Five Fundraising Tips from the charity:water September Campaign

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.

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Announcing Giving eCards

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

Are 2012 Presidential Candidates Embracing Mobile? Not So Much

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.

Continue reading “Are 2012 Presidential Candidates Embracing Mobile? Not So Much” »

Some Facts About Mobile

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

5 Frustrating Things about Drupal 7

Drupal 7 was officially released in January of this year, so our team at The Bivings Group has had a few months now to familiarize ourselves with the platform.  Working with our resident Drupal experts Chris Roane, Mike Lockard and Ronald Isla, last week I wrote a post outlining the things we love about the new platform.  This week we’re going to tackle the bad.  Following are 5 frustrating things about Drupal 7.

(1) The lack of working modules.

Drupal 6 has been around for a few years, and as a result tons and tons of great community-contributed modules have been built for the platform.  These modules represent hundreds of thousands of man hours put in by thousands of programmers.  Since Drupal 7 is so new, many of the modules we came to rely on in Drupal 6 haven’t been ported over yet, and many of the ones that have been are still in alpha or beta releases.  As an example, the critical Views module is still in beta and the Splash module hasn’t even been started on yet.  This can add time to the development process, as we either have to identify new modules to use or develop them ourselves.  Time will fix this problem, but in the short term it is a pain.

(2) Similarly, there aren’t as many themes to work with.

According to the Drupal theme database, there are 588 themes for Drupal 6 and 158 for Drupal 7.  This doesn’t impact us that much, as we typically develop our own custom themes, using stripped down templates such as Framework as a starting point.  But for folks who don’t want to mess with custom theming this lack of choice is a problem.  As with the lack of modules, this will be sorted out with time.

(3)  The programming learning curve for Drupal 7 is steeper than Drupal 6.

As mentioned in our previous post, for content managers Drupal 7 out of the box is much more usable than Drupal 6.  But for programmers working with the system the learning curve is higher.  According to our developers, to work with the code on a programming level you have to understand much more of the core system than you did when working with Drupal 6.  Specifically, our developers mentioned that mastering the Field API was difficult and that figuring out which hooks to use took some time.

Once you know what you are doing Drupal 7 is much more powerful than 6, but it takes a bit to get your sea legs under you.

(4) Documentation could be a lot better.

Related to number 2, Drupal doesn’t do a great job of providing easy-to-follow documentation.  Some simple tutorials or walkthroughs would make things a lot easier.

(5) The update process from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is no fun.

Drupal 7 is a major change from Drupal 6.  As a result, upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is not an easy task.  The lack of working modules in Drupal 7 makes it even harder.  As a result, we’re going to hold off on upgrading most of our sites for a few months until more of the modules we rely on get upgraded.  The good news here is that the community should continue supporting Drupal 6 for 3-4 years. 

And if you are unlucky enough to need to go from Drupal 5 to 7, the process is even more cumbersome.  You can’t go from Drupal 5 to 7 directly, and instead have to go from Drupal 5 to 6, and then from 6 to 7.  No fun.  For complicated sites, it is probably easier to start fresh than to try to upgrade from Drupal 5 to 7.