Giving 2
When Twitter donation platform Givey rolled onto the scene last month, we thought that some of the drawn out functionality defied one of the basic rules of fundraising (make it easy!) but wondered whether it might open the doors to other direct giving platforms on the social networking site. This week, we discovered Giv2.it, an outstandingly simple site that has answered some of the drawbacks that inhibited us from getting more excited about Twitter giving.
Giv2 allows you to give to any charity that’s on Twitter. You simply tweet #giv2 @charity £2. Then, if they’re signed up to giv2, you’re then redirected to a mobile optimised site to complete the donation. This is straightforward and free for both the charity and the donor and it’s a lot easier than expecting donors to sign up in order to give on Twitter unprompted.
In terms of cost, the charity use their JustGiving account to raise the cash (if they have one) and it doesn’t cost anything to sign up. We’d advise charities to have an account simply because there’s nothing to lose by signing up and it opens up another channel of fundraising. Then ask the question, would it work as a suitable medium to integrate into your marketing campaign?
We are excited to see some innovative and creative uses for the site by progressive charities in the future.
Google vs. Facebook round two – a blue corner victory
As I sat down at my virtual quill in full preparation to write a witty yet informative morsel (I maintain) about Google exporting Facebook contacts into Google +, a story that I read about this very morning, it appears that Facebook has already jumped all over the new tool and have blocked the friend exporter even before sandwich time.
The tool allowed you to grab phone numbers, e-mails and other data from your Facebook friends and let you import them into your new Google account, potentially allowing the not yet established social network harness to some of the huge amount of social data that Facebook has.
The extension developer of the Facebook friend exporter, Mohamed Mansour, claims that:
The cheeky exporter device is part of Google’s attempt to make sharing social data easier, having recently launched Takeout, a tool that allows other sites to import social data from them.
A Deal for a Cause
Groupon opened our eyes earlier this year to different ways that the crowdsourcing deals trend could be utilised in the charity sector. Shortly afterwards, we discovered the Philanthroper who had tailor made a site specifically for charities. Now, new offering, A Deal for a Cause, claims to have found a truly innovative way for charities to capitalise on the trend that also benefits the donor at no cost.
“It’s easy (Ed: hmm). We work in a very participative format with your non-profit /organization to match your donor base demographic and geographic profile to one of our many merchants and we then develop a custom deal(s) to fit. We then take it from there. From the Email Flyer all the way to the delivery of the voucher and a 24 hour customer service team.”
In theory it sounds like it could benefit everyone involved: A Deal for a Cause can access the mailing lists of the charities who sign up, the merchants get to peddle their wares to a wide audience and boast about the charitable good they do, non-profits get to raise some easy money and the people on their lists get access to some ‘custom deals’.
However, as someone who is signed up to email alerts from Groupon, Living Social, and a plethora of retailers, I receive so many deals that I feel slightly underwhelmed by even the best offers as they flood into my inbox (half price on professional fake tan? You don’t know me at all!).
For those who are a little bit more protective over their email addresses, I can’t help but feel like having commercial emails thrust upon you when you signed up for charity updates could feel intrusive and like they’ve violated your data.
How long term is this solution? You might get money from the rounds of emails that entice people to get an £80 3 course meal for £29.99, but I think it’s really important to think about what potential damage it could do to your brand.
Mid year tech roundup
Google has been quite unabashed in its efforts to become more social and capitalise on the valuable data that comes with it. At the start of this year, Facebook had overtaken Google for the second time in terms of web traffic and we highlighted that social referrals were on the up. It seems like Google took heed of this warning with the evolution of their social offerings.
- Google social gaming platform
Facebook is still a force to be reckoned with in 2011. They started the year with a ridiculous 500 million users, and have now kicked through the ¾ mark surpassing a whopping 750 million this month. If they carry on at this rate – would it be possible for Mark Zuckerburg to be unwrapping a cool 1 billion users for Christmas?
A lot has changed for them these past few months, (like the launch of Facebook Places and Deals) – but one thing that hasn’t changed is their constant battling with Google.
- Facebook hired PR company to highlight Google privacy issues
- Facebook vs. Google – Ding ding
Twitter has had a huge 2011 so far. One year ago, users sent an average of 50 million tweets per day. Now, the average is over 140 million, and growing. They’ve been trying to capitalise on this success for quite some time because, while it is popular, it wasn’t as monetised as it could be. They want to strengthen bartering opportunities with advertisers and started by changing its terms of service to restrict the development of third party apps (keeping more people on its site) and also bought one of the most popular clients, TweetDeck, for $50 million.
Rumours are rife that they are setting up a UK office to get British advertisers on board, and others are saying that they plan to push out Facebook style brand pages to commercialise the popular site.
Foursquare
At the start of the year Foursquare was celebrating a hugely successful 2010. 6,000,000 members had joined up and it had seen an unprecedented 3400% growth. Now in the middle of the year, they’ve continued the celebrations, reaching 10,000,000 users and in April, a successful 4sqDay across 1,200 events. Whilst this is not yet enough to really challenge their biggest rivals (Facebook places) it says a great deal about how location services are growing.
- This is not just any Foursquare campaign
- Foursquare has 10,000,000 users.
Lucy J
Tags: beautiful bytes, crowdsourcing, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, JustGiving, start up, Twitter
[...] Giv2.it launched in July we were excited that there seemed to be an easy answer to Twitter giving – and we’re still excited. [...]