Thinking About Campaigning

Thinking of Campaigning. Alexander Crockett [email protected]

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Contents A Resource For All .............................................................................................

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When Social Media Can’t Be Ignored ....................................................

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Campaigning for action...................................................................................

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What We Can Take Away...............................................................................

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About Ceasura………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………11

Campaigning Online Social media adoption has been booming. There has also been a concomitant rise in the number of self proclaimed experts in the field of new media, resulting in the wide adoption of platforms with little to no strategic insight into their use. A consequence of this trend has been skepticism about the benefits of social media. Therefore the need for a paradigm that can be relied upon to secure investment seems obvious. This paradigm will benefit from, and capitalize on, a thorough understanding of how media have changed and how people, interestingly, have remained the same. Such awareness will inevitably dictate a dynamic and effective strategy.

A well crafted strategy, with an equally lucid view of the workings and benefits of social media should raise the bar of expectation for an organization and for its supporters. Stakeholders and campaigners alike can expect to see a direct and beneficial effect from a considered use of the tools available online. However, those elevated expectations can only be justified when they are supported by a genuine understanding of the potential benefits and lucid presentation of the strategic use of available online tools.

The following article will look at new media success stories, drawing out vital elements, illustrating not only the benefits of social media, but also its proper use.

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It is clear that campaigning is crucial to charities. Knowing what campaigning online consists in is doubly crucial because a campaign based on false assumptions about key features will fail.

Twitter is an example of a medium that has seen a phenomenal increase in popularity amongst media strategists. This microblogging platform was reportedly responsible for $1 million in revenue for Dell last year (as reported by nasdaq). Similarly, the Red Cross has openly embraced Twitter. The reason? Twitter offers a form of communication that is constant, self correcting and up to date.

Significant online data and numerous success stories demonstrate the power of social media to carry a campaign. However, merely looking at a charity’s campaign pages will not provide an easy insight into how it can campaign well.

A scan of available material reveals certain crucial elements. The importance of charities strategic use of social media has emerged as vital. Integration of channels and making the best use of networks are key factors to an online campaign. In order to achieve these goals however, greater perception and more profound analysis are necessary.

We will focus on the following areas: channels, calls to action and the ability to pass a campaign along a network. Of the available criteria there has been some division about what is essential. For example, some sources indicate the following to be the crux of campaigning:

1.

To show an opportunity to solve a crisis

2.

To ask a users to do one thing

3.

To explain what their action will accomplish

However, others have added the following elements to good campaigning:

1.

Include deadlines in appeals

2.

Combine SMS, e-mail and social media

3.

Ask corporate sponsors to e-mail on your behalf

4.

Be movement building

Not all of these strategies are easy or necessarily applicable. To build a movement you need to know the channels along which the movement will develop. That means knowing your

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audience and their preferences. Simply signing up to Twitter will not t be enough despite the proselytizing by the industry. Although lthough new ways of eliciting data from Twitter are emerging (Tweet Tweet Stats, Trendrr, Tweet meme, Xefer Twitter charts - are a few data sources), not all of your stakeholders/users will use Twitter Twitter. Over 30’s may make greater use of e-mail. e (The NSPCC recently raised than

£1.4 million from a direct marketing campaign by ee-mail mail that cost less

£20,000 to implement.)

In addition addition, one of the most successful campaigns from Grey

London made astronomically good use of YouTube YouTube, a medium which is much more familiar to most people than Twitter.

Crucially, rucially, getting users to involve other people who have not come directly to a charity will be part of any good campaign.. Facebook, Causecast, Socialvibe, Change.org, Justgiving and Carez are tools by which this goal can be achieved achieved. For example, the he success of the JustGiving model has prompted Virgin media to release a new online donation network, set to outperform JustGiving which at present owns the largest share in the market. All of this underscores the importance of clear, clean and int integrated approaches.

Ann example of the kind of site that has a lot to offer is Know How Non Profit.org. http://www.knowhownonprofit.org/

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Know How Non Profit.org is a promising resource for several reasons reasons: 1.

It discusses how charities can best operate online while providing free strategy and guidance from professionals within the charity sector itself

2.

It is a Social media platform for people within the charitable sector and reflects the kind of information that will ill be relevant to them

3.

It has been designed specifically for those within the sector to support others within the sector and offers an impressive shared knowledge base

An example of a highly regarded strategy is the release earlier this year of an advert featuring Keira Knightly. It is for the charity Women’s Aid. In the advert Ms. Knightly, is seen as the victim of domestic abuse. The advert has since appeared on YouTube and in several places across the blogosphere as well as in the traditional news media media, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and the Times.

In this campaign, designed by Grey London, the advert was initially banned for TV viewing. viewing However, it generated an enormous number of views online. Since its release on YouTube one of the online versions has been viewed 239,344 times, another 431,116 times. (Neither of these statistics is from the charity’s own page page.) On the charity’s YouTube channel, channel the same video has been viewed 208,494 times. All in the space of a couple of months since its release.

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It is worth noting that at the time this campaign was launched Third Sector reported that charities were being offered cheaper airtime. Rates had fallen by as much as 25% to place an advert on TV, making the possibility of integrated campaigning even more attractive. However, TV advertising is expensive and Women’s Aid, in a short period of time, received greater exposure than they would have at a fraction of the cost of televised advertising.

The benefits of online campaigning are manifestly promising. The buzz in the digital arena is in itself compelling. However, there is still no paradigm to provide organizations like charities the security they seek. Certainly one outcome of the rise of the digital arena has been a radical shift in the identity of the decision makers. In a recent poll fundraisers have for the first time, made the top of the list of important influencers. Interestingly Professional Fundraising, one of the sectors major news sources, has raised the question “Are Funders Taking Over Social Network Fundraising?” Also of note: aid agencies have come under criticism as of late because many have made themselves more accountable to donors than disaster victims (reported in Third Sector Online).

One of the signal success stories in this shift has been charitywater.org. They don’t provide aid; in fact they don’t directly help anyone. They liaise among aid bodies, securing funding for others. However, at Twestival earlier this year charitywater.org raised

£250,000. Similarly,

when Facebook launched Facebook for Good, charitywater.org managed to become one of the 16 charities supported, despite the fact that few people had heard of them. When Hugh Jackman and the American retailer Target offered money to charities online, it was charity water.org that did best (in both cases). The question remains: how, given their anonymity, have charitywater.org managed to do so well online? Professional Fundraising believe that there is a single and crucial explanation, “It is a people-facing organization….concentrating on both its donors and its beneficiaries as people, bound together in a globalised world.”

The fact of the matter is that for charities, social media platforms offer a singular opportunity to engage with their donors and, unlike many forms of marketing, they allow for communication to be constant, fluid and reciprocal. In other words a distinctive feature of social media is the ability to induce potential donors to be a part of the charity’s own network. For a great number of people, membership is a motivation in itself.

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Much can be learned from campaigns th that have been so successful they’ve e brought social media into the forefront of strategists strategists’ imaginations. The success ss of the Obama campaign and the he attention it received across media has highlighted the need to use the internet as a means of campaigning. In an article about the Obama win win, a Capitol Hill correspondent writes:

“The The campaign of Barack Obama and meticulous use of new media tools led to a landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election and it has changed the way politics and business bu deploy new media to influence voters or customers to action action”

And nd as one of President Obama’s ke key campaigners Michael Silberman, wrote after the victory:

on: It represented a carefully considered element of almost every “Technology was not an add-on: critical campaign function. Most remarkably, technology played a critical role in the one area least understood by the "digerati" and most online campaigners: moving online supporters toward real-world action.

The New Media team's mantra and focus was "Message, Money, and Mobilization"—three Mobilization" critical campaign functions that their work served and supported. The Internet's role in the first two—enabling enabling a massively successful online word-of-mouth mouth campaign and recordrecord breaking fundraising totals—are are both fairly well documented. Not so the third "M," mobilization.”

Getting people to act may seem like the toughest part of an online campaign. When a campaign is launched, there is no guarantee it will mobilize an audience, especially specially if a charity wants to think creatively about how they approach their audience, (and and creative thinking is certainly needed). But, that is the crux of the problem. Thinking in terms of messages within a traditional context is exactly what needs to change. Rather, thought has to be allocated to developing communities of people who are a pa part rt of the success of a charity’s ability to reach its (and its community’s) ) goals goals.

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There are a number of charities that are doing exactly this to great effect. The British Heart Foundation have made social media an integral part of the their strategy. Recent ecent campaigns have taken advantage of mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, JustGiving and Flickr. By aligning these platforms with campaign microsites microsites, the charity has s seen enormous participation in their campaigns. Their Red For Heart campaign in February this year raised

£1.3 million in one month. onth. There is no doubt that the change in tactic was born of necessity. necessity Their heir traditional method of getting users to buy from their campaign shop was not successful. Moreover,, the shift in strategy has saved money as well a as s made it. What is important is that the message was clear, the charity were directly asking for participation, and they engaged directly with those who got involved, securing the aid of future fundraisers as well as taking a lead in social media strategy.

Online campaigning is a burgeoning field not yet consolidated. What is more, with new forms of Social Network seeing greater and greater success success, the exact nature of online campaigning will continue to evolve.

That said, what the Obama campaign has highli highlighted ghted is that online communication is only growing in importance. As online forms of communication become more and more mainstream,, with mobile technology evolving, Digital Britain underway, social networks are now part and parcel of the landscape landscape. It is the proverbial laggards who are now using Facebook. The he potential is in place to harness the power of the web. The question is: is “Are charities really doing it yet?”

Beyond the web eb pages and campaign pages of charities, there is a wealth of information and opportunity to generate successful campaigns online online. When we are commissioned to work with charities, one of the crucial questions that we will have to ask is is, “How ow well is the charity optimizing their networks?” For most charities charities, money is a crucial issue, and social media offers a cost-effective means of engaging with people when it is executed correctly. correctly That means dropping what are fast becoming antiquated modes of speaking at people and instead, engaging with audiences udiences as a part of a wider community. Alongside that comes action. That is,

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getting communities to act on behalf of the charity so that growth is based as much on the size of the community as on the amount of banner space that is bought.

The vital lesson to be learned at this point can be expressed in one word: ‘strategy’. Strategic campaigning is crucial to charities. This means knowing who they are talking to and how to talk to them. And while talk does come relatively cheap these days, the art is turning words into actions. What charities need to know is who is going to act on their behalf. It has been suggested that the new model for online marketing does not ask how many hits an organization is getting but rather, which of those users is going to come back and hit again. In other words, who are the valuable users that a charity can focus on before they begin to count their conversion rates? There are some basic principles that a charity would do well to follow. They include:

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Being multi channel

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Stating both problems and opportunities

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Keeping people involved

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Being familiar with your audiences

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Not asking for too much but getting people to come back

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Creating campaigns that move

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Using support networks including corporate sponsorship

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Setting deadlines

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Developing communities of supporters

The discussion so far illustrates the need for clear strategies. These should incorporate the new media model into the way organizations communicate. The first key point within the digital industry is that online campaigning does not involve a radical departure from how we communicate as individuals. The crux of social media is that it is social first and foremost. Networks may be larger; they may in fact be more immediate in their effect. That said, they are still networks of people talking to other people. As soon as that realization comes off the shelf, the mystery around digital media will thankfully vanish. Campaigning online is still campaigning.

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It is also the case that the potential impact can be much larger at a fraction of the cost of traditional campaigning. Social media platforms are global, and as the Digital Britain directive gains traction more and more people will become reliant on the internet. That means that welldesigned and well targeted campaign will have the potential to reach across geographical and economic divides, finding resonance across broader audiences.

Vital however, is the participation and involvement of communities of people. Membership to a cause has advantages beyond the scope of this article. Any communications professional will understand the value of knowing who will be responsive to a cause. In fact both the NSPCC campaign mentioned in this article and the BHF campaign achieved a large part of their success because their campaigns were targeted to those members of the public they knew would pick up on the campaign. The Obama strategists did much the same thing, using young activists to go door to door in locally designated areas, energizing those who were already sympathetic.

To summarize there are four key points to success. First, traditional one way messaging is dead. Secondly, for the greater part of the public the white noise of egocentric organizations telling us what they want us to hear is slowly being washed out by the sound of participation. Third, the donor is the decision maker and the donor also wants to be a part of the solution. And fourthly, in order for them to do that, and to feel involved, they also need to feel that their voice is being heard within the communities they join. In that way a charity has the power to secure both action and dedication from communities of people ready to carry their flag and act on their behalf.

This means one thing. Traditional structures within organizations are no longer qualified to manage the changes that social media has brought about. Organizations need to look for staff who can communicate with their wider community. These must be staff who understand the individual concerns of their donors, who speak the same language and who are equipped to communicate along the preferred channels that audiences already use.

If you are thinking of communicating online, start with strategy and end with people. The media may have changed but, they are only tools that enhance communication with people who have not changed.

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A About Ceaura Ceasura is a small organization dedicated to meaningful partnership. We believe that knowledge and information are the backbone of any good decision making. That’s what we’re here to provide, and at the core of our service will be our need to know you. We want ant to collaborate, why, because we enjoy the work we do and we think that you won’t just benefit from it, you can get inspired as we work together. So far we have a combined knowledge and experience writing for top publishing houses and conducting research for top 100 interactive agencies. That includes writing for womens glamour magazines to government agencies and NGOs, producing reports as well as working closely with charities designing and launching campaigns that have raised over one million in their first month. So far we’ve been involved in helping conceptualize university websites, charity campaigns, big pharma marketing and reviews of hospita hospitall communications. In other words we are diverse. We’ve looked at the insides of companies as well as at their stakeholders, clients and customers to get an overall view of what needs to be done to help organizations move forward. And I emphasize, moving forward rward doesn’t mean you’re failing, sometimes it’s t’s just the next step to great greater success. That is why we believe in the research we do can help, because it’s been reaching out to the people that matter and hearing what they have to say, and it’s made a difference, ference, inspiring us to create our own family right here at Ceasura.

Alex Crockett

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Contact us: [email protected]

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