Everything Everywhere waives text donation fees

If, like me, when expertly crafted text-to-donate communications are thrust into your eyeline, you almost instinctively search for a kind of catch, or for the amount that the charity will ‘actually’ receive, you will be happy to find out that Mobile communication giants, Everything Everywhere has taken an important step in combating the stigma attached to text donation by suspending usual fees and announcing a review of its current text-to-donate service.

Whilst this is a temporary measure, put in place while the organisational unifier of Orange and T-Mobile is undertaking a review of the service for non-partner charities, it is hoped that with enough outside pressure, the elimination of fees will become permanent.

According to the company, the review will also look at “making the service even better for more charities, including a simple gift aid mechanism for customers”.

Everything Everywhere added that, for the “vast majority” of donations made on its network, no administration costs or charge fees are passed on to the charity. These include texts in aid of Comic and Sport Relief, Unicef and the Royal British Legion.

Louise Richards, director of policy and campaigns for the Institute of Fundraising, who lobbied for this new approach, said that the organisation welcomed the suspension of fees, but is wary that “a suspension isn’t the same as ending fees”.

Let’s hope Everything Everywhere abolishes charges for every charity, every time.

Twitter UK

We noted in our post ‘is easy giving smart giving?’ that Twitter intends to roll out Facebook style brand pages as part of the big (and slightly controversial) plan to revamp its commercial offering. This week the social network took another significant step towards the ‘monetizing’ of the US-based site by launching a UK office to service the growing demand for advertising.

Twitter has been posting vacancies for a sales account manager, sales executive, business development mobile/electronics and communications manager on its own recruitment feed. It is keen to harness the advertising potential of the 200 million user site, but there is doubt based on its past shortcomings and wariness that complicating its simple interface and introducing advertising will be unpopular with users.

Twitter is also set to offer geo-targeted promoted tweets and a dashboard allowing advertisers to access data about their followers.  Could changes like this mean that Twitter starts to become as popular an advertising medium for charities as Facebook, or could they affect Twitter’s popularity?  Only time will tell.

This isn’t just any Foursquare campaign …

This weekend was significant for a horde of deserving charities because it was London Marathon weekend; though one story has caught our eye that didn’t involve any red-faced, jelly-legged supporters. Marks and Spencer donated £1 to Breakthrough Breast Cancer for the first 25,000 customers to check-in to any one of its stores on Foursquare. The campaign, which ran all weekend, is part of continuing support that M&S has pledged to the charity.

This could be a landmark for starting to establish Foursquare’s potential for fundraising, and it also challenges the stereotype that smartphone marketing should only be targeted towards teenagers and initiated by edgy brands, with some kind of gimmicky creative hook.

Results of the campaign haven’t yet been shared, but we’re really looking forward to hearing what happened with this…

Read more about the campaign on UK Fundraising.

Twitter looking to buy TweetDeck

Twitter has made no secret of the fact that it is desperate to reign back control over the huge amount of applications and clients that have cluttered its branding efforts since 2009.

It took measures earlier this year to limit the influx of developers and announced that it would no longer support the development of third party applications.

It has now proved its commitment by reportedly offering $50 million to buy one of the most popular, TweetDeck, which accounts for 13% of all tweets sent out. TweetDeck is said to be used by some of the most powerful users and Twitter is keen to keep these ‘mega tweeters’ using an official application.

If you’re choosing a suitable Twitter client for your charity tweets, check out our post comparing the most popular here.

Measuring social media success and preview of new Facebook non-profit research

Conversations about measuring social media success are often full of confusing and contradictory messages: Is success 25 new followers, 50 RT’s or one in-depth conversation with a supporter who went on to donate? Is measuring the number of fans or followers your charity has really important?

The social media league table, just published by NFPsynergy, seems to suggest that some think social media is still a numbers game, but there were plenty of strong responses on Twitter to the contrary – mostly from social media-savvy people working at charities – following the publication of this report.  Coincidentally, Rachel also blogged about this issue last week, and there was also plenty of discussion about measurement and ROI among the panel during the Guardian Voluntary Network‘s live Q&A, ‘Is your charity social media ready?’, yesterday, too.

It’s certainly a hot topic and has been since social media started to gain traction among charities.  Pure statistics, such as ‘daily new likes’ or the amount of times a link has been followed often seem to be the extent of the interrogation into measurement and impact, but what constitutes real success for your charity?

Idealware has recently released a preview of  findings from a US survey they carried out in February of over 500 nonprofit professionals who were using Facebook at their organisations. These findings are based on how charities feel Facebook has helped them achieve various objectives (seems like a pretty sensible way to evaluate success to us). Value isn’t quantified in metrics like click-throughs or numbers of comments, but on how the respondents assess Facebook as a medium for attracting support for their charities.

The percentage of respondents who said they they’d seen “a few” or “substantial” new constituents of that type, who also said that attracting that type of constituent was important to them.

Of course, in the example graph above, what constitutes ‘a few’ or ‘substantial’ amount of new constituents will be skewed by the targets and aspirations of each individual respondent.  Nevertheless, this kind of data might be a useful representation across the board of the general usefulness of the social network to the nonprofits that took part.

We’ll look forward to reading the full report – and to any further insights it includes – when Idealware releases it in May.

Until next time,

Ash

Tags: advertising, beautiful bytes, digital, Facebook, Foursquare, geolocation, Institute of Fundraising, mobile, mobile fundraising, mobile marketing, online, Paypal, SMS, text donations, tweetdeck, Twitter