One of the roles I have picked up at Amnesty is helping to coordinate an intranet resource on online fundraising. One of the items that has landed on my desk, and is worth sharing is news about the SMS activism program that Amnesty Norway has been running.
The concept is simple enough - Amnesty Norway has recruited about 25,000 people who have signed up to receive SMS notices when there is an urgent action alert - about twice a month. Every time an alert is sent out, each subscriber pays 0.25 euros (so it costs about 0.50 euros each month, or about 6 Euros a year to stay on the list). Each time that someone responds to an urgent action note - about 10,000 do each time - then they pay another 0.25 euros. Amnesty Norway recieves about 50% of all the SMS fees, so this program not only generates Urgent Action signatures, it also generates a surprisingly large amount of income to fund Amnesty’s programs - about 100,000 Euros per year. It’s a real example of the cummulative nature of small (in this case, micro) donations.
If your Norwegian is up to scratch, check out AI Norway’s SMS Activism page for more details ..
Beth Kanter at NetSquared has posted a nice roundup of some early entries in the nonprofit / youtube mashup category. The success of youtube is putting some new spark into the “what can nonprofits do with online video” discussion - read Beth’s article here, and watch for more developments to come quickly as this year’s hot online trend rolls out into mainstream society.
My innner fundraiser is eager to point out that submissions of personal video testimonials recorded by donors about why they chose to give to a particular cause or campaign could be very powerful tool for pitching to new donors. Youtube style video uploads would add a whole new level of storytelling and emotional impact to the personal fundraising pages that are supported by companies like Justgiving, Artez and GiveMeaning.
A few days ago I was at the annual Social Justice Retreat at Algonquin Park, out in the Canadian wildlands. Between workshops and kayaking, I had a chance to sit down with Phillip Smith from communitybandwidth.ca to talk about his work on a current Greenpeace Canada campaign that has a strong online organizing and advocacy element: www.kleercut.net.
In my chat with Phillip we talk about the concept for this “brand-damage” campaign which is focused on engaging consumers in local actions, and how the website has evolved to reflect the progress of the campaign, as well as what some of Phillip’s “take-away’s” have been so far.
To hear the podcast (cross-posted to fundraisinginnovation.com):
http://www.fundraisinginnovation.com/podcasts/phillipsmith_algonquin.mp3
The last couple of days of the skillshare focused away from the specific Latin American offices, and took a broader look at three areas of fundraising-related activity – Internet, Direct Dialogue, and Supporter Services. That meant it was my turn to make a presentation and I teamed up with Lale Metzinger, the international director of online fundraising for Greenpeace to focus mainly on areas where we felt there were new opportunities for the Latin American offices to move forward with internet fundraising and campaign integration. I concentrated on the theme of using social networking for fundraising and building broader suppprt lists. I’ve made posts on this blog previously about using social networking approaches to improve campaigning and fundraising effectiveness. This is a new area of activity for Greenpeace – like many organizations, they have traditionally viewed their supporters as sources of donations rather than as co-participants/activists.
Highlight of our final skillshare day was a detailed report from Marcelo Iniarra on the No Whaling Virtual March (http://whales.greenpeace.org) that Greenpeace ran this past spring. More than 60,000 people around the world signed up to support Greenpeace’s No Whaling campaign and emcampment in South Korea by uploading pictures of themselves saying “No†to commercial whaling. These photos were projected onto a special public screen that Greenpeace set up outside the building in Ulusan, South Korea where the International Whaling commission was meeting.
I also took time to record a podcast with Marcelo on the origins of the idea, the challenges faced in launching and managing such a complex online project (there were 11 microsites in different languages), and also on the emotional impact that the photos submitted by people all around the world had on the campaign, and how the online fundraising message was integrated into this mobilization campaign.
The podcast is published on the FundraisingInnovation.com blog:
http://www.fundraisinginnovation.com/podcasts/vol_3_0805.mp3
Today was Greenpeace Skillshare day 2 and I participated in the Internet fundraising stream (go figure). We got more detailed presentations of online fundraising results and online development plans from each of the four Latin American offices. Overall, it’s clear that Internet fundraising is one of the major fundraising channels in this region – in part because these offices were only established in the early 90’s, and really grew into their maturity during the boom years of the Internet. Greenpeace Argentina in particular has been a vanguard of Internet innovation for the whole Greenpeace global network, driven by the former fundraising director Marcelo Iniarra and his team. Greenpeace Brasil has emerged more recently as an online powerhouse and is rapidly expanding its online donors base – with a very impressive number of new monthly-giving online signups each month. Greenpeace Mexico and Greenpeace Chile also have ambitious plans, but are more limited in the resources and staff support they have available for new online initiatives.
One particularly interesting trend here is the close integration between the traditional silos of fundraising, campaigning, and communications. Many of the online initiatives we’ve looked at today have a tight integration of the activism, communication and fundraising messages, and there seems to be a sense of common purpose in acquiring both new donors and new cyberactivists, instead of the competition/ownership of email lists between departments that sometimes leads to mixed messages for the online audience. Every one of these offices seems to be in an expansive stage at the moment, with lots of energy and vision to double or triple the size of their online activity in coming years – and that may could be really underpinning that sense of common purpose.
Yesterday at the Greenpeace Latin American fundraising skillshare, we have heard overviews from four different Latin American countries about their fundraising and communications/campaigning programs and their success and challenges.
Greenpeace’s Latin America program was launched at the Rio climate change conference in 1992. At first it was run as a project of Greenpeace International based out of Amsterdam, and the senior people were all europeans, with support staff hired from the local populations. But it became clear that in order for Greenpeace to have any lasting impact in Latin America, it needed to develop a regional base here, and 4 national offices were opened in Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brasil. After more than 10 years, the investment and effort by Greenpeace has had a significant impact in the region. Greenpeace is easily the most recognized environmental NGO throughout the region, and the Latin American offices have shown significant leadership and innovation in campaigning, fundraising and communication around environmental issues.
Greenpeace Argentina in particular has been one of the world’s most forward-thinking organizations in using the internet for fundraising, and at one point was raising more actual dollars online than was Greenpeace USA. We saw today a video report – which I will hope to upload to here shortly – about Greenpeace Argentina’s “Jaguars†campaign that uses motorcycles and mobile video cameras to catch illegal loggers in the act and block them in much the same way that Greenpeace did with small zodiac boats stopping whaling ships in the 70’s and 80’s.
One highlight of Greenpeace Brasil’s presentation was a discussion of how they have dealt with the issue of rainforest destruction in the Amazon. For the past 5 years, there has been an international campaign operating in the Amazon, largely run from Greenpeace’s Europoean offices, that has been causing much conflict with the local population, including death threats against the lead GP organizers. Over the past year, GP Brasil has taken over the campaign, and their approach is to build better connections with the local population, to gain their trust and an understanding that they have a common set of goals. This reminds me of the way that Greenpeace Canada has tried to build alliances with lumber unions and towns in British Columbia to work toward a sustainable logging industry that preserves jobs and communities while protecting the ancient rainforest.
Overall, there has been an emphasis on Dialogo Directo (Direct Dialogue), which is a form of street-based, face-to-face fundraising that is an important fundraising program being developed across Greenpeace’s international network. Readers in the UK are familiar with “chuggers†who are on street corners of many UK cities, but this fundraising approach is having great success right now all around the world, including the 4 GP Latin American offices, and I have also heard that GP India is having immense success as well. Given the challenges of technology, and particularly internet connectivity in developing countries, the use of face-to-face fundraisers, who also serve as campaign promoters and communicators seems to be a natural fit.
Ok, today will be more detailed workshops on direct dialogue, Internet fundraisng and donor/member services ..
Long day(s) of airflights — including 6 hours in the world’s most uninteresting airport, Washington Dulles – but this morning I woke up and looked out to see the palm trees and crashing surf of Ubatuba, Brasil where I’ll be for the next few days with a group of about 30 Greenpeace fundraisers. A few of the folks here are familiar from an online course that I ran earlier this year for Greenpeace International Last night’s get-to-know-each-other hangout around the coutyard pool of the hotel was a kind of jam-up of Spanish, Portuguese and English – “Portu-ñgol-glish†which is going to be the language of choice.
Frank Guggenheim, the Executive Director of Greenpeace Brasil gave a short keynote welcome in which he highlighted a couple of themes that we should keep in mind through our work over the next few days:
1. Image and language need change over time
Citing the example of the stalwart German magazine Der Speigel, which was unassailable atop the German media for decades, but which has been knocked out of that position recently by new format magazines, Frank reminded us that Greenpeace can’t continue using the same imagery and language from the 60’s and 70’s when Greenpeace was born. We need to find new ways to communicate its message or risk becoming sidelined.
2. Communication media change over time
Greenpeace was born at the height of the television era, and grew up as a mass-media organization. Now we are in the age of the Internet, and Greenpeace has been developing new ways of communicating that fit that medium. But already we see the next technological wave coming – cellphones/SMS — so just as Greenpeace was starting to get comfortable with Internet/Web, we will have to quickly learn new ways to engage with people using cellphone/SMS.
Just got confirmation that I’ll be participating in a Greenpeace regional fundraising skillshare in Brazil next week (Aug 14-19). I’ll be leading a couple of discussions on new trends in online fundraising and online engagement, and in particular I hope to convene an overview/discussion of new online engagment tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, flickr, de.licio.us, etc. that are probably famliar to many people reading this, but which are just starting to emerge into the everyday practices of mainstream nonprofits.
I’m expecting there will be some interesting stuff to report back. Greenpeace’s recent No Whaling Virtual March (http://whales.greenpeace.org) was developed by Marcelo Inniara, the online engagement guru from Greenpeace Argentina. More than 60,000 people uploaded photos of themselves holding Stop Whaling signs and messages to be projected onto a billboard in Seoul, South Korea where the International Whaling Commission was debating a return to commericalized whaling. It’s a great example of the “show the network” school of online mobilizing, and I love just browsing through the photos that have been submitted. It really communicates the sense that 60,000+ signups is more than just a number — it’s a vast crowd of real, individual people.
Another interesting thing about the No Whale campaign is that a large percentage of the signups to the campaign — with uploaded photos and all — have come from non-western/developed countries. In fact, signups from some of the larger southern countries such as India (4300), Brazil (4500) easily surpassed more traditional online activist countries such as the United States (1400), Italy (1100), and France (2200). As well, a handful of signups came from very non-traditional activist countries such as China (93), Indonesia (65), and even Albania (4) andIraq (2). Greenpeace is actively ‘globalizing’ and has opened offices in India, Thailand, Turkey and Lebanon in the past few years, so these signup point-of-origin numbers could be an indicator of success.
I’ll try to report some of the more interesting learnings, and also what the online engagement paradigm looks like from within a large, global activist organization.
I’ve just participated in an inaugural podcast for the Fundraising Innovation blog. I sat down with online fundraising guru Mike Johnston for a 20 minute conversation about interesting new fundraising-related ideas/happenings. Here are a few of the topics we covered:
1. The Live8 concerts: why wasn’t anyone asking for money?
2. Wristbands or bracelets? Better ways to use them for fundraising
3. ASPs and technology providers - moving from innovation to refinement
4. Mobile phones: new fundraising and campaigning ideas from Eastern Europe
Here’s the URL for this podcast:
http://www.fundraisinginnovation.com/podcasts/vol_1_0705.mp3
To subscribe to the podcast feed:
http://www.fundraisinginnovation.com/?feed=rss2
