DOWNLOAD TO DONATE
Music for Relief has teamed up with new startup Causecast, to produce a more rewarding approach to fundraising. An American scheme, we’re interested in the concept and are wondering if something similar could work in the UK.
DOWNLOAD TO DONATE offers donators free music downloads for a year alongside the inner cheer they recieve for giving money to a good cause. They encourage people to make a one-off donation of $10 online or by text to either the continued rebuilding of Haiti or The Tsunami Relief Fund in Japan.
A variety of artists donate their songs, videos and merchandise to a catalogue of music that donators have access to after putting $10 in the virtual charity tin.
For those who donate, it’s not only a way to find new non-commercial artists, but is a great introduction to the charities that benefit from the scheme. Many charities are desperate to open up a conversation with younger supporters, and this scheme allows those charities to do that in a way that isn’t too demanding.
HootSuite launches new tools
HootSuite has added some new tools to make managing your social media profiles easier and more effective.
- Social media Scheduling: HootSuite was the first Twitter client to offer message scheduling. They’ve now updated the feature to allow you to slice and dice the destination profiles for each message and drag-and-drop your updates into timeslots. With Pro you can see a calendar view for more complex campaigns
- Limited for Control: With this feature, collaborating interns, contractors and new recruits can share search streams and compose new messages, but are constricted from posting them to valuable accounts until they are approved by an administrator. We’re not too sure about this one; Everyone in the NFP (or any other business for that matter) should know what the brand values are and be able to represent the organisation appropriately, and sometimes limiting tweets can stop the organic flow of a conversation.
- Smarter Selections: Auto-complete text fields for creating messages by creating a list of favourite profiles which you most frequently mention. Simple and useful.
- Articles with Answers: For beginners at Twitter clients, they have set up operational articles about the tools from a marketing perspective.
HootSuite seem to be doing a good job of evolving their Twitter manager despite Twitter reigning in developmental control and banning future applications.
Foursquare reaches 10million users
Foursquare reached an important milestone this week – 10 million users. This is a great indicator of how seriously we could be taking location based services. A few have dabbled in Foursquare campaigns, but this landmark makes us question, does Foursquare really have the potential to grow to the point where it is truly relevant for charities? Of course at this stage it depends almost entirely on how tech savvy your audience is you have and whether they see the title of Mayor as a virtual accolade or the elected head of a city.
Whilst 10million is quite an impressive feat for any application, if you are considering using check-ins as part of your campaigns, we’d be hesitant to start thinking about moving them over to Foursquare just yet when Facebook Places has a similar process and access to the social network’s 700million users.
Everything Everywhere drops text donation fees
We noted back in April that Everything Everywhere, owner of Orange and T-Mobile, had suspended usual fees and announced a review of its text-to-donate service. It was well known at the time that Institute of Fundraising were very keen that the elimination of fees should become permanent and since then, they have lobbyed for the suspension to be interminable.
It seems that the outside pressure of their campaign had an impact as Third Sector reported yesterday that:
This is great news for the sector as Everything Everywhere was the last major operator not to pass on 100 per cent of text donations to all charities.
6 beautiful months
Image courtesy of NHN_2009 on flickr
Last week was beautiful bytes’ half birthday. While we ate cake and biscuits to celebrate (although this is almost a bi-daily occurrence in the office anyway) we’d love to know how you’ve found reading our posts. What’s been useful, what hasn’t been so useful and what you’d like to read in the future. We’d also love to thank you for reading our indulgently geeky updates – we will continue to trawl the web for kooky start-ups, web tools and analytics and think about them from a charity perspective until the world is officially at peace or iOS70 is released – which ever comes first!
Lucy
Tags: beautiful bytes, Fundraising, Haiti, HootSuite, Japan, social media, Tools, Twitter clients
