travel a reality, build a robot to clean houses for free) rather than fixing something that once went wrong? Do you think organizations like that can raise money on line in times like these?
Something about #6 rubs me the wrong way.
Really, folks have to start somewhere… or mebbe it’s just me because I have a campaign going on where I’ve only raised about that much after a week so far just because I’m trying to self-publish my books (without going the POD route). :\
Good list, Naomi. Too many non-profits have absolutely no idea how to raise money online, particularly in social media.
The basic formula goes like this:
-Tell us what the problem is
– Tell us (quickly) why the problem exists
– How much do you need?
– Why do you need it?
– Tell me how to give.
That formula applies online, offline, web 1.0, web 2.0, here, there, and everywhere.
Thanks for the post.
I’ve been thinking about this some more (because I’m a geek like that)and I think “What went wrong” could also be stated as “Why do you need my (specific) help” That covers your point about safety nets failing and contingency plans not working out. For less catastrophic asks it also covers the important point of “why isn’t the money from the “usual suspects” enough to meet your needs?”
i have worked on a couple campaigns and it all starts with the story and having a goal. what i am not good at is executing things after that point!
while my campaign wasn’t very successful in soliciting money, it did solicit lots of empathy and attention, which wasn’t such a bad thing either
That last part is so critical. It’s amazing how many messages are missing a call to action!
I have the feeling that if we were smart, we’d apply some of these principles to general business dealings as well.
Umm, I came by your website via getting pasted the url by a magazine publisher in China, and I’m totally on the other side of the world. So you might want to add in some rule about not under-estimating the global reach of the intertubes.
So basically…almost exactly the same steps you’d use for any kind of campaign :)
In our opinion a lot of charities out there (especially in the animal rescue/shelter sector) are greedy, useless and are hopeless at communication. They do not network with other charities on a similar theme. do not help each other out, do not network at all, have no real interest in raising funds via social networking and just give the overall impression of being totally unprofessional. This not a rant. We have communicated with many canine charities both large and small over many years and have found the vast majority to be petty.small minded and pulling in different directions instead of helping each other out and working together on a common cause.
If any of you have a comment on this we would like to hear from you. http://www.maps4pets.com/contact.asp
Naomi, I love your site. Could you share all of your campaigns and how much they raised? The domestic violence one looked great. Do you think, however, that some of the success is based on your personal brand and popularity as opposed to that of the cause?
One thing people can do who know how do these things is to take the skills to others who don’t have them.
I would add in that there is more than just an electronic set of things to do to really have the “social” part of the campaign work too. When people give honks of money to your campaign, show them the results of the work if you can.
There’s a charity that I give to that was very obscure. I -knew- exactly where the money I was sending was going. Well, I’ve been giving to this charity for years, not heaping piles, just what I could. I even checked into the socioeconomics of the locality & am still surprised at the wretchedly screwed up nature of them.
Well, this past year some *other* people got involved in giving to them, and I got pointed towards them. They did all this sort of active fund raising campaign organization stuff on a local level to put together people to ‘do stuff’.
The result was, well they raised more money than normal, and I got like a nice thank you out of it that was very new media-ish.
My point is that often, there are charities out there who don’t have the faintest clue about doing -any- of this type of thing. There are plenty of situations where you people, just by virtue of being able to read these things, are the person with the lamp in the world of darkness.
You can pick problems to work on too. That’s one of the nice things that you can do. There are a lot of them that need work. Some are local, some are national, some are international. Some are all of those.
However, there was someone who expressed some despair about working to save pets. This is a great example of what can be a strange set of problems caused by, or related to the activities of others. In some places, pets can be found homes, in other places, the animals some people keep as pets are seen as being “bad”. In some places, the pets people keep can be “bad”, and in other places, they can be “good”. In some places, the things some people call pets, other people call food. And, in way too many places, you might be very tempted to humanely execute a beloved pet to save a child from starvation. In some places, one persons pet is another persons invasive species that kills off endangered species.
None of the people who seek to save pets from bad fates are people with bad motives. However there is no way to deal with the problem in a unified or easy way because of it’s nature.
There are even some species that are only being kept alive because the people who cared about them saw no alternative than to encourage captive reproduction amongst whoever would be interested. There’s a whole world of frogs dying off right now, and snakes and other reptiles that are endangered.
People like keeping snakes as pets though, even poison ones. However, consider the Python… Keeping one of them in Canada, or any number of other species of potentially strange reptile, and there’s no threat from it. However the same creature in Florida let loose could wreck havoc. Even in the case of alligators and giant snakes, it’s unfortunate they can’t be found homes in like cold and desert regions where children are unlikely to be able to see them, and where if they got loose, they couldn’t go feral & cause trouble.
I have a better example of ‘how to’ do something about ‘bad’ problems you find out about. If there is something bad happening, and you’ve found out about it because of ‘the news’ or some source on the interplumbing, you have a potential trail to follow to find other people trying to do something. If it’s in a conflict zone, often by contacting people, or organizations in the area, you can find out ways to do direct aid.
If you -don’t- find a way to do direct aid because there’s no one else doing anything, well you then have a different problem. Then you’re the person who can create this thing that’s needed.
In China today they have a phenomenon that’s been somewhat translated as being a ‘flesh search engine’ (人肉搜索). All manner of things that people in other countries would find unusual are accomplished this way. One of the ways that the country mobilized to aid people who got hurt in the earthquakes there was because regular people used technology in that way to do it.
In conflict zones, a person CAN track down ways to get things from one place to them. They CAN figure out ways to generate change directly. Sometimes that’s going to mean thinking beyond your own borders to do it.
In one place, I help fund an underground railroad away from the conflicted area. It resettles people in safe places where they are welcome to live peacefully. There’s nothing illegal about what I do either, in fact I end up doing a good thing. Yes, there are some rather evil people who don’t like it, but well, frak them and their horse, especially given that the situation ends in one where no one has any complaints about the results.
Really the question if you’re reading this is, so you have a problem with something? Well, what are YOU going to do about it. Do any flaming thing that even looks like helping and talking to others about it, and well, you start creating solutions. You’re reading this? You can use teh goog too I bet? If it’s not there or on hayahwhat, bong, doggy beta, blahdo, or any of a whole pile of other search engines, hey then what it means is it’s all you. Perhaps you can find a market and hire a truck in one place to go to someplace else, perhaps it’s that simple in some instances, and can be done with some creative thinking & the seriously cheezy and crappy website you make. If you just be decent and honest, and look for people who are the same, well most places you can find some of them that could do something if only ___.
I would add one more item to this list:
Tell me what you are not good at.
I saw this, and thought of these comments…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703683804574533530623132664.html?mod=wsj_share_linkedin#printMode
After spending 27 years in prison and being released after the Supreme Court rule my case unconstitutional. I wanted to help kids like my self who are children of parents in prison. I’m a generational ex con. There are hundreds of thousands of generational incarcerated families in America. every state in America uses the number of children of people they all ready have locked up to determine the amount of bed space they will need in the future.Its nut and my organization is trying to stop the cycle of generational incarceration. However we are desperately under funded and the States and Federal Government are in no big hurry to give money to an organization cutting into their human warehousing profit making business.Any suggestion will be most graciously appreciated. Twitter @andydixn @reconcile84
Not too sure how I found this blog but glad I did. Think I was looking for something else on yahoo. Not sure I agree 100% with what you say, but have bookmaked and will pop back to read to see if you add any more posts. Keep up the good work.
Good luck everybody! – I will come back again. Are you on facebook or twitter? Will like to follow you.
Thanks
Aw, this was a really quality post. In theory I’d like to write like this too – taking time and real effort to make a good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and never seem to get something done.
BR