We are pleased to announce the launch of the Brick Factory, a Washington, DC-based digital agency founded by former employees of The Bivings Group. You can read the details of the transition here.

As a result of the change, The Bivings Report will no longer be updated, although we intend to keep the site up as an archive of the great content that has been produced over the years.  To read new entries, please check out the Brick Factory blog, Brick by Brick.

From a fundraising perspective, one of the great successes of the last few years has been charity: water.  In five years the organization has evolved from a lean startup charity into a fundraising juggernaut that has raised millions online and provided potable water to an estimated two million people. 

The organization just rolled out its annual September campaign, which is their big fundraising push each year.  While charity: water clearly has more resources at its disposal than the average non-profit at this point, the fundamental set up of the campaign is something that any organization should be able to replicate. 

(1) Set a goal and a timeline.

The goal of this year’s September campaign is to raise $1,200,000 by the end of September.  On their site they include a real-time counter showing their progress in the campaign.

Setting clear goals like this and showing progress helps to make donors feel invested in the campaign and creates a sense of community.

(2) Tell tell people where the money will go. 

The money raised for the September campaign will be used to purchase a drilling rig that will help provide potable drinking water to 40,000 people a year.  charity:water provides a detailed breakdown of how the rig will make an impact and how the money that is raised will be spent.  People are more likely to donate if they know exactly how the money they give will be used.

(3) Use matching.

If charity: water reaches its goal, a donor has agreed to match the $1,200,000 and purchase a second rig for the organization.  For donors, this essentially means that their donation will be doubled.  I know this isn’t a tactic everyone can use.  However I would advise non-profits to pitch the concept to large supporters. 

(4) Use video to mobilize.

charity: water has been a pioneer in the use of online video to mobilize.  This years September campaign video (embedded below) is fantastic. 

After watching that video, it is hard not to be inspired to pull out your credit card and make a donation.  Video can inspire emotion in a way that straight text can’t.

(5) Don’t just encourage people to donate, encourage them to fundraise.  

Economic times are tough, so there is only so much the average person can give to an organization like charity: water.  In an effort to give people ways to help beyond donating, charity: water has a robust online fundraising system that allows people to tap into their own networks to help charity: water reach its goal.  For a long time, this took the form of encouraging supporters to ask friends and family to donate to charity: water in lieu of birthday gifts.  While charity: water appears to have built their own custom fundraising system, tools such as Crowdrise and Rally provide inexpensive ways for organizations to launch similar fundraising campaigns.

Your most passionate supporters want to help you.  Provide them with ways to.

Bianchini Launches Mightybell To Harness The Power Of Baby Steps

Mightybell looks like a really intriguing new online service, and given the team behind it will definitely be worth watching.  Beyond the obvious self help style applications, I could see political and public affairs organizations using the service to help educate about issues or mobilize supporters to a campaign or cause. 

As a sports fan and iPhone user, one of the sites I frequently access on my phone is ESPN.com.  ESPN recently launched a new mobile site for iPhones, which is more robust and app-like than just about any mobile site I’ve seen.  As a reference point, below are screenshots of the ESPN mobile site in 2008 and today.

While they may not look that different superficially, the site today is much more sophisticated and user friendly than it was in 2008.  It is all about the details:

• The new ESPN mobile site has become much more video-focused the last few years.  As you browse the site just about every section has the option to play video on your phone.
• In 2008, the ESPN site just featured one top story.  Now the mobile site has a Top Story slider that allows you to cycle through articles in a manner similar to the experience on www.espn.com. 
• The mobile sites navigation system has been optimized to work really well for touch screens.  In 2008 it was a bit mysterious.
• The search is featured prominently on the site today, and the results you get when searching by topic focus on delivering the most timely information first.
• The MyESPN area allows you to customize the headlines you see by team/sport, allowing easy access to the topics you care about.

ESPN has worked hard to create a thoughtful mobile experience that focuses on getting users to the content they need without any tension.  For me, the simplicity and focus on content of the ESPN mobile site is a not reprieve from the clutter that you find on ESPN.com and other news sites. 

So how important is the debt ceiling crisis?  So important it has gotten the Obama team to actually use Twitter.  I’m only sort of kidding. 

It is understood that the 2008 Obama campaign was the most successful digital campaign ever.   Given how well run it was, it always seemed strange to me that they never really did much on Twitter.  They built a massive following to be sure (over 9 million followers at last count), but the updates have typically been fluffy.  Lots of stuff about President Obama’s travel schedule, what he was eating and the game he was watching at a given moment. 

The last few months things seem to have changed, at least to me.  Team Obama has started playing offense on Twitter.  President Obama did a Twitter-centric town hall back in early July.  The Office of the Vice President joined Twitter.  And most importantly, Team Obama has started using the account to promote his agenda, aggressively.  As you’ll see below, throughout the day today  President Obama has been using Twitter to mobilize followers to pressure specific legislators in key states in support ofa  debt ceiling compromise.  Below is a sample. 

Will it help?  Who knows.  But I think the aggressiveness being shown is a clear sign of how important the debt ceiling negotiation is to President Obama (and the country).  They are attempting to mobilize support using any means necessary. 

Update: Mashable has an article with more details about this.  The Obama campaign ended up sending more than 100 tweets targeting Republicans in all 50 states.  According to Mashable they lost 14,000 followers in the process.  I think it would have been more effective if they had been a bit more targeted.  Sending that many tweets in that short of a timeframe is annoying to followers and comes off as a tad desperate.

Like many, I’ve spent the past few weeks playing around with the new social network Google+.  The most interesting aspect of Google+ is Circles, the tool for organizing contacts (social graph) on the network.  Here’s a quick video overview:

So why does Circles matter?  It differentiates Google+ from Twitter and Facebook.

On Facebook, to have a relationship with someone you both have to opt in.  You have to become “friends”.  Due to this restriction, most interactions on Facebook are private.

On Twitter, you follow people and people follow you.  While there are ways to figure out if someone reciprocates your follow, it isn’t critical to the use of the service.  The primary point of Twitter is to find interesting people to follow.  The service is primarily public.

With Circles, Google+ has sort of split the difference between Facebook (private) and Twitter (public).  They have left it to users to decide how they want to use the service.

When you decide to add a contact on Google+, you are automatically asked to put the contact in a circle.  By default, Google has a a few predefined circles.  Some of the predefined circles imply intimacy (Family, Friends), while others imply only loose connections (Following, Acquaintance).  You can also create custom circles.

When posting an update, you decide which of your circles to share information with.   And that’s it.

This is a really elegant solution for a number of reasons:

• Adding someone to a circle is less of a commitment than adding someone as a friend on Facebook. Circles just doesn’t have the drama associated with Facebook “friendships”.  At the same time, the inclusion by default of circles such as Family and Friends makes it possible for adding someone to to be more of a commitment than simply following someone on Twitter.
• Circles lets you define your relationship with someone in private. While you are notified when you are added to a circle by another user, you have no idea which particularly circle you are included in.  So someone that has added me to a circle called “BFF” will never know if I’ve only added them to a general circle called ‘Following”.  While this sort of grouping is possible to do in Facebook, it is not nearly as fundamental to the experience as it is with Google+.
• Circles forces you to categorize contacts. To add a contact, you have to put them into a circle.  You have to make a choice. This requirement forces you to think through how you want to categorize your contacts, which ultimately makes you think through how you want to use the service.

As a result of all of this, Circles allows people to use the service publicly, privately or through some hybrid model determined by the user.  Scoble can use the service to amass 40,000+ followers in a week while at the same time my college buddy can use it to post photos from his wedding only viewable to three people.

The sharing flexibility of Google+ allows the service to fill a nice little void between Twitter (public) and Facebook (private). If Google+ succeeds, I think it will largely be because of the elegance and flexibility of Circles.

What do you think?

We’re big believers in the importance of usability at The Bivings Group.  Online, usability is branding.  If your site is hard to use, visitors will lose patience and take their eyeballs elsewhere.  It is just common sense really. 

Inevitably, usability is about the details.  It isn’t one big thing, but tens or hundreds of little things.

Today, I came across a good example of a frustrating UI mistake on the new discovery platform Scoville.  After signing up for the service, I was taken to a screen that allowed me to quickly follow my Foursquare friends that are using Scoville.  For any new social service this is a critical screen, as value depends on the network effect.  If I can quickly find friends/colleagues using the service, there is a good chance I’ll stick around and find value.

Below is the add friends page:

There is one major usability problem with this page. 

When you click on the “Follow” button to add someone, the button subtly changes to read “Following” instead.  The difference between “Follow” and “Following” may seem obvious as you look at the screenshot above.  I can assure you it wasn’t obvious to me as I used the actual page. 

I spent a minute on the page clicking the “Follow”/”Following” button repeatedly, not realizing I was changing my selections.  I thought the page was broken.  I was about to bail on the service when I suddenly understood what was happening. 

This is a problem easily solved by creating more differentiation between the “Follow”/”Following” options.  Have the labels be slightly different colors.  Change “Following” to “Added.”  Anything would be better.

This may not seem like a big deal.  My criticism may seem nitpicky.

But it is a big deal. A marginal improvement (10-20% better retention) in the usability of this page could have a huge impact for an online service such as Scoville. 

When designing a good UI, these sorts of details are everything. 

An increasing part of our work at The Bivings Group revolves around helping non-profits and political organizations fine tune their fundraising strategies.  This work has taught us that raising money is tough.  The down economy has created fierce competition for donor dollars, so organizations have to get creative in order for their solicitations to have an impact. 

Into this environment we’re pleased to launch Givings eCards, a new product that provides organizations with a creative and cost-effective way to raise money online.

An eCard is a personalized image and message that an organization’s supporters can send to their friends and family. Giving eCards allows your supporters to not only send a custom eCard through the site, but make a donation to your organization in someone’s name.

Here is how it works from an organizational perspective:

1. Organizations sign up for a free account on www.givingecards.com.  When signing up, the organization reserves a custom URL for their Giving eCards page (www.givingecards.com/page_name).
2. Once the account is created, organizations upload their custom designed eCards to their account. eCards can be categorized dynamically, allowing for sets of cards to be created for common occasions such as birthdays,the 4th of July, graduation, etc.
3. Once the eCards are uploaded, the organization promotes their eCard page to their supporter base via email, social media, website links, etc.
4. As supporters donate and send cards on behalf of friends and family, the money is automatically deposited into the Paypal account of the organization.  Giving eCards takes 5% of the amount raised on top of Paypal’s fees.
5. Organizations can access and export all donor information from their Giving eCards control panel at any time.

We’re planning to launch the product in closed beta next week with a more complete roll out in July.  If you are interested in giving the product a whirl, please visit www.givingecards.com and sign up to request access to the beta.

Stay tuned….

eCards Organization Page

eCard Purchase Page

We’ve all seen the stats about the explosion of the mobile web.

There are four billion mobile phones in use globally.  One billion of these are smart phones.  By 2014, more people globally will access the Internet from a mobile device than a desktop computer. 

Depending on who you talk to, mobile is either the next big thing or the big thing right now. 

Given all this, I’ve fully expected the 2012 Presidential candidates to break some ground in their use of mobile.  It is still really, really early -  many candidates haven’t launched version one of their full websites yet and mobile is a technology that lends itself to the ground game.  The cool stuff will come later. 

But taking an early look at the state of things, the situation is pretty bleak, with most candidates not even doing the basics well at this point. 

I analyzed the mobile programs of the fourteen candidates who have either formally announced or launched formal exploratory committees.  Here are the key takeaways:

• Only three of fifteen candidates (Newt Gingrich, Roy Moore and Barack Obama) have a version of their website that is optimized for mobile.  And frankly the Roy Moore mobile site is so poorly done they would have been better off not doing it (screenshot at the bottom of the page).
• Only four of fifteen candidates (Gary Johnson, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) offer ways for users to sign up to receive updates via text message. 
• Only one candidate (Barack Obama) has built an official campaign app that is available for the iPhone. 
• Barack Obama is the only candidate deploying all three of these strategies.  No other candidate is using more than one. 
• On the Republican side I expected the well funded candidate to have much more robust mobile strategies than the long shots.  This isn’t the case at this point, as none of them are really doing that much at this point.

Below is a full table showing all the relevant data, as of June 20, 2011.

*Michelle Bachmann has an app for her most recent Congressional race.
**Various candidates had apps created for them by supporters or companies seeking to capitalize on their popularity. 

Like I said, it could be too early to be looking at this stuff.  Great things may be on the horizon. 

But at this point it is hard not be underwhelmed by the strategies being deployed by every candidate, with the notable exception of Barack Obama. 

Note: If I missed anything, please let me know in the comments.  I’ll update the table periodically as new candidates announce and new versions of the sites are launched.

Barack Obama Mobile Site

The Obama mobile site is the best of the bunch, by far. 

Roy Moore Mobile Site

This site is even harder to read and weird looking on the phone itself.

Newt Gingrich Mobile Site

A solid start by the Newt folks.

Update: This post was edited on 6/21/2011 to reflect Jon Huntsman’s entry into the race and on 6/27 to reflect a new version of Michelle Bachman’s website..

I’m not breaking any news when I write that mobile Internet usage is exploding.  This move towards mobile has a direct impact on our work here at The Bivings Group, so I’ve been following the trend very closely.   In the spirit of sharing, I figured I’d write a quick (lazy?) post highlighting some key facts about mobile I’ve come across the last few months.

• There are  4 billion mobile phones in use globally. Of these, over one billion are smart phones.  Source 

• Sales of smart phones grew by 96% in 2010.  Source

• It is estimated that by 2014, more people will access the Internet via mobile phones than via desktop computers. Source

• There are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they do not have electricity at home. Source 

• Estimates suggest that there will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015. Source 

• Global mobile data traffic is projected to increase by a factor of 26 by 2015. Source 

• What exactly are all these smart phone users doing?   81% browse the Internet, 77% search, 68% use an app, and 48% watch videos on their smartphone.

• The most popular websites for smart phone users are search engines, social networks, retail and video sharing websites.   Source  

• 72% of smart phone owners use their phones while consuming other media.  1/3 use their phones while watching TV. Source   

• The average American mobile Internet user spends 2.7 hours a day socializing on their mobile device.  Source 

• The number of videos delivered by YouTube to mobile devices tripled in 2010.  YouTube now delivers 200 millions video views each day on mobile devices.  Source

• Starbucks reports that more than 3 million people have paid for coffee using the Starbucks Card Mobile App.  Source

• Over 1/3 of Facebook’s 600 million user base access the site form a mobile devices. Source

• Half of Twitter’s 150 million users access the site from a mobile device. Source