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Tag: Facebook
Net2ThinkTank: It's the shopping season – so get your supporters shopping for your cause.
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.
Facebook and Boredom
Lloyd Davis (on facebook) pointed me to this headline FACEBOOK DISTRACTING WORKERS FROM UNDERPAID, SOUL-DESTROYING TEDIUM, SAYS CBI which is the point we were trying to make here.
Facebook is a time waster – so why not ban it TUC?
I know Facebook is a timewaster. I could have used many hours more productively over the last couple of months, but instead I install apps, answer facile quizzes, and then uninstall apps. Using Facebook can smack of that guilt you get when you start smoking after a week of quitting: the guilt of futility.
In theory then this post should be all about telling the TUC to shut up with this intervention to encourage employers to allow Facebook at work. But that’s not what I think.
If you run a business you need to ask yourself a couple of simple questions:
- Do well connected staff help my business thrive? – If yes then find ways to embrace social networking as part of your work. After all you wouldn’t want to stop a sales team using LinkedIn would you?
- Which is more interesting the work or Facebook? Please try and make sure the work is more stimulating than hours of guilty futility
That’s business – what if you you run something as substantial as a local authority. Kent has blocked facebook for its staff? For public sector organisations I’d still point them to the two questions above and ask them to consider two more:
- Do we have a responsibility to bring out neighbourhoods into the 21st Century? If so any policy which is built on constraining internet use should be challenged. Most local authorities are major employers – their attitude to the possibilities of the web influence how households, schools, parents and children flourish or fail online.
- How good are we at managing our people? Time wasting at working is often more about poor management than it is about distractions on the desk top.
Nevill Hobson as written two or three post about this (check the links at the bottom of this post). To his thoughts (and these at Mashable) I would add don’t go all King Canute. When a wave as powerful as Facebook hits your organisation work out how to ride it because the price of stopping it to be higher than you think.
TUC Guide to Online Social Networks.