I was lucky enough to grab some rare time with Rebekah to catch up over a sushi dinner recently (sadly no ikura – one of our joint favourite things – but otherwise very good indeed).

Among the things we talked about was a presentation Rebekah was doing on emergency fundraising using social media, as part of her MA, my recent panel at Media140 Third Sector event on 4 February, entitled ‘The Future of Giving’, and the agenda for the next NFPtweetup.

As is so often the case in life, things seemed to be coalescing around a theme, without us really having planned it: charities using social media for fundraising, measuring, quantifying and understanding success and the contributing factors (more of our favourite things). [Many ‘social media experts’ would start talking about ‘serendipity’ at this point, but I’m not going to because it’s adding nothing new to the conversation and the word’s always used incorrectly anyway ]

Anyhow…

I put my panel for Media140 together on fundraising because I wanted to explore social media’s place in fundraising and have an informed debate on our perspectives about such things as emergency fundraising, raising unrestricted funds sustainably, scalability and whether results from fundraising through social media would ever be replicable.

I made that the focus because I felt the sector has surely had it’s fill by now of generic presentations about how brilliant social media are and how charities should be making the most of them, and that there was a real need to elevate the conversation and grapple with some of the real strategic challenges and opportunities, based on quantitative data, and a genuine understanding of fundraising and the financial models of most charities, among other things!

Even on a more tactical level, don’t you agree that we should have moved beyond the ‘cool tools’ conversations by now and be at the point where we’re measuring success, creating benchmarks and at least be able to begin to quantify the value we can generate using social media and share some insights about how to optimise that? I’d hoped the conversation would only start there, before moving on to imagine what fundraising might look like in 5-10 years.

In retrospect, it was probably a bit ambitious for a 40 min session, including questions from the audience, so we didn’t even get halfway there and getting stuck into that is going to have to keep for another time.

What is really worth mentioning is that, in the run up to the event, I had asked representatives from British Red Cross and Merlin to join me on the panel to talk about the support they’d received for their Haiti fundraising appeals through social media – because they’d be able to share some genuine insights into how ‘social fundraising’ compared to the traditional channels they were using, as well as whether they raise funds via social media on any significant scale at times other than emergencies. Sadly, they couldn’t join me at Media140, but they have both agreed to come and speak about this at the next NFPtweetup on 4 March, instead.

We’ll also be joined by UNICEF, who will share how they helped to turn Charlie Simpson’s sponsored bike ride into a fundraising phenomenon, so it should be a great night – and it’s all come together quite nicely around a theme of ‘Generating, and Measuring, Value’, or something like that (it’s still a bit of a working title!).

This seems to be a good point to mention Rebekah’s presentation again, as it was inspired by a press release the DEC released about the role social media played in their Haiti earthquake appeal. I have to say, I thought the presentation so good it would be a shame not to share it more widely, so here it is and over to Rebekah for her perspective:

This presentation was for a class of 15 MA students who didn’t know much about charities and their use of social media. I chose the DEC Haiti earthquake appeal as a case study because the class were familiar with both the disaster and widely publicised appeal. Focusing on DEC’s mobile giving campaign via Twitter, there were examples of how they engaged and encouraged supporters to donate, ending with lessons learnt from the appeal, personal thoughts on the topic and a few questions to kick start class discussion.

I knew it would be hard enough for my classmates to absorb all the new information they were going to be exposed to (most of them don’t have any fundraising experience), but they made a good attempt at giving me considered comments about the questions on the last slide. The final question was left unanswered though:

“Which benchmarks are best to gauge whether or not social media channels make good fundraising tools?”

Maybe the words ‘benchmarks’ and ‘gauge’ made it too scary for my class to approach. Maybe they didn’t feel qualified to offer an opinion on fundraising – which would be quite fair enough. But then I’m not sure the charity sector has managed to answer these questions satisfactorily yet either.

If you’ve got any thoughts to share, please do, and if you’re from a charity and would like to come along to the next NFPtweetup on 4 March and have a good old debate about all of this, tweet me @rebekahhah. We have a few places left, but you’d better be quick!

Rachel and Rebekah