Pop-up funding

Pop-up funding campaigns give charities the opportunity to raise money online very quickly, usually based on a live event.

The secret sauce to any great crowdfunding campaign is to set up your strategy and design templates so that you are ready to go live very quickly. The strategy should cover communications messages, creative work, financial targets, a timeframe and a roadmap for the deliverables.

Stories

What you say is as important as why you say it. The reality of running a live campaign is that a tragic event is likely to have happened, so your stories of the event need to have empathy as well as a direct message of support.

As humans, we need to feel an emotional connection to the cause and story-telling for charities is more important than ever. The sometimes cold delivery of the News is now presented in conjunction with stories direct from peoples phones. These can be much more raw and emotional. Finding the balance on your site and feed can tell the story of the event and also help donors understand why your cause could be important to them.

How you share your pop-up campaign is the critical piece. Without impressions (the number of people your content is shown to), there will be no engagement (the number of people who took an action on your content — share, like, comment).

To work out where your audience are, its important to find the insight that tells you how they feel, what they think, what they are interested in. Once you know that, then the right platform will become apparent.

Facebook

Sara Mirone, Marketing Director, discusses how Wegiveit can help charities harness digital technology to generate more funds

Originally published by The Third Sector, April 4, 2017.

We pulled out of the honking pandemonium of morning traffic into the cement schoolyard of Chhotubhai Patel High School. It was only slightly quieter than the street. Hundreds of kids milled about or huddled in small groups, practicing cheers that blended into a rhythmic, unintelligible wall of sound.

Those who weren’t dressed in school uniforms sported tiger T-shirts that proclaimed “LEAVE ME ALONE” in bold type. Photographer Steve Winterand I jumped out of the car: We’d come to film this rally. Kids with painted tiger faces roared at us as we weaved through the crowd.

Shortly, 1,200 students streamed into the streets of the small central Indian city of Chandrapur, halting traffic. They screamed with deafening exuberance, so loud it echoed off the buildings. Save the tiger! Save the forest! Everyone — pedestrians, motorists, store owners — stopped to watch.

Many of the marchers carried signs and banners in English and Hindi that identified their affiliation, Kids for Tigers. These high schoolers are part of a groundswell youth movement that is now more than a million strong across the country. I had chills watching them. Despite the constant, heartbreaking news I hear almost daily about the tiger’s continuing demise, these kids inspired hope.

The program is the brainchild of Bittu Sahgal, a man who fell in love with tigers on a safari to Kanha National Park in 1973. It was the same year Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger to rescue the cat from extinction. Repeated expeditions into India’s national parks turned him into a part-time activist. He used skills he’d gained working in advertising, writing newspaper articles, and campaigning, sometimes successfully, against assaults on the land in key tiger habitats — particularly around India’s nine newly-established tiger reserves. Mines, dams, roads, chemical complexes, and other development were creeping, like mange, into tiger habitat, he said.

A campfire conversation transformed him into one of India’s most influential tiger defenders. In 1980, Sahgal asked Fateh Singh Rathore, the head of Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, how he could help tigers. “Start a wildlife magazine,” Rathore said, “so that city people learn to appreciate wildlife and do less damage!” Sanctuary Asia was born 10 months later, India’s first environmental news magazine, which Sahgal still edits.

Then came Sanctuary Cub, a bi-monthly kid’s magazine, a 16-episode “Project Tiger” TV series, (which was viewed by some 30 million people), and a children’s TV series on conservation. Eventually, Sahgal was posted to high-profile government committees, where he and others who fought to protect natural resources were ignored or summarily dispatched by those pushing for big development projects. “Our advice was found unpalatable,” he said.

To fight his growing cynicism, he turned to India’s youth: In 2000, he launched Kids for Tigers. “They have the greatest legitimacy to ask for a better tomorrow,” he said. “Essentially, we wanted to give the children a voice. We wanted to explain…that you can make a difference.”

The program has created a new generation of tiger advocates through nature walks, educational films, camps, and a conservation agenda that’s been adopted by more than 500 schools in 20 cities. Kids for Tigers started in urban centers — New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore — and then branched out into smaller towns and cities like Chandrapur that border tiger reserves. “We now have a veritable army of young kids,” said Sahgal.

It’s an easy sell. This huge orange-and-black cat is deeply woven into India’s history, religion, and folklore. The Hindu goddess Durga vanquished a monster-demon while astride her ferocious mount, a tiger. Some Indians refer to the tiger as a striped water-god who creates rain and can end drought. The cat is thought to keep nightmares away and to lead lost children to safety. Pulikali dancers in Kerala, along India’s southern coast, paint themselves as tigers for an elaborate harvest festival that celebrates the cat’s power and strength. And the tiger is, after all, India’s national animal.

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We went to St. Gregorios School in Mumbai to film a Kids for Tigers school assembly. There I met 12-year-old Kush Somaiya, who was in full tiger face paint. He told me that a few years ago, before the program took him and his classmates into nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park, he’d spent little time outside of urban areas. I asked him how he liked getting out into the forest.

 

“First, I was not that much into nature,” he said. “But after coming with them I came to know that nature is such a beautiful thing, and what we see in nature is damned unusual and we can’t see it out in normal life or out in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai.”

He paused, then smiled. “The jungle is a gem and the thing that enhances the gem is the tiger. The tiger is the best. I love him!”

This was Sahgal’s goal: To give city kids the opportunity to fall in love with tigers and with nature, and to teach them that we can’t save tigers without saving their home. By preserving the remaining big tracts of forest, wetlands, and jungle that tigers need to survive, he says, we’re giving them space to hunt, find a mate, and enough land to survive catastrophic events, like floods or drought.

But he has a much larger message, one that I watched him deliver before hundreds of middle and high school kids at St. Gregorios. “If you save the tiger, you save the planet — and you save yourselves. And you guys are the voice for tomorrow, so remind the adults that…you don’t want them to destroy your world.”

He gives them a wide ecological view that few of us ever hear. Saving a forest — conservation on a grand scale — has effects that radiate outward with global implications. Those wild lands pull carbon from the atmosphere and slow climate change. They prevent erosion of the rich soil that we need to grow crops. Forests feed water into 600-plus Indian rivers and streams that run through them, watersheds that provide drinking water for millions of people.

By protecting tigers — and the top predators in any food chain — we also save the entire spectrum of life that shares their realm, preserving ecosystems that have been fine-tuned over millennia.

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Kids across India now march in the streets for tiger protection. A rally in New Delhi drew 25,000 children. They influence their parents, and they petition government officials. One year, they collected over two million signatures and delivered a truckload of them to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. “Did we do this so that we would influence the Prime Minister?” Sahgal said. “Perhaps, but the real truth is that everyone who signed that letter stepped over a line. They weren’t sitting on the fence anymore. Those kids came over to our side and said, ‘Yes, we will save the tiger!’” He says they’ll continue to send letters to heads of state and other officials. “I think adults are more difficult to convince than the kids, but we have very determined kids on our side.”

A week after meeting with a delegation of these kids in 2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee stood before India’s National Board of Wildlife. “Our children have woken up; why are we adults all asleep?” he asked.

Sahgal notes that 1,200 teachers are part of what he calls ‘Teachers for Tigers’. “So we have teachers on our side, we have kids on our side, we have parents on our side, we have the media on our side,” he said. “All we need now is to get a few politicians on our side so that they don’t destroy these forests before the kids take over the steering wheel.”

From Google’s innovation time to assessing a senior team’s capability, organisations can do a lot more to embed a digital culture.

Something more fundamental is required. Creating a truly digital culture isn’t just about putting some resources into a Facebook microsite or hiring a community manager to look after your Twitter feed, it’s about looking at how the cream of the digital crop (Google, Facebook, Uber) have disrupted the traditional way of running a business. It’s about learning from those methods and adapting them to suit your cause. Here are a few suggestions.

Encourage innovation

Google is the poster boy here, allowing staff to spend up to 20% of their time on side projects has led to the creation of Gmail, Google Cardboard and, this month, a way to use Google Maps to assess suitability of housing for solar panels.

This kind of thinking can easily be applied to the charity sector. For example, Shelter has recently introduced an innovation labs programmewhere every three months it puts a small, cross-department team together to work on a specific challenge. The programme has already found a number of solutions and is a perfect example of the kind of approach that grew from embracing a digital culture.

Digital is not just about a product or a service — it’s about a new way of doing things.

Enable a collaborative culture

There’s little value in just telling people how digital can improve the way they work — they need to be shown how to do it themselves. Macmillan Cancer Support is training as many staff as possible in the best use of social media. As Amanda Neylon, head of digital, explains: “We’ve trained nearly two thirds of the organisation in social now, so instead of having three people in the social media team, we’ve effectively got 1,000.”

Embrace multiple platforms

Most digital platforms require very little investment yet can offer a simple, cost-effective way of capitalising on your resources and communicating with a new audience. All an organisation has to do is seek out the channels that best fit its needs.

Take the British Heart Foundation, which has created a new revenue stream by opening up an online shop on eBay. This is an organisation that has countless items for sale through its existing offline operation, yet adding a digital channel has enabled the company to reach a wider audience.

Engage end-users

A positive user-experience is essential. The sooner the end user is involved and their feedback taken into account, the better the final product will be.

This kind of approach can lead to outcomes like Jointly, a successful mobile app created by Carers UK that allows people caring for an individual to share information, coordinate rotas, medication lists and more.

Look at the leaders around you

Look at your senior leadership team. When you’re asking a question today, are you asking it differently to how you were 10 years ago? In my opinion, the fallen titans of the commercial world such as IBM or Kodak failed to do that. The failure to accept changes and embrace a new way of working saw younger, more agile companies replace them as the giants of the digital age.

Obviously I’m not suggesting that you immediately cull everyone without a Facebook page from your executive board, or only consider trustees with more than 5,000 Twitter followers. However, I do believe that it is important to be honest about the digital gaps in a charity’s leadership.

original article: https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/sep/11/five-ways-charity-leaders-encourage-innovation by Jonathan Simmons — Chief experience officer at digital agency Zone