Jonathan Waddingham

Now that we’ve had the selfies, and the blogs against selfies, and the blogs for selfies, and the blogs about what charities can learn from selfies, there’s really not much left to say about the #nomakeupselfie campaign. So I won’t bother (or perhaps leave it to my sessions at Fundraising Online or the IoF National Convention) and direct you to Madeleine’s blog for a fab collection of selfie-themed articles and blog posts to get up to speed.

Instead, I’ll just share some numbers from JustGiving that reinforce just how powerful it was, and what a viral campaign does to your analytics. Over a million was donated on JustGiving to selfie related campaigns, which is impressive enough, but how that happened is just as interesting…

• We saw an increase of 15,743% in the number of mobile direct donation shares compared to previous period*
• An increase of 7,406% in the number of desktop direct donation shares
• 30% of mobile direct donors shared their donation afterwards and 26% of desktop direct donors shared their donation (again, mobile users share more)
• An increase of 47,331% in the amount donated from shares after a direct donation on mobile
• An increase of 430,702% in the amount donated from shares after a direct donation on desktop
• An increase in visits of 50%, with a a peak of 9,000 concurrent users on the site at the busiest period (22.00 on Wednesday – is your Ops team on call 24/7?)
• Overall, 2% of desktop donations and 7% of mobile donations were made from post donation sharing to social networks – donations which would not have been made were it not for the social sharing tools tightly integrated to our donation process. This doesn’t count visits as a result of fundraising page or charity profile shares before donating, so the numbers would be even higher in reality. Sonny’s law in action…
• 51% of visits on peak day were from mobile, 36% from desktop and 13% tablet. I’d guess that’s the most mobile heavy day we’ve ever had, although January 2014 was the first month where we had more traffic from mobile alone than desktop, so it’s part of a wider trend.
• Just under 500,000 visits from Facebook from over 11 million impressions on Facebook on Wednesday 19th alone.

And pretty much every graph looks like the one below:

So yes, if you hadn’t realised it already, #nomakeupselfie was big. Big.

What else can we learn?

Build for mobile, build for shares, build to scale.

Watch the video over on the JG blog for more.

*All dates are from Tuesday 18th to Sunday 23rd March (the appeal spiked on Wednesday 19th) compared to previous period of Tuesday 11th – Sunday 16th March.