Information for Non-Profit sector use of emerging technologies
By Dan Robichaud
I am currently enrolled in a Non-profit governance course at Dal, and we are doing a Stakeholder Accountability exercise. About two dozen ED’s from the voluntary sector across Canada sharing their success stories and challenges in 2010. Reading these posts has made me want to comment a little bit on new technologies and how I have seen non-profits and charities shift in the last few years .
In my daily work, I help communities and organizations benefit from emerging trends and technologies. Permit me, if you will, to digress from my focus on HRCAP alone, and allow me now to rant about the current trends in the voluntary sector.
Several months ago, I attended a meeting at the Metro United Way. The staff had invited several social media consultants to meet with them to identify how social media could be used. It was, essentially, re-engineering how that organization functions. Door to door canvassing and kettle campaigns simply doesn’t work in an increasingly digital community. I was delighted to see such a large organization looking into new media, but sadly I sensed that it came out of desperation, and perhaps less out of vision. I am, however, confidant that they are going to lead by example, and thrive in the new digital world.
So there’s two reasons to re-invent how your organization functions, if you haven’t yet crossed the Digital Divide. First is awareness. Used correctly, the Web 2.0 platform is an umbilical cord to your stakeholders. Second is money. With the sharp decline in street campaigns, organizations with vision have quickly taken advantage of these emerging technologies.
In terms of social media, Facebook and Twitter are two websites that you can consider your technology safetynet. It’s your short term survival plan for any organization large or small. To ignore these two platforms, will surely lead you astray.
Associations are increasingly using website traffic to generate revenue through Google’s Adsense program, which displays related content advertisements on banners on your website. Clever organizations are creating unrelated webcontent, but which generates alot of traffic, to generate significant revenue.
The dynamic website, or Web 2.0 compliant website, is a “content management platform”. This means it is not a one-way, reader-only website. Readers can comment, subscribe, participate in forums, make instant purchases and donations, and perhaps even be entertained with educational games and useful interactive components.
There is also a trend away with print advertising. With programs like Google’s Adwords and Facebook’s Advertisement platform, a little goes a long way. These programs allow you to display banners and advertisements on other websites at a very minimal cost. On the surface, you’d quickly dismiss this option. It’s easy to think that your information will just get lost in the vast information highway, but this isn’t so. These advertisement platforms allow you to select the geographic area and demographics which you are attempting to reach. For example, when you purchase ads on Facebook, you can tell it to only show those ads to Facebook users in Nova Scotia, women, who are between 45 and 65. In terms of cost, you are talking around eight-hundred thousand ad impressions for about one hundred dollars. Still paying thousands for print ads? Think again… Even one third of your print budget moved into online advertising will create unprecedented visibility for your association.
As for fund raising, we have a great example of how charities are using new technologies for fund raising right here in Halifax. Attention now onto Pheonix Youth Programs and Feed Nova Scotia and their partnership with apps4good.
Please look at what they have done. http://www.apps4good.ca/
Basically, a group of programmers have donated their time to develop “applications” which people download, for a small fee, to their “iPhone”, a wildly popular cellphone. The “applications” are not related to the charities necessarily, but rather, clever programs that one would use on their phone. Each download costs a minimal fee and is billed directly to your iTunes, phone bill or paypal. All the proceeds go directly to the charities. That’s thinking outside the box.
Some things we take for granted. Had enough of those annoying Facebook notifications about all those games? Here’s a fact that will shake you. All those Facebook games were developed for charities to raise awareness, and more importantly, money.. lots and lots of money.. for their cause. Farmville is related to a relief organization in Haiti. YoVille was developed to raise money for the San Fransisco SPCA. The World Wildlife Fund runs the “Zoo” game. I’ll stop here, I think you get the idea.
See what these organizations have done at http://zynga.org/#currentIni
Finally, don’t be afraid of PayPal. Arguably it is more secure than any traditional bank. You will never regret putting a “donate now” button on your webpage (and everything you do online).
Another outside the box thing that has had a significant amount of results is called “Flashmob”. Recently, Capital Health staged a “Flashmob” in the Halifax Shopping Center. It was to raise awareness for there Bust-a-move campaign, with the deployment of the Flashmob..
The best explanation of Flashmob is found on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob
You can see footage of Capital Health’s flashmob in the Halifax Shopping Center here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPetgDoJfpI
The event received national television news coverage. Those are my broader suggestions for using new Information Technology trends for non-profits, particularly for informing your membership, reaching out to your community, and seeing opportunities beyond the box. It might seem insane to you, but there were several thousand people in the mall at the time of the event, plus the television and print coverage, plus over twenty thousand combined views on YouTube in less than four months.
If you can raise awareness cheaper, with more saturation and shock effect than this, then, bravo. You have to watch the video to believe it.
In terms of raising awareness on a larger scale, Nova Scotia CAP minted a custom coin which is used in the the wildly popular “Geocaching” game. In consultation with the Sonic Group, Compart Event Management, the Maritime Geocachers Association, Groundspeak, a mint in China, and a local supplier (http://3geeks.ca) we developed a custom minted game coin called a Geocoin.
The goal was to raise worldwide awareness around some of the issues around the digital divide. We released 250 coins in 2008, and already we are seeing an incredible footprint these have had.
Don’t know what geocaching is? geocoin what?
Our custom coin has it`s own website http://www.halifaxcap.ca/geocoin/
The coins travel the world and are trackable through Google Earth. (amazing
photos!)
http://www.halifaxcap.ca/the_halifax_regional_cap_association/geocoin-information/
This was an outside the box idea. At first, it was hard convincing our funders to let us invest so much in a small piece of copper. After seeing the Google Earth Images (which coin travel have doubled since those screen shots were taken), everyone agrees that this project was worth the investment. For one, unlike print advertising, this is not ephemeral. Even in two hundred years,
these coins will still be kicking around – long after all the paper behind it has turned to dust. The same can be said for two thousand years… Even in terms of reporting, we gave ourselves a five to ten year window before we begin to measure the impact.
Our geocoin launch event gathered national television news coverage and has since been recreated in communities across North America. In addition, we were able to get out news item on the newsfeed that was shown on flights in Canada for over two days. Talk about a captive audience!
Please, repost this, print this, share this information with all the non-profits you know. We don’t have to struggle to survive. With new technologies, we can thrive.
Dan R
The Halifax Regional C@P Association
Dan Robichaud, Executive Director
a/s The Hub Halifax
1673 Barrington Street, 2nd Floor
Halifax, Nova Scotia
B3J 1Z9
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Fax : 902.482.5014
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