(Ireland) Win a €10,000 tv advertising campaign on Setanta Sports this Christmas

From todays Irish Independent:

Setanta Sports Television is offering a free advertising campaign to three Irish charities this Christmas.

Recognising that raising those much-needed funds and generating awareness is all the more difficult this year, Setanta Sports is inviting charities from around the country to get in touch.

Three charities will then be selected in a draw and given a month-long campaign on the Setanta Ireland channel, to the value of €10,000 per campaign.

The prize will include production of an ad, which will then be televised during the top live fixtures in the Setanta Sports schedule this Christmas and New Year, including Barclays Premier League football and Magners League rugby.

To enter, all you have to do is send the name of your charity, contact details and a paragraph detailing the nature of the proposed campaign to charity@setanta.com.

The closing date for receipt of entries is Friday 11th December and winners will be notified the following week

Turning Christmas Upside Down

Im looking for people to tell me about great Christmas Fundraising campaigns either they are doing or think are great. Have you seen something that has turned Christmas Fundraising on its head?

Let me know if you have, this is the final call for nomintaions.

email me conorsfundraisingblog@gmail.com

 

Is Foursquare the next big thing?

I have just heard about this today and have signed up to see what its all about, like when I joined Twitter I don’t quite get it yet…but I need to spend more time on it. CNN had this great article about Foursquare last week. What do you think?

Among the Web’s early adopter set it seems that Foursquare  has aligned itself to become next year’s mainstream hit.

Foursquare is a location-based mobile startup which aims to let an individual share his or her location with a group of friends.

It’s a virtual game in which participants earn badges for checking in at various locations; those that check in most become a venue’s “mayor.” By all accounts, this mechanism is as addictive as Twitter, Facebook or checking your e-mail on a BlackBerry.

Originally launched as an iPhone application and seeded by the young early-adopter set in cities such as New York and San Francisco, the site’s founders were able to leap from a ready-made springboard: Twitter.

With users’ “check-ins” being posted to the messaging service, Foursquare was able to gain a foothold in much the same way YouTube built its lead from videos embedded in MySpace pages.

The parallels with Twitter are numerous. As technology early adopter and popular blogger Robert Scoble wrote in September: “Go back three years ago. Twitter was being used by the same crowd that is playing with Foursquare today.”

This week Foursquare debuted the singular piece that launched Twitter into the stratosphere: an API. This application programming interface allows third-party developers to build anything they desire on top of Foursquare’s location-based social network.

It’s been shown time and again that once these ecosystems gain momentum, potential competitors face an arduous task. From Flickr to Google Maps to Twitter and beyond, it’s clear that early critical mass — having enough users and applications to make a service invaluable — sets the stage for a landslide victory.

With the launch of its API, Foursquare looks set to capitalize on this “rich get richer” phenomenon before others can make a play. Foursquare is doing more than wooing users and developers, however: It’s also courting local bars and restaurants.

“Foursquare for Businesses” is a platform for retailers wishing to offer special deals to Foursquare users: Check in to frozen desert maker Tasti D-Lite at two venues in New York, for instance, and you’re eligible for a discount.

Competitors abound

Nonetheless, multiple players are vying for victory in the location-based services market. Between Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite and Google’s Latitude, Foursquare will by no means have an easy ride. While Gowalla debuted an early version at SXSW 2009 alongside Foursquare, both Loopt and Brightkite have a head start.

All of these services, I’d argue, lack the highly addictive game play that appears to have Foursquare users hooked.

One company may unwittingly squash Foursquare in its infancy: Twitter itself. The very service that propelled Foursquare to prominence is rapidly building out its location-based features, with a location API that directly challenges Foursquare. Twitter already has the critical mass of users and ecosystem of eager developers. If it executes correctly, the service could leave Foursquare in the dust.

In Foursquare’s favor: Young, fast-growing startups such as Twitter often find their engineering teams overstretched simply trying to achieve scale. Twitter has added less than a dozen new features since launch as preventing frequent downtime has become its greatest challenge.

Foursquare may network its way to the top in 2010 or find itself lost in an increasingly competitive landscape. Early adopters are betting on the former

The hows and whys of using the modern web – Dublin

Damien Mulley is organising a conference for charities on December 8 at the Euro Commission office in Molesworth Street, Dublin 2. Excellent opportunity to learn how the freely available tools that are out there can work to the benefit of organisations.

The course is free, with a max of two attendees per NGO. You can sign up here if you’re interested.

one-third of the online donations could not be processed.

The Non Profit Times reported on an attempts to make donations online. Amergent, in Peabody, Mass., decided to contact 30 Catholic organizations and test their responses to $25 online and offline donations sent out this past June. Amergent wanted to analyze the ease of donating, how organizations cultivated and renewed donors, and what were the differences between giving online and offline.

Ten out of the 30 online gifts could not be processed online.

Rick Christ, vice president of online fundraising at NPAdvisors.com, now a part of Amergent, explained that having any roadblocks to your online donations could severely affect whether a person will give at all. Donors expect online donations to be easy and they sometimes don’t have the patience to sift through 12 pages to find the donate link or navigate an error message.

Christ said that sometimes the error messages themselves were confusing, even for someone who works within the online sphere. One error message proclaimed an “AVS mismatch,” with no way of correcting the error. “Imagine the impact on the 80-year-old woman getting that error message. It’s written by the programmer, not a fundraiser,” he said.

He explained that organizations couldn’t assume everyone can breeze through an online donation form. “We are in the forgiveness business – and need to practice a little here,” said Christ. Error messages should apologize for the error and plot out how the donor can fix the situation.

Christ said the average online donation should take less than three days to clear. The test of the 20 remaining organizations that could process online donations found that the processing ranged from one day to seven days, with the average as less than three days.

After making 50 donations, 30 by mail and 20 online, to the 30 organizations, only 17 organizations responded with accurate information in less than 24 hours. Three organizations reported inaccurately that Chris Doyle gave one gift instead of two. But the fictional Chris Doyle is still waiting to hear back from 10 organizations.

From the answers Amergent received, eight asked for a full postal address to track gifts and one organization followed up with a typed, mailed letter that arrived 10 days later

Movember

I posted about this last year and probably the year before. I love the name, I love the visibility of the campaign, I love the link to the charity. It just works so well.  And its really grown (ha ha) since it started 6 years ago. It is one of those ideas where you say….why didnt I think of that! Well done to the Mo Bro’s and Sista’s raising lots of money.

If you dont know about Movember here is some info:

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer.

The idea for Movember came about in 2003 when a few mates were having a beer in a small bar in Melbourne, Australia. Inspired by the women’s health movement, it was recognized that men were lacking a way to engage and actively involve themselves in their own health. During a conversation about fashion and past trends, the idea came up to bring the moustache back for one month, and in doing so, have some fun, raise a small amount of money and hopefully encourage men to talk about their health with each other.

Since this time, Movember has continued to grow each year, both in terms of participation numbers and funds raised. In its first year, 30 Mo Bros took part in Movember and last year, across the globe more than 173,000 Mo Bro & Sistas got on board, raising more than €14 million across the Movember’s men’s health partners gloabally.

And a Message from Hulk!!

The 2009 Non Profit Tagline Report

Im a couple of days late with this, but the Non Profit Tagline Report is worth it. This report really is an incredible brainstorming tool for your organisation and ther report is designed to help you shape effective taglines.

“A powerful tagline is a must for any nonprofit intent on delivering its message in our overcrowded world of 24/7 content,” says  the fantastic Nancy E. Schwartz, president of Nancy Schwartz & Company and publisher at GettingAttention.org,  the nonprofit marketing and communications resource website that produces the annual report and awards competition (you really should sign up to the site here)

A 2008 survey of nonprofits showed that 7 in 10 nonprofits rated their tagline as poor or didn’t use one at all. Schwartz says the majority of nonprofits not using a tagline indicated that they had not thought about it or couldn’t come up with a good one.

The 2009 Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Report  really does give you everything you need to start a tagline development process. Things like:

• Why a Nonprofit’s Name Isn’t Enough
• How a Strong Tagline Benefits Your Organization – Useful for developing support among colleagues and leadership
• The 10 Have-Tos for Successful Taglines
• Using Words that Work
• The 7 Deadly Sins, 9 Snores and 5 Best Ways to Antagonize Your Audience – What not to do
• Research, Create, Revise, Test, Repeat – The right steps to take to craft a potent tagline
• Over 2,500 Nonprofit Tagline Examples to put to work for marketing brainstorming.

“A nonprofit organization’s tagline is, next to its name, the marketing message most frequently heard, and the easiest and most effective way to convey its brand. A strong tagline complements an organization’s name to convey its unique value or impact with personality, passion and commitment. Nonprofits that fail to make the most of their taglines are basically throwing that opportunity away,” says Nancy.

I agree with Nancy when she says that taglines are a key tool in building strong nonprofit brands, which are more important than ever in these times of increased competition. “Nonprofits can develop a tagline at the organization, program or campaign levels to freshen up their messaging, emphasize their commitment and/or revive tired positioning,” she says.

Do your supporters feel ownership?

I was in a taxi on the way to the airport and the taxi driver was talking to me about his favourite football team. What I found intriguing was the way he referred to the team.

He didnt say they or them….it was WE. Everytime he mentioned Arsenal he said WE…like he was the one had played the game.

I spoke about this before to a commercial director of a football club, he was not new to sport but relatively new to the country (UK) and I asked him was he surprised at how fans were about the club. He wasnt surprised but he did say that their sense of ownership of the team was incredible. If the club isnt succeeding the fans will let them know what they think, if they are they are the reason why. Cleverly he is embracing this and their focus is on the fans and making sure everything they do puts them first.

Imagine if your supporters and donors felt that sense of ownership about your cause? Wow the potential is huge isnt it? We all too often think of donors comments about what we are doing as being a little annoying…what would they know. Not all the time, but sometimes you just want to pull your hair out. But perhaps you should be embracing this. First of all they care enough to comment, so give them a forum to do it in. Of course you can’t listen to every comment or thought, imagine if a manager of  a team did that…it would be a mess. But by engaging people from the ground up you can allow them feel ownership.

I can’t wait until I hear someone refer to a cause as theirs and when they talk about the work it does say…We…

Poppy and Legion Live

For some reason…and I dont know why….but The Royal British Legion didnt strick me as an organisation that would be embrassing new media…shame on me. They have launched Legion Live which is being driven by ‘Poppy’, a virtual character who generates content and spreads it through her own blog. LegionLive is a hub for Serving and ex-Armed Forces, their families and wider supporters.

The plan is for LegionLive to bring all these people together under one roof, and then give them the tools to interact with each other. They can write their own blogs, join and create groups,message each other and offer advice and support. Poppy’s own blog is updated every day, as well as picking up content created by LegionLive members on-site, she reports on other Legion news of relevance.

I asked how people were responding to a virtual charachter they told me that “Poppy is new, so at this stage not everyone knows what she’s about, or why she’s been created, but in this short space of time she has been very well received and that members haven’t hesitated to directly get in touch with poppy and address her as they would an ordinary person”

There plan now is to “keep up the momentum and keep her relevant” ……I like that plan!

Well done to the Royal Legion…and sorry for not thinking this would be a Legion thing to do…good on you.

Nominations for Best Christmas Campaign

I think Christmas brings out some incredibly innovative ideas in charities. Years ago the Christmas pin or badge was the big thing, recently its the Christmas gift list.

Well this year I’m setting out to find the most innovative and creative Christmas campaign. It can be a new twist on an old idea, an old idea re worked, a brand new idea. It doesn’t matter to me, if you think its the best Christmas campaign out there…let me know.

Your nomination can come from your own organisation or can just be one you have seen and like, I would ask though that its a campaign being run this year.

So send me your ideas, email conorsfundraisingblog@gmail.com.

Nominations close on Nov 25th.

The Fun Theory

I thought this was kind of cool, came across it on Twitter (cant remember the person who tweeted it, sorry!). The idea is “dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.” Here is an example of the fun theory

Twitterboard at 29th IFC

Ah yes…us Fundraisers are really at the cutting edge aren’t we. 

At this years International Fundraising Congress Innophoria Lab’s  introduced a Twitter Billboard during the four-day conference. Well done to all invovled especially Alan Bird and Kristina Fitzpatrick for their work in supporting this new, Twitter-orientated social network.