In the 1989’s Birmingham’s leaders gathered at Highbury Hall in Moseley for a summit meeting. It was the second time such a gathering had happened and Highbury 2 spawned the idea to break the concrete collar which was stranggling the growth of the city centre.
With the ring road down it is 2007 and Stef Lewandowski is now proposing a crowdsourced future for the city centre, using us and a wiki to shape where next. Highbury 2.0 has my support, how about you?
I used to find the back pages of Private Eye puzzling. Rows of personal ads asking for money to help people “travel” “pay my mums nursing fees” or “finish university”. Why would you bother to send a cheque?
I think I understood them a little better when a year ago I threw a few dollars at Volunteer Evolution because I wanted to trust the idea behind her ambitions and it wasn’t a big deal for me financially.
This all came to mind when Jon Bounds alerted me to I Am Not A Drain on Society. A week ago this anonymous medical student added a donate button and eloquently explained:
This is sheer desperation. I mean it. I’m financially crippled, and unless I manage to magic up some cash at warp speed, there is a distinct chance I may get suspended from medical school.
Earlier today they wrote:
I want to say a huge massive thank you to all of you! Between all of you who have either donated, or sent messages of support, you have all reduced me to tears of joy. Basically, I needed £1000 up front to the university to allow me to register as a 2nd year student and get my loan for this academic year. On top of this £1000 I owed them a further £1600. So courtesy of you wonderfully generous individuals, I have now raised £1700 in donations.
So how does this work? I have some ideas:
In the same ways as the Private Eye personals which appeal to people for whom a donation is small fry and the subject has some personal resonance.
Trust built up over a period of blogging to establish a real relationships.
Good writing and entertainment are rewarded (like Radiohead making money from trying to give away their music, but the again possibly not).
The ease of the mechanism. Push button donations are simpler than going to a post box.
It certainly doesn’t appear to be the blogosphere buzzing. Technorati reckons the blog has barely received any links in the last week and Google blog search was telling the same story. It is interesting that only two people I could find who sympathies are other blogging public servants Walking the Streets, Random acts of reality and The Thin Blue Line.
So what have I missed?
How talking gets in the way of conversation.
Britt Bravo at Netsquared has thrown out this question: How Can Nonprofits Use the Social Web During the “Giving Season”?
The truth is that this is the shopping season – so make the most of it with something that’s a touch web 1.5.
Sign up for an affiliate site and encourage your supporters to use it for some of their Christmas shopping. Over at the Birmingham Conservation Trust we opened this shop through buy.at. We chose it because it has a number of key high street brands which have a lot of public trust – which is important when you are thinking about how people may perceive your charity.
You can buy everything from a case of wine for Christmas through to the holiday you’ll need to recover afterwards, the clothes you’ll wear to the works Christmas party and even those utterly useless presents bought for uncles you barley know.
We don’t litter our website with affiliate links but simply encourage our networks to use it for their shopping. You can apply all of the tools of web 2.0 to encourage people to support you at no cost to themselves. Add it as an item on social networking sites, send the link to friends on facebook who share an interest with you or live in a neighbourhood relevant to the charity, perhaps even use it as a url when you leave comments on people’s blogs.
Be warned, it can be difficult to get people into the habit of using your affiliate site.
On www.buy.at/birminghamconservation we have one stationery trader, Euroffice, who offers 8% on just about all purchases. With deals like that why not talk to businesses you know and ask them to start consider routinely using the service to buy their office supplies.
Of course the more flexible your affiliate provider is the better for you.
I’ve got mixed feelings about perfiliate who runs buy.at. You can’t create links to specific products or traders – which seems a little complacent on their part. For example the National Trust will pay us £20 for everyone who signs up to them through our buy.at shop. That’s a natural tie in. If we could email a link to that offer direct to our mailing list it could allow us to raise money quickly with minimal effort. But we can’t – the best we can hope for is that our supporters will wade through a series of links to. So any suggestions for a better affiliate welcome.