nfptweetup

We’re busy preparing for tonight’s NFPtweetup event but thought we’d take a short break to share our next session preview from Scott Mullins, Digital Media Officer at The British Heart Foundation:

Every year in the UK, 27,000 people die from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. That means a population roughly equal to that of Gibraltar collapses, stops breathing normally and dies because their heart has stopped working properly. More worryingly, only 1 in 10 survive a cardiac arrest when they’re out of hospital.

Part of the problem is not enough bystanders are stepping in to help. Our survey found have-a-go heroes were put off because they didn’t know anything about CPR; they were worried about getting sued; and were anxious about giving the kiss of life.

So how did we go about solving a problem like out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rates?

Well, sometimes to go forwards you have to take two steps back. We stripped the life-saving message back to its simplest form: hands-only CPR. We then built a funny, relevant and shareable campaign with Hands-only at its core and released it to our audiences before it was on TV.

Join me and couple of chums and we’ll endeavour to tell you a little bit about how Vinnie Jones and our campaign managed to clock up one million YouTube views in 5 days and two million YouTube views in just over a month.

And why it’s already making a difference and saving people’s lives.

In the first of our session previews we hear from Matt Collins, Head of Marketing at Beatbullying, as he introduces the world’s first global online march…

To mark Anti-Bullying Week, Beatbullying led the first digital demonstration against bullying to the doors of No.10.

Thousands of children and adults created colourful avatars at www.beatbullying.org/bigmarch, spent time being educated and entertained in the virtual Big March Park, and set off across the websites of some the UK’s biggest companies and charities to call on the UK government to protect children from bullying.

We then set ourselves the challenge of topping the Big March. The natural next step was to take the movement against bullying to the global stage. This time, we’re calling upon the United Nations to enshrine explicitly in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: “The right of every child to be safe from bullying, violence and the fear of violence by their peers as well as from abuse by adults.”

So thousands of cute little avatars, including ones for Stephen Fry, Pixie Lott and Desmond Tutu, will cross the websites of MTV, Girlguiding UK, and other charities and corporates from all over the world. We’ve harnessed the incredible power of the internet to join bring children’s rights organisations from Canada, Australia and beyond together in the fight for children’s rights.

How did we do it? Is there still time to join? And can you get a personalised avatar of your own done? Look forward to telling you on the 16th…

We hear about a lot of great campaigns at NFPtweetup events, but we felt it was really about time that we debated some of the big issues, too.  So we’re very excited to announce that NFPtweetup 14 will close with a panel debate on the challenges facing the sector and the role digital media could play in meeting these.

The panel will feature:

• Zoe Amar, Head of Marketing and Business Development at Lasa
• Damien Austin-Walker, Head of Digital at vInspired
• Bertie Bosrédon, Assistant Director of Services (Information & Multimedia) at Breast Cancer Care
• Emma Malcolm, Chief Executive at Prostate Action

And will be Chaired by Rachel Beer, Founding Partner at beautiful world

In preparation for the debate, we are asking folks working at charities and nonprofit orgs to complete this short survey on your charity’s use of digital media.  We will share the results and use them as a basis for discussion.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Take part in the survey

The cake and badges have arrived and we’re just one sleep away from celebrating NFPtweetup’s third birthday – I can’t wait!

See you there,

Teri

Next up in our series of session previews is Joseph Freeman, Digital Community Executive at Diabetes UK, as he returns to tell us more about the ‘hideous piece of work’ Active Fat…

At last November’s NFPtweetup I (along with Laila, then of BHF fame but also on the bill at this tweetup) talked about the collaborative project between the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK called Active Fat. We shared our experiences of these three charities working together to combine their powers for the greater good. And it worked.

It worked so well that we thought we’d do it again for a second year – but bigger and better. More social media. Better calls to action. More coverage. But with the same, nasty Active Fat character (“active fat”, for those not in the know, is the fat the gathers around your waist that can lead to cancer, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes – all pretty frightening and a very good reason for us to all work together to raise awareness).

Armed with a fancy new website, new video and a Twitter account take-over, we talked to our combined followers across social media (and even in “traditional” press!) about how to fight off active fat. And it was fun, even with the more serious undertones of improving the health of the nation.

So how did we do? What challenges did we face? Will we get someone to dress up as the Active Fat character to talk at NFPtweetup*?

We look forward to telling you all about it…

Joe Freeman – @Diabetes UK (with Roberto Kussabi, @theBHF, and Aaron Eccles, @CR_UK)

*No one will be dressed as the Active Fat character. Sorry. Although for a pint (or donation, I guess) one of us will do his voice.

Is anyone else willing to chip in to experience this? I might do a whip round with a collection tin to see if we can make this happen!

Teri

So, NFPtweetup turns three this Thursday but we’re already celebrating with session previews from all our speakers. First up is Rob Dyson, PR & Online Engagement Manager at Whizz-Kidz…

During party conference season, we’re always looking for new ways for our young people to engage with MPs and decision makers at Whizz-Kidz. This year we decided to do something a little different, and turned two of our young ambassadors into ‘interviewers’ using Audioboo, at the Labour and Conservative Conferences.

Audioboo is a web and smartphone based application that allows you to record five minutes of audio, attach a photograph and location data, and upload instantaneously to the web to share with the world.

Our Public Affairs Manager set up lunchtime meetings with as many MPs as possible – we also knew we’d be able to doorstep a few. After talking about the work we do, our two intrepid reporters - Jamie Green and Max Sampson, both 17 and wheelchair users – disarmed them by asking a few quick fire and fun questions using Audioboo.

All the interviewees, which included MPs and MSPs, as well as big-hitting journalists like Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, and Sky’s Adam Boulton, took the audioboos in good humour. Some were very candid, and many tweeted their followers that they had met us; helping to raise awareness of our work.

I hoped for some nice content we could share on our website and social media – but when I pitched the set of 20 ‘boos to Clare Horton at Society Guardian, one interview with Ken Livingstone captured her imagination. We also picked up interest in the Diary column of Scottish current affairs magazine, Holyrood.

The social media-based project promoted Whizz-Kidz’s ethos; it was carried out by young disabled people themselves, and the light-hearted questions (including, ‘what’s on your iPod?’ Have you been to Benidorm?’ ‘Do you ever Google yourself?’) played with Whizz-Kidz’s particular brand of fun, friendship – and sometimes mischief. Our approach made the politicians and news journalists appear more ‘human’ than they ordinarily come across (mostly).

I’m particularly proud to be able to say that last week Whizz-Kidz won the Party Conference Innovation award at the Public Affairs News Awards; in front of a starry audience of MPs and sector professionals in public affairs, government relations, policy and communications.

It’s important to us that a young person and user of our services was creating this content, and contributing to its success. Beneficiary becomes producer and curator; this is an empowering combination. The media coverage we secured off the back of the ‘boos – and the recognition of an award – were the cherry on the cake.

Want to know more? I’ll be presenting on this (now award-winning) piece of work, and talking about how to engage your charity’s users as ‘producers’ at the next NFPtweetup on 24 November 2011.

In the meantime, you can listen to all of our winning ‘boo interviews on Whizz-Kidz’s audioboo channel: http://audioboo.fm/Whizz-Kidz.

We’re really looking forward to seeing everyone on Thursday. If you weren’t able to get a ticket this time round, however, the event will be live streamed on the NFPtweetup Facebook page and follow the hashtag #NFPtweetup on Twitter for tweets throughout the evening.

See you soon,

Teri

We want to say thank you to everyone who came to NFPtweetup 12 and for making it such an enjoyable event. We feel lucky that not only did we have a brilliant turn out of people, but that those people asked some really insightful questions that helped to steer some fascinating breakout sessions. We’re excited that around 1200 #NFPtweetup tweets were sent on the night; lots of questions, comments and love!

Thanks also to Amnesty International UK for agreeing to host the event again and being really helpful throughout the whole thing and thanks to JustGiving and Facebook for sponsoring, making the event possible.

As is tradition, below are a few of our favourite tweets:

Not that this was an exhaustive list of our favourites. We wanted to embed our Storify of the event into this post but it was too crammed full of lovely and interesting tweets for this short blog. I wouldn’t hope for us to be able to fit even a summary of the all of the great tweets that were sent into one little blog post anyway.

We really do hope that you can all join us for cake, party hats (and maybe a few third sector digital presentations) on our third birthday event on November 24th. Watch this space for more information or tweet us any ideas you have for hosts or presenters for future events.

Lucy J

P.S. If you haven’t had a chance to fill in our short survey, please do so we can use everyone’s feedback to make the next event even better!

Next up in our series of guest posts is Paul de Gregorio, as he shares what inspired him about our latest event – and more importantly why he is now just points away from a Wookie!

I went to another fantastic NFPtweetup last night. Run and organised by the lovely people at beautiful world it’s an event that continues to motivate and inspire me. I just love the fact that third sector people of all types (from coders through to direct marketers) get together once a quarter, to learn, share, chat, drink and think together in such a relaxed and informal way.

What really inspired me last night was James Sadri from Greenpeace UK’s presentation on the recent Volkswagen campaign; you just have to check it out if you’re not aware of it.

 

The campaign objective is for VW to turn away from the Dark Side by dropping their opposition of key environmental laws.

James’ presentation was brilliant, a perfect NFPtweetup presentation because he delivered it with a smile, shared lots with us all and was so obviously in love with and passionate about his job.

But what really got me thinking was a fantastic aspect of the campaign that was created to incentivise people to spread the word and get others to sign up.

In the hope that you might win a limited edition T-shirt, those who sign up to the campaign can embark on Jedi training. Basically you sign up, you register, and you’re given a personal page and URL. Then of course you are asked to spread the word into your own social networks. Greenpeace want to harness the power of your referral to get your friends and contacts to sign up and spread the word, you know the theory here.

But you get given points, one for every view of your personal page and five for every person who signs up to the campaign from your page. The more points you are given, the further along the Jedi training path you go. Starting as an Ewok the goal is to unlock the T-Shirt once you have accumulated 1,500 points. Genius.

James went on to describe the lengths that people have gone to in order to further their path to the T-Shirt. My favourite was the guy who set up a blog claiming to know how to hack the page and get the T-Shirt, when you click on the link for the way to do it; you of course end up on his personal page and give him an extra point!

So I had to give it a go. I got home, registered and set up my own page. So far I’ve progressed from Ewok to Princess Leia and just unlocked Jedi Mind Tricks next stop is to unlock the Wookie at 100 points. Have a look here to see what I’m on about.  (And yes, that was a shameless attempt to get another page view.)

I loved pretty much everything about the campaign, but think that this idea is brilliant. We can argue if all traffic is good traffic, but in this case putting the message in front of many people as possible seems like a decent outcome.

On a personal level it’s reminded me of how brilliant Greenpeace can be, and reminded me to set up that Direct Debit I keep on thinking about.

 

Originally posted on Paul’s blog.

In the first of our series of guest posts after NFPtweetup 12 last night, we hear from Lisa Hopkins as she shares her ‘view from a newbie’:

I was thrilled and delighted to be welcomed to last night’s 12th NFPtweetup.  Friends in the sector had long spoken highly of this paradise for passionate and enthusiastic people working in the charity / NFP sector to come together and share ideas.  Having followed the event on Twitter in the past I was intrigued to go along myself and see what it was all about.

I don’t know what I expected, really, but if I think about it, I thought it would have more of a casual, coffee morning vibe…  Instead what I found was a fabulous lecture theatre space full of buzzy charity and digital people, excitedly waiting for the presentations to start.

It was a little bit daunting, actually!  But spotting the snacks and drinks at the back gave me a reason to stride into the mix and start rubbing shoulders.  It was definitely a strange experience to keep seeing people I recognised and trying to place them – when I had never met them in real-life, just on Twitter.  Once I was over that small oddity I grabbed a glass of wine and settled in for the presentations.

My day job is in fundraising but my career has thus far been distinctly un-digital – but I have a burgeoning interest in digital and social media, so I was very excited to hear about something very different to my day-to-day.  The three speakers were clearly well-prepared and knowledgable about their topics and the whole event struck the perfect balance between professionally run and fun to attend.

When the breakout groups were announced I didn’t hesitate to join James Sadri’s session to talk some more about Greenpeace’s VW Darkside campaign.  For me, talking about this kind of campaigning – rather than direct fundraising – was a bit of a revelation.  I’m so used to measurable KPIs – return on investment, pledge rates, average values – so a campaign with no clear end date and that thinks about success in such different terms, was really inspiring to me.  And being in a room full of friendly people keen to share thoughts and opinions was brilliant.

I really wanted to be actively involved in tweeting about the event as well as participating and that proved a challenge – multitasking perhaps something I could refine a little! – but it was worth it as hearing in the moment what other people are thinking about what’s being presented added another dimension again.

On every level I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and found a lot of food for thought.  If I could do one thing differently I think I would have forced myself out of my comfort zone and spoken to more new people – so my tip to anyone reading this ahead of the event is to just talk to people.  Say hello, engage and interact.  Those strangers I did converse with proved to be friendly, funny and welcoming and I look forward to hearing more from them in the future – both on Twitter and hopefully in real life too!

I must say a massive “thank you” to Rachel and Teri for organising such a fabulously geeky (in the BEST way) and fascinating event, and I definitely look forward to attending more in the future.

When Giv2.it launched in July we were excited that there seemed to be an easy answer to Twitter giving – and we’re still excited. Simon Painter, creator of Giv2.it, will be joining us for NFPtweetup 12  tonight (in a manner of speaking) to tell us a bit more about it. Here’s what he has to say:

Making giving money to charity on Twitter easy

When we started up the Ragabonds online community we wanted to carry on doing what we enjoyed: standing on street corners persuading the public to part with their loose change. We have since raised nearly half a million pounds a few pence at a time. Moving that process online is the challenge that faces anyone wanting to get involved in online ‘microdonations’ and it was that challenge that led to the creation of Giv2.it, a Twitter based microdonation system using the JustGiving API suite.

There’s no lengthy process for signup and no one is asking for commitment. I wanted to try to create something to take that to Twitter, because I believe that it currently has no serious proposition for instant giving.

Giv2.it is pretty niche, remember there are more farmers on Facebook than users on Twitter, but it gives every charity who wants to opt in the ability to solicit micro donations quickly and easily through Twitter without asking the donors to move out of Twitter into another medium.

Read more from Simon about how Giv2.it works on the JustGiving blog.