Last Friday, I received a copy of CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World by Tom Watson, (Wiley, Nov 10,2008). Given that we’ve been talking a lot on this blog lately about social networks, but not so much about nonprofits and cause marketing (at least I haven’t been), I was interested to pop open the covers and take a look inside.

The book contains 10 nicely segmented chapters, all dealing with different aspects of the impact of the wired / wireless world on philanthropy – touching on topics from Katrina response, to political movements, to micro-lending.

If you’re in the nonprofit world and haven’t yet taken advantage of the online space, then this book is full of great ammunition for you to take to your executives to persuade them that it’s the right thing to do. i.e…

Charities seeking to raise money through direct mail are known to pay a premium for each dollar raised from a brand new donor; the cost may be $1.30 or $1.50 to acquire each new dollar. While the money raised on Causes {a fundraising applicaion on Facebook – Simon} is small so far, the acquisition cost per public supporter is almost zero.

…and how about this quote discussing figures released by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement in 2006 talking about millenials (young Americans born after 1980)

30% told researchers they have boycotted a product in the last year “because of the conditions under which it was made or the values of the company that made it.”

When you consider other numbers and discussions in this book about the online connectivity of these millenials, it looks like a great opportunity for causes that can capture the imagination of these millenials.  On the other hand, it’s also an area of great concern for companies that have working practices that these millenials may deem questionable or worse.

One of the biggest changes that the online world has brought to philanthropy has been the increasing level of openness. In the past, you would send your money in to a charity, and that would be the last you’d hear of it (well, until the next request for cash came in).  These days, people can read about the actual people that benefit from their $25 micro-loan.  They can read about where their donations are actually being applied…following the story of the people or villages that benefit.

More than 58% of high net-worth individuals say they would give more to charity if they could determine their gift’s impact… But new markets are offering that opportunity to smaller donors as well… micro-philanthropists should be as respected as large-scale philanthropists.

Now, the book does make the point that $ ROI is relatively low for many of the causes discussed.  But, Watson does talk about the fact that engagement in this social media world is about much more than just dollars.  It’s also about getting people behind a cause in other ways, whether it’s to call their elected representatives or demonstrate in one way or another. I’ll leave the last word for the author, but please note that there’s a lot more in this book beyond what I’ve covered.

Will online social activism unleash a golden age for causes – for philanthropy, for activism, for citizen engagement? Perhaps… the CausedWired movement is also changing lives and inspiring new a new generation of wired social entrepreneurs to reach for something better.

One problem that I’ll frequently hear when gathering requirements for a Search Audit, is that a site used to rank well for a particular term, but no longer does.  I’ll ask what content they had that used to rank for that term.  Sometimes I’ll hear that it was either pages that were taken down due to redesign, or due to seasonal content.  The most common response is – “We don’t know, that’s why we called you in.”

In those cases, a simple 301 redirect could be used to preserve those rankings by redirecting the page equity to a page with similar or like content.  What you don’t want to do is have a 404 page (always No-Index them) or some other stop page be presented to the user.

In the example below, Oxfam had a page calling for donations for the 2004 Asian Earthquake.  This campaign is now over.  So, what did they do with that page?  They changed the title to “Campaign Expired” and presented a “This Campaign has Expired” page to the user.  As you can see, this doesn’t look good in their search results.

What should Oxfam have done?  I would recommend that they put together a landing page that talked about the results of the 2004 campaign which would be linked to current campaigns – with strong calls to donate on the page.  This lets people see what’s been done with money in the past, gives them a chance to donate to wherever the need is now (opening up the previously closed conversion funnel), and preserves the rankings by providing like, relevant content for the search.

Is Make a Wish bankrupt?  Is that really true?  Yahoo suggests it, and those suggestions are based on actual search volumes, so there must be a groundswell of people who believe it to be true…

Unless, of course, a popular site such as The Onion put out a parody story about a kid who wished for as many wishes as he could have, which bankrupted the Make a Wish Foundation…

As if non-profits don’t have enough to concern themselves with – with various watchdog organizations, news organizations looking for that Pulitzer winning expose, etc.  Now, they have to look to fictional issues. 

Search engines don’t necessarily know what’s real and what isn’t, although contextually they should be able to know what is relevant to the query.  But for Make a Wish, that bankruptcy story doesn’t rank, yet it still gets billing both above and below the fold as part of the suggestions tool.

This brand confusion is the reason that the United Nations asked the producers of Doctor Who to rename the branch of the armed forces that the doctor sometimes interacts with from “United Nations Intelligence Taskforce” to something else.  This name had been used throughout the 1970′s & 80′s with no problems.  But now, in this internet age, they recognized that it could impact their reputation where articles on the United Nations fighting off alien menaces began ranking for their name.  From 2006, UNIT became known as the “UNified Intelligence Taskforce.”

So, fiction becomes another potential source of reputation management issues for non-profits.  Being proactive, like the UN, and removing the issue before it becomes one can allay any potential hit that your organization would take.  But, when something like the Onion, or a Saturday Night Live sketch takes aim at you, you’ve got to make sure that you already own your shelf space and are ready to respond in whatever fashion you need to. (Maybe a PPC response from Make a Wish on Yahoo will assuage any concerns that a searcher may have when they see that suggestion.)

Of course, if your organization has made it big enough to be parodied in a national forum, or be shown on a hit multi-national TV show to be earth’s last defence against alien invasion, then maybe it’s not too bad a problem.

The day started out with welcome and introduction to the conference, with the tagline “Join the Conference”. Word of Mouth Marketing is growing, over the last 5 years WOM has grown 30% annually, to end up at 2007 with a $1 billion spend. Over the next 5 years the annual growth is expected to exceed 30% annually, reaching an annual spend of $4 billion by 2011.

This was swiftly followed by a keynote speech from Joseph Jaffe, CEO & Chief Interrupter of Crayon – author of “Join the Conversation” (one of two free books handed out in the nifty little conference backpack). He uses his title as a conversation starter. “Most of advertising is criminal for lies and misrepresentation” – i.e. smoking. Word of Mouth has been around since we could talk, but the recent growth has been amazing. Use anything to start a conversation. Marketing can be a conversation, in and of itself. It is no longer a spectator sport, you have to participate.

1. Listen
2. Participate
3. Join
4. Catalyze
5. Start talking

How do you seed a new idea to a skeptical and marketing weary universe of influencers? Not all influencers are necessarily original participants. Word of mouth is not bought it is earned.

Don’t

1. Lie and fake it
2. Manipulate the conversation
3. Try to control the conversation – T-mobile sued engadget over their use of the color magenta…
4. Dominate the conversation
5. avoid the conversation

Next up was Jeffrey Graham of the New York Times, whose main point of with the amount spent on Word of Mouth Marketing compared to other forms, WOMM forms the butt crack of advertising.

You can find my writeup of this session over at Search Marketing Gurus.

Following on from this was the first of the breakout sessions. An interesting concept, 12 tables were set up for 6 different topics, with specialists at each table. As each person walked in they were given a starting table, and a suggested route. So I started over at the basic social media table, and headed over to the advanced social media table after 1/2 hour. I didn’t find that these sessions worked all that well, which may have been down to either the moderators, the other participants, or just the fact that we only had 1/2 hour and up to 12 people participating at each table.

The conference didn’t even stop for lunch, once you grabbed your sandwich (assuming you weren’t a vegetarian, although to be fair an hour later they did have a vegetarian option) you went back to the main conference room for a presentation by Judy Stonefield of OPI cosmetics and Fiona Petruiski of SheSpeaks. They discussed how SheSpeaks has a network of 50,000 women that they use as advocates and testing grounds for various products and services, and created a private social network for OPI. On average each member of the network told 10 friends about the OPI product, each of those friends told 4 friends on average, giving a reach of 40 people per network member.

After lunch the interactive case study section of the program began. 3 different nonprofits presented their organizations, and discussed their challenges and goals, each member of the audience then selected one of the nonprofits to help by walking into the room for that particular nonprofit. I went into the room for The Wilderness Society where we brainstormed for the next hour.

Following that we had the last keynote of the day from Carla Hendra of Ogilvy.  She went through a number of case studies, which you can read about over on Search Marketing Gurus, but the big takeaways were the same concepts that have been constantly hammered in throughout the conference.

1. Listen
2. Be transparent
3. Participate

After that we finished up by heading out for more of the breakout sessions. This time it seemed that people had decided to either take advantage of the Miami sun, and headed out to the beaches or pools, as only 6 of the tables were filled. This time I hit the “Buy, Build or Create social communities” session, and the “Reputation Management in Social Communities” session. I have to say that these sessions worked a lot better, and actually left me wishing that both had been longer than 30 minutes, again it could have been the moderators, the rest of the crowd at the table, or maybe just the fact that we’d gone through concept earlier that day and were more used to it.

Thus ended day one of the Womma Wommu conference, more tomorrow.

It is my turn to host the Nonprofit Blog Carnival, so I’ve chosen one of my favorite topics, Social Media.  I’m a big fan of Social Media for nonprofits because I believe that it can radically improve the efficiency and ROI of the marketing program.  True, the direct ROI of Social isn’t as measurable as a Pay Per Click ad, but remember that the investment you make in direct online channels scales up linearly with budget and often has diminishing returns.  Social Media scales with the size of a growing community. It feeds itself and, done right, it has compounding returns.  The Wild Apricot Blog provides more rationale this week in Making the Case for Social Media Marketing .

What drives Social Media success?  Think Outside the Site from The Connection Café does a nice job of setting out a fundamental truth that drives effective social media engagement: It’s not about your Web site.  Getting past “marketer-think” (i.e., “my goal is to drive people to my Web site so that I can talk to them about what is important to me”) is critical.  Marketers must leave the comfort of their own home (The Web Site) and venture out into the communities of others to have conversations that go beyond “one to many” pitches for donations.

One of the interesting places to venture out to is Twitter.  If you don’t *get* Twitter, read Three of the Latest Reasons Why I Love Twitter from Social Butterfly for a good overview and some useful tips.

Harold Jarche writes this week about using Social as a community building tool (and demonstrates that necessity is often the mother of Social Media invention.)  For another good example on how to use Social, take a look at Cox Communications’ Kudzu.com fundraiser, featured this week on The Cause Related Marketing Blog (I love what Cox has done with this.  It is a great example of taking the time to understand what your community wants and how to incentivize them to become content creators.) 

Love Without Boundaries, the winners of the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge also provides an interesting case study on Social.  Frogleap has a nice interview with the folks at LWB on how they did it.

Rachel Happe’s The Struggle to Measure Social Media Effectiveness sets out some of the thorny issues about Social Media measurement.  Attempting to apply old models to things that are new and hard to understand is only human nature.  In my opinion, this is what is happening with attempts to measure Social Media.  Rachel’s post does a nice job of reminding us that the things we already know how to measure are not the things that provide true insight when it comes to Social Media.

Happy reading!  Remember that only the connected will survive…

Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.