nfptweetup

Following Howard Lake’s guest post yesterday, NFPtweetup newcomer Becky Coleman shares her experience:

I’m a relative newcomer to the world of social media; at easyfundraising we started using Facebook and Twitter to communicate with and about our members and causes just over a year ago. It’s been a steep and incredibly rewarding learning curve but I’m aware of the vast potential to do even more.

So being a bit of a newbie and keen to know more, I jumped at the chance to venture down to the big smoke and pick the brains of the terrifically talented social people who organise and attend the #NFPtweetup.

I first heard about the #NFPtweetup last year from Graham Richards and was lucky enough to get a ticket to the first event of 2011, being held at Amnesty International’s HQ in Shoreditch. I had a few specific aims in mind:

1. Get there without getting lost

Didn’t get off to a great start with this one but fortune smiled on me and the first person I asked for directions turned out to be the lovely Lucy from tweetup organisers, beautiful world, who kindly escorted me to Amnesty International – and without laughing at my poor map reading skills either.

2. Make some new friends – and meet some old ones

This turned out much better than aim number one. Within minutes of arriving, I met Janet Stollery of Calvert Trust – a meeting I know I found incredibly useful and I hope she did too.

A brief glance at the name stickers we all wore allowed me to put more faces to names and I was pleased to meet my long-standing ‘virtual’ friend Howard Lake of UK Fundraising in the flesh. I’m happy to report he is every bit as nice in real life!

I was also pleased to make the acquaintance of @ycharity, @chasecare, @thenspcc to name just a few.

3. Learn

The evening was split into two speakers, Jonathan Waddingham from Just Giving and Fiona Mclaren from Amnesty International UK, plus three break-out groups for further discussion and finally a panel debate.

Jon’s talk focussed on donation apps and how fundraisers can make best use of them, while Fiona showed us how Amnesty engaged their supporters to play a part in the Egyptian Crisis.

Both speakers were fantastic and for me I think the most interesting fact of the evening came from Fiona – during the Egyptian Crisis, for the first time, Amnesty recorded more referrals to its site from social media platforms than anywhere else.

I was torn between the three break- out groups and would happily have attended all of them but plumped for Rachel Beer discussing developments in the social world – which ended up ranging from the new updates to Facebook to how choosing an engaging Twitter avatar is not as easy as it seems!

Lastly the panel debate – the main focus was whether fundraising via social platforms could be classed as ‘slacktivism’, the general consensus being ‘no – any action taken by a fundraiser or supporter is valid and useful in its right’.

4. Be inspired

Well the event certainly succeeded on this point too. It was hugely enjoyable as well as being massively stimulating and I’ve taken so many ideas away with me that will enable us to help our causes do and raise more.

Throughout the evening, live streaming of tweets tagged #NFPtweetup kept the discussion lively but this one from Chance UK really stood out for me. Well said.

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Following yesterday’s agenda, you might have noticed Wednesday’s NFPtweetup is all about integrated campaigning and fundraising.

We’ll hear from Adrian Cockle, and learn how WWF-UK turned a tweet into a roar. We’ll also hear from Fiona McLaren and see how Amnesty International UK responded online to the protests in Egypt in recent weeks – including crisis mode stats (!)

Later in the evening, the panel debate will begin to explore some of the questions below – as well as bring the discussion to the floor:

• The challenges and opportunities of integrating campaigning and fundraising
• Has social media/the social web fundamentally changed campaigning and activism? Does their existence make charities’ jobs easier or have they encouraged ‘slactivism’ and made it harder to generate meaningful/long-term engagement?
• Do donors/fundraisers and campaigners have different preferences and demographics?  Should we expect supporters that donate to become activists or campaigners or vice versa?

If there is something you’d like us to explore further, please let us know: comment below, tweet @NFPtweetup, or wave at the person with the microphone tomorrow night!

See you tomorrow,

Teri

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Despite being in full NFPtweetup mode for at least two weeks,  I’m still slightly in shock that the next event is just two days away… and tweeted as much just for good measure.

This Wednesday will be NFPtweetup’s tenth event (!) and will focus on integrated campaigning and fundraising.

Agenda for the night is as follows:

• 17:30 – 18:15  Arriving/registering/networking, drinks and nibbles
• 18:15 – 18:20  Introduction
• 18:20 – 18:45  Adrian Cockle, Head of Online, WWF UK: Tweeting and roaring: joined up campaigning
• 18:45 – 19:10  Fiona McLaren, Online Communities Editor, Amnesty International UK: Examining online activity and social media during the recent protests in Egypt
• 19:10 – 19:50  Break out groups
• 19:50 – 20:20  Panel debate: integrated campaigning and fundraising, including Adrian Cockle, Fiona McLaren, Kate Turner, Head of Communications and Campaigns at Merlin, Jonathan Waddingham, Product Manager at JustGiving and Rachel Beer, founding partner at beautiful world
• 20:20 – 20:30 Wrap up (and off to Bar Music Hall for those who would like to join)

We’ll also have a few NFPtweetup goodies, courtesy of Pixel Philosophy who are co-sponsoring this event. To all those people who were too polite to take mugs last time – these are for you!

Almost counting down the hours now…

See you Wednesday,

Teri

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So charity tickets have all gone! I think the first 50 tickets went in under 40 minutes… surely that’s got to another NFPtweetup record?

The NFPtweetup team is now doing everything we can to make the next event just as fun and as memorable as the last, but in the mean time I thought we’d share a little sneak preview. Big thanks in advance to Amnesty International UK for allowing us to use its venue for the evening.

To all those who suggested NFPtweetup needed a bigger boat, it looks like we’ve got one…

If anyone missed break out groups at our birthday event, fear not. You might even get your own seat!

Discussing all important seating plans… and where to put refreshments, of course.

If you didn’t manage to get a ticket do let us know and we can add you to the waiting list. If you can no longer make it, please let us know so we can allocate your ticket to someone else – thanks! Just email NFPtweetup at hellobeautifulworld dot com, or tweet @NFPtweetup.

Can’t wait to see you there,

Teri

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I wanted to produce a blog post after this event because I don’t normally manage it and because this event was really special – in that it marked two years to the day that the very first NFPtweetup was held.

It was also special because there was such a positive buzz about the evening – more than ever before, people seemed to really be enjoying themselves; having fun, even. And it wasn’t just because of the booze.

I was absolutely delighted when I read this blog post from Paul de Gregorio on Thursday, partly because it is it so lovely, but mostly because it articulates so clearly what I set out to achieve with NFPtweetup and, in doing so, proves that actually comes across in the experience:

The deal is that if you go with a friendly, co-operative and sharing attitude you can leave with lots of new ideas, a lot of inspiration and some new friends … It has to be the most important get together of non-profit sector people in the UK… The star of the show is the work, the ideas and the community. So it’s a format and ethos that really challenges the traditional fundraising conferences and seminars that we go to. This is an exciting step forward and for me mirrors the impact of social media in society by giving everyone in the room a voice, no sit down, turn off your mobile and listen to the person on stage go through 60 slides in 90 minutes at NFPtweetup!

Thanks again for the lovely post, Paul – it hits the nail on the head, I think.

NFPtweetups are fun because of the people that come to them – people that opt to come after their working day has finished. They do it, not because their line manager has sent them, or to get out of the office for the day, but because they are passionate about their work and always striving to be better. They’re the ones that aren’t watching the clock, waiting to leave the office at 5pm so they can go and do something more interesting. They are the people that want to drive forward the new ideas that make the world a better place and will do whatever it takes to make them happen. They are excited – not scared – about the possibilities emerging media have to further the missions of the organisations they work for. And they come together at this event to discover how other people like them have managed to push this agenda in their roles; to find out what worked, what didn’t, what persuaded the board, what produced the best ROI, and what’s next?

It’s peer-to-peer support at its very best. No one is showing off here – just offering mutual support and encouragement. In fact, one of the things that’s so rare about NFPtweetup is that the charities that present are happy to say, ‘we tried this and it didn’t work’, in the hope that others can learn from their experiments and avoid the same pitfalls. It’s a bit different from most other conferences, where you only hear about the successful campaigns – which is a total misrepresentation of reality, really, isn’t it?

Of course, best practice case studies and success stories are really useful, and NFPtweetup has a more than equal share of those, but they are interrogated both by the people presenting them, and the people listening to them, who are all asking questions like, ‘how could this be made better?’, ‘why did it work?’, ‘would it work for all charities or does it rely on a high brand awareness?’, ‘how sustainable is this approach?’… and so on.

NFPtweetup has always been about so much more than a meet up about social media. It set out to make it easier for charities to share with each other, to learn about new trends and developments in media – even to create new trends in the way they are used by charities. But, most of all, it set out to encourage new ways of thinking and working that are apace with incredible rate of change in technology ‘these days’, to give people the confidence to challenge convention and innovate from an informed perspective, and to feel how much of a powerful role they can all have in this amazing sector, if they choose to.

I want to thank all of the people who have come along to the events and helped to make NFPtweetup what it is today. Particular thanks goes to those who have presented, sponsored, provided a venue, blogged, tweeted, reported, volunteered, acted as a sounding board, facilitated workshops and discussion groups, many of them having been supportive from the beginning:

JustGiving, Jonathan Waddingham, Steve Bridger, Paul Henderson, Howard Lake, Amy Sample Ward, Jacqui O’Beirne, Alex Goldstein, Leah Williams, Paul Webster, Bertie Bosredon, Christina McGill, Steven Buckley.

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Many in the sector still seem to doubt that social media can be used for fundraising – in large part because there are so few examples of charities having tried – so we’re really lucky that Jacqui O’Beirne of Dogs Trust will be sharing the results of Dogs Trust’s Twibbon fundraising experiment at next week’s NFPtweetup. In our third blog post to warm up for the event, Jacqui gives us a sneak preview of what she’ll be sharing:

Dogs Trust, as most of you know, are sometimes heralded as the ‘best practice’ for NFP social media, and while we love that tag there was always a missing element for us that niggled – we never raised any money. We rehomed loads of dogs, which is our charity aim, but we never had a figure in our income column come month end.

We went into social media as a communications tool, not a fundraising one, but sitting in department of 30 others who are raising money made us feel a bit inferior.

So, never ones to pass up an opportunity, when JustGiving and Twibbon approached us about being their guinea pig for a product they were launching how could we say no?!

At next week’s NFPtweetup I’ll be sharing the results and learnings from our Valentines Day Twibbon Experiment, as well as answering any questions you may have about our work online.

See you all there!

Jacqui

Digital Marketing Manager
Dogs Trust
@jacquiobeirne @dogstrust

Originally posted:

June 5, 2010 on the beautiful world blog

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We had a fantastic 6th NFPtweetup at Breast Cancer Care last Thursday (check our posterous for the briefest summary).  So, before the night’s memories and #NFPtweetup mentions fade, I thought I’d try to capture the essence of it here:

The 6th event felt like it began long before it did, with an outpouring of excitement via Twitter as people made their way to the venue and those who could not attend in person expressing their disappointment in 140 characters.

After the t-shirt competition winners, @PontoonDock, @amyrsward, @HaveFunDoGood and special prize winner @RochelleDancel received their t-shirts, the event carried on with three great presentations:

UNICEF: Charlie Simpson – A media sensation

UNICEF were looking for a positive, UK based, Haiti appeal fundraising story to engage with supporters through the media. After coming across Charlie Simpson’s tale, they promoted his story through the press. What UNICEF wasn’t expecting, was how the story would then grow into a worldwide phenomenon.

The ‘Charlie Simpson effect’:
•    Caused UNICEF UK’s web traffic to go off the charts after press coverage
•    Was responsible for 30% of UNICEF’s Haiti coverage
•    Galvanised people to support a 7-year old boy to an unprecedented degree, with donations amounting over £208,000 to date
•    Inspired many to come up with their own fundraising initiatives for Haiti – fundraising enquiries went from about 4 a day to 50 a day

Once they realised the scale of its impact, UNICEF made use of the opportunity to get other people fundraising. UNICEF attributed the viral success of Charlie’s story to its authenticity; although @citizensheep pointed out that such fundraising stories also need to tug at the heartstrings in the first place; being a cute kid on a bike certainly helped a lot.

UNICEF’s impressive graphs illustrated the tipping point where Charlie’s fundraiser transformed from local success into global phenomenon. However, the biggest lesson we took from the presentation is when opportunity strikes, be prepared to take advantage of it quickly. You can’t predict when your communication will go viral online, so be ready with all available resources to ride the momentum of a wonderful opportunity.

UNICEF was also kind enough to share that, of their top referring sites during the ‘peak Charlie Simpson period (20 – 30 Jan)’ was Facebook, which accounted for 17% of referrals.  Twitter accounted for just 0.3% of click-throughs – which is clearly not the whole picture in terms of the contribution it will have made.  It was certainly considerably overshadowed by Facebook though, which isn’t really surprising when you compare the difference between user numbers.

British Red Cross and Merlin: Impact of social media on fundraising for Haiti

This joint presentation by British Red Cross and Merlin demonstrated how a larger and smaller charity used social media in an emergency response.  They focused on their Twitter use to illustrate social media upsides and downsides in their Haiti fundraising communication.

According to both charities, social media allows for immediate, high reach, cost-effective and personal engagement. Because it can be done anywhere, people are able to receive updates from locals and aid workers on the ground. This instant spreading of emotional reaction and updates on their progress makes social media incredibly effective in an emergency appeal. Responding to positive and negative comments was essential in their social media use and they felt their use of social media had resulted in much greater levels of brand awareness.

For British Red Cross and Merlin, the downsides of social media engagement include the lack of direct control over what others say about their charities. To protect their brands, both charities view it necessary to monitor and manage comments, which made it time consuming. They also said that the fundraising income generated from social media channels is still minute compared to traditional channels, but that it was too early to expect more.

Some attendees like @calemox and @watfordgap saw the downsides not as weaknesses, but as opportunities. While charities can’t control what people say about them on social media, they are able to nip rumours in the bud at a speed that is very hard to do offline. Social media channels may not have produced spectacular results in terms of fundraising income – yet – but they are fantastic tools when it comes to driving traffic towards charities’ websites.

One of the final slides covered social media management within both charities. Essentially, who’s responsible for ‘doing’ social media is less about which department’s remit it falls under. More important is that whoever does it is actually communicating with people. The key word, as always, is engagement.

Whizz-Kidz: Measuring Social Media Metrics

Last but by no means least, Whizz-Kidz’s Rob Dyson combined honesty and humour for his presentation on social media metrics. Taking us through his journey exploring various free-to-use social media measurement tools, Rob encouraged us to take into account their pluses and minuses to help the other charities attending to figure out what might work for them. Other attendees chipped in with other measurement tools worth trying (also see JustGiving’s notes from the 6th NFPtweetup).

For Whizz-Kidz, Rob monitors social media mentions. This enabled him to identify case studies, as well as people to engage in conversation with – who may or may not be Whizz-Kidz supporters. He suggested spreading the conversations across different networks, and to generate interest for your cause by making the conversations relevant to different audiences in different places.

In Rob’s conclusion, he talked about being selective about what you measure. Learn what’s important for your social media measurement as you go along.

We know that simply being able to measure something isn’t always the same as it being worthwhile, and that the real question is what, within the range of metrics, are the important ones to measure?  Without knowing what you’re trying to achieve, it’s difficult to identify what counts as success – so our advice is always to start with your charity’s or department’s strategic objectives when deciding which activities are important and always to refer measurement back to these objectives, to decide whether you are generating value for your organisation.

Rob also said he believes it’s important not to get hung up on ‘strategy’, since the fluid nature of social media makes communication an art more than an exact science (do you agree?).  For those who are trying to get management buy-in for using social media, Rob’s tip is to keep a record of your social media successes in order to evidence its impact to senior management – which sounded like good advice to us.

The evening came to a close with the launch of Becauseitsgood.org – a third sector community blog started by Enable Interactive, with the aim of encouraging those working in digital communication for the third sector to share ideas and insights to improve the way digital is being used.

Everyone at the 6th NFPtweetup took valuable lessons from the presentations with them and those who were able to stay longer extended their night at the Lord Nelson with conversations probably best left out of this blogpost!  We don’t think we’ve ever seen that many people from so many charities in one pub and it was a lot of fun.

I reckon the 6th NFPtweetup might have been the best one ever – despite a slightly more formal structure than usual.  It’s so successful because it’s so genuinely collaborative.  It takes the efforts of a lot of different people to make it work – the team at beautiful world, sponsorship from Just Giving and, for this event, Enable Interactive, too, Breast Cancer Care for providing the venue, the lovely speakers with their great presentations, as well as all of the attendees in person at the event and online, both sharing thoughts via Twitter. Together, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.

Thanks to everyone who made the 6th NFPtweetup a fantastic event. We’re counting on all of you to help us make the 7th NFPtweetup even better – so, if you came along, or followed online, please let us know what you thought by completing our short survey.

Rebekah

P.S. Check out our Flickr gallery to see some photos from the night.

Originally posted:

March 8, 2010 on the beautiful world blog

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