Way back in August 2009, I wrote a blog for Professional Fundraising (as it was known then) about how the newly released Facebook Connect (as it was known then) gave websites the ability to personalise content based on people’s Facebook data to an unprecedented level. I was really excited about how charities could personalise their campaigns with this integration, but it’s taken until this year to finally find something that does this, and does this really well.
Step forward Plan UK’s Tell your story campaign and take a bow. I came across the story via the excellent sofii website, a site anyone involved in fundraising should regularly check out. As with any rich personalised experience based on Facebook data, like Intel’s brilliant museum of me, you only really get a sense of what it’s like by trying the site yourself so I’m not going to explain how it works or what it does. Showing my Facebook friends, photos and data won’t have the same effect as seeing your own connections show up – that’s the point and the power of it. Still, here’s a video to give you a broad idea:
And at the risk of navel-gazing, I would like to quote my post from 2 1/2 years ago, as I think they’ve nailed exactly what I thought would be possible and powerful:
…it’s this personalisation that’s the point I want to make. We all know from DM experience that the more personal a campaign, the better the response rate. And for many people, data doesn’t get much more personal than what they share with their friends on Facebook…
Imagine how you could use that data in a campaign. How could you use someone’s personal photos and make it relevant to your charity’s goals or a story for a new campaign? Or, once someone is donating to you online, could you ask them to connect with Facebook so you could create a personalised thank-you video, including their name and address, showing how their donation has helped?
There is great scope for using this feature to create a rich, interactive experience and greater personalisation. The beauty is that you don’t have to ask people to enter any details, they just log in to Facebook, and you use things they’ve already shared.
Having spent the last year doing a lot of work on various Facebook integrations, I know that the technical effort required to get the data they’re using from Facebook isn’t actually that hard, but they are using it in a very clever way. And as with all these things, it’s the story not the tech that’s most interesting, and how they have used tech to tell such a compelling story is very impressive. I’ve talked a lot about digital storytelling in the past, and this is probably the best of the bunch I’ve seen thus far.
I recommend you head over to Sofii’s exhibit to read all the details and background to the campaign and doff your hat in acknowledgement of some great work. I look forward to reading the follow-up and seeing how the campaign went.
Last year I was inspired by Seth Godin to write an end-of-year review about what you shipped, so it seems proper to do the same thing this year, especially as it’s been quite a different year.
Shipped? I thought you said chipped
2010 was all about speaking and presentations for me (25 in all) but 2011 was meant to be the year of product; the year of doing, not talking (or not talking as much). So here’s a list of things my team of fab of fab developers, QA, UX and design shipped in the last 12 months:
The catchily named IPDD (internet paperless Direct Debit), allowing any charity on JG to receive monthly direct debit donations
Many unseen infrastructure improvements and bug fixes
Quite a few homepage updates, including adding Facebook and Twitter feed (finally – woo!)
Much improved social sharing after you sponsor someone (‘social sponsorship’) and allowing people to leave their Facebook profile picture on a page. See the hashtag #justsponsored 🙂
Update to Facebook app to allow people to make one-off or monthly donations on Facebook, and allow charities to add a donation tab to their Facebook pages. Another first!
And finally, a new design and a few new features for fundraising pages.
Looking back at that, we’ve shipped a lot. And that was just my stream, not including epic projects like JustTextGiving, JustGiving for companies, tons of new API methods, improved in memory products and many more improvements for charities that the other product teams led by Lee and Jamie worked on. It’s safe to say we’ve shipped more this year than any other, and that’s because of a lot of hard work, talent and pain from our brilliant dev team.
I still managed to slip in a few presentations too, but only nine compared to last year’s 25. And for me personally, that was the best thing to look back at: the difference in building and releasing lots of new products. The doing has been really rewarding, and the talking has been even more so, as I’ve been talking about the results of what we’ve been doing: my favourite presentation of the year (yes it’s sad, but I do have a favourite) was packed with numbers and results from many of those products we released this year.
Another notable highlight from 2011 was MC-ing at the JustGiving awards for the second time, a massive privilege and one I’m already excited about doing once more in 2012. I have never been in awe in the presence of a 7 year old boy before, but sharing a stage with Charlie Simpson (who raised £210k for Haiti) was quite something.
(Oh, and I got married to the wonderful Sophie too. It’s safe to say that was the real highlight of the year, or of any year for that matter, so I should probably mention it despite this being about work).
Naturally, all of this is a product of teamwork from lots of very awesome people. So shout outs go to Pedro, Bala, Neil, Rob, David, Jamie, Lee, Ambica, Shashi, Will, Yael, James, Kai, and all the other great people I’ve had the pleasure of working with this year – thanks!
Hopefully 2012 will be as interesting (although I know it will be, as I’ve seen our product roadmap…)
On Tuesday this week I went to the London edition of F8, the “on tour” edition of Facebook’s flagship developer conference. I have to say (and I did say it), it was the most useful day at a conference I’ve ever had.
Despite spending a lot of time reading through the docs for the new open graph, there’s nothing quite like hearing it from the horse’s mouth. Not to mention seeing some of Facebook’s finest engineers live code on stage to show you how it all works.
.@sicross building a cooking/recipe app live on stage #f8 #f8london
The big topic of the day was how to use the BETA open graph, a new way to get your apps distributing content to Facebook’s ticker, newsfeed and timeline. It also gives you a hitherto unavailable level of control over how that content appears, is structured and linked. In absence of any personal imagination, I’ll copy their example:
The Open Graph allows apps to model user activities based on actions and objects. A running app may define the ability to “run” (action) a “route” (object). A reading app may define the ability to “read” (action) a “book” (object). A recipe app may define the ability to “cook” (action) to a “recipe” (object).
This is effectively a lesson in grammar. You get to define an action (verb) and an object (noun). But the really useful part is that you can then create aggregations of those verbs or nouns that appear on a user’s timeline (which, incidentally, I think is a really great feature).
So from a developer or website point of view, you need to think about what sentences make sense to people and whether they will be interesting enough to be clicked by that person’s Facebook friends. Because as with most Facebook integrations, you need to think both about how things work for your user, and your user’s friends. Ultimately, you want something posted to a newsfeed or ticker that is compelling enough to be clicked on and bring you some extra visits. It’s a bugbear of mine that people often focus on one of those audiences, but not always both.
I’ve spent a lot of this week trying to map out all the relevant objects and actions on JG and how they fit together in an almost database like structure, but as this is so abstract, it’s been easier to focus on the sentences we want people to share and what aggregations will be interesting to our audience and then work backwards.
So if you start with a description of what someone does on your site (like, I don’t know, sponsor a friend ;-)) then you can work back and define the relevant objects and actions on Facebook. Once you get your head around this, it’s actually relatively straightforward to set up your mapping on Facebook and then add the relevant meta tags to refer to your custom objects, as per another example below:
Once that’s all set up, you need to ask for permissions to publish actions at some point in a flow on Facebook or on your site. This is a one-time ask, and one reason why this is so good for content publishers is because it removes the barrier of asking to share (frictionless sharing is what Facebook call it). In the case of spotify, once you authorise the app, each song is shared without the user having to do anything. Whether that’s good for a user or not is another story (and I’ve been caught out a couple of times by spotify sharing dubious song choices…).
Aggregations
Finally, you can create aggregations of any combination of objects and actions to give your user something interesting to show on their timeline. For example, here’s the slightly random collection of music I didn’t realise I’d listened to on spotify in October until I looked on my timeline…
This is where you add some really interesting value, and make someone’s interaction with your app be a part of their social identity. These was a theme mentioned a coupleof times on the day. It’s like those boxes you used to be able to put on your Facebook profile to show you liked something, except this is an opportunity to show the user something new, something different, something interesting that they didn’t know themselves – the launch partner apps show top playlists on spotify, or most-read authors on the Guardian, but the potential for this is really quite exciting.
Advertising – the scary/awesome bit
One last thing to add is that Facebook said you would be able to advertise to people who had taken custom actions related to custom objects in your app. So if you have listened to an artist on spotify, that information can be used to target you with an app. This is awesome in that you can advertise based on custom verbs and nouns you define, but scary in that the level of ad targeting Facebook can use has just upped a notch (and it was already more targeted than any other form of advertising already). Fast forward a bit, say an app shared that someone was “buying” something, an advertiser could then target that buyer in near real-time with another offer, and all that person’s friends could see they were in the process of buying something and suggest something else – a scary/cool type of social commerce…
And if you look at it another way, they have managed to build a way of allowing you to add rich customised content to their network, which adds value to their network, and then allow you to pay to advertise to people on their network, based on the content you’ve added! But that is the trade-off, nothing is ever for free. But as far as I’m concerned, the value you will get from integrating so deeply into Facebook is worth it, so why shouldn’t they get some value back too.
Ultimately, though, given that the open graph is in BETA, won’t be live until Timeline is released and the ticker is still new and bedding in, it’s difficult to say how this will pan out and how successful it will be. But I suspect we’re about to embark on a new wave of innovations on Facebook’s platform – one that will create tons of value for websites, app developers and publishers, not to mention Facebook themselves.
I don’t hear people talk about the semantic web much these days, but Facebook are about to release a platform where anyone can create a machine readable summary of not only their site, but what people are actually doing on their site in real time in a way that can be used to target those people with relevant ads or content. As TechCrunch memorably put it, “Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again.”
More reactions from F8
If you like your conference content curated (who doesn’t!), then I point you in the direction of this F8 storify, a collection of exquisite tweets, and a report from .net magazine.
This morning I went to a talk on disrupting philanthropy, where I heard Lucy Bernholz talk about how new technologies are changing the way we need to think about giving. She’s great, you should check out her blog, and follow her.
Organised by many fab people (including NCVO, Guardian Voluntary Sector Network, Big Society Network and more), I thought it was a really interesting morning – as much for the discussions afterwards as for the talk itself.
A lot was said about new technology and how powerful it can be, although Lucy’s caveat of “if you know how to use it” didn’t appear to be picked up by many people – but it’s a very important point. As much as I love new technology and applying it to the charity world (which I’m lucky to say is my day job) the technology in itself doesn’t change anything. It’s how people use it that counts, and how technology is designed to complement existing human behaviours and what we know about people who give to charity.
Much was made (in the questions after at least) about data, it’s importance and the fact it should be open. To be clear, I agree on both counts – and it was great to meet Chris Taggart, who’s responsible for using data very cleverly with opencharities. Data should be open, and it is important.
But data alone is not the be-all and end-all.
One question in particular was asked about how effective things like pie charts are in showing how much charities spend on admin or fundraising, for showing impact to grantmakers or individual donors. I think data in that context misses the point, or where the really valuable data is (which for me, is in social networks).
Any research or focus groups with *people who actually give to charities* will tell you that they want to know what happens to their money when they give. Somehow we’ve extrapolated from that fact that people want to know what percentage is spent on beneficiaries versus other things like admin or fundraising.
How did that happen? Aren’t we missing the point?
As a donor, I want to know what you’ve spent the money on so I can understand how I have helped. This isn’t about the data, its about the story of what a charity did with my money. This appears to be the same as what Lucy referred to as “impact investments”, which to me seems a posh way of describing a donation that is followed up with a story about how that donation has helped (I’m probably doing her a dis-service here, this is just my interpretation). Saying 80% of a donation goes to help beneficiaries is totally pointless unless you say what that 80% of my donation has actually done.
I think stories in the charity press about donors “being concerned about how money is spent” is a symptom of not being told how their donation has helped, and not a green light to start publishing ratios on fundraising spend vs admin spend in all fundraising material. If you could see what the money has done, you can innately understand, or at least appreciate, that costs were involved in making that thing happen.
And as much as I love navel gazing about new ways of giving, or sexing-up how we talk about giving, ultimately the point of all of this is just that: to tell people how they’ve helped and the demonstrate it. It’s the feedback loop.
To power that feedback, you tell a story. So what you need is content. I’ve talked before about charities and the art of digital storytelling, because new technology helps people tell stories, and stories are the essential ingredient here. Whether you’re a small or large charity, you can tell a story by having a Facebook page, sharing videos on YouTube or by tweeting. That technology is available to all.
Having said that, one good point raised was about whether new technology gives a voice to people who don’t have one :
I’d argue that this is one role of charities – being the people who give a voice to the silent, to empower the people who are neglected or who need help.
Anyway, back to the data point – sure, data can be part of a narrative, if it helps a story, but if one charity gives me a pie chart when I donate showing how much is spent on beneficiaries and another gives me a story of how a beneficiary has benefited, I know which one I’m more likely to become a long term supporter of.
So, how do we disrupt philanthropy?
Do what charities have always done, tell stories. Just do it in a new way. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
Here’s just one of many interesting tweets from the event, one making the point that data is usefulif it shows efficiency, but connection with the cause is just as, if not more, important.
The talk did cover other areas too, but these were the topics I was most interested in, so if you took something different from this morning, I’d love to hear it.
There are a whole host of essays related to the government’s latest efforts to build a strong culture of giving. Naturally, the one I was most interested in was the paper by MissionFish UK CEO Nick Aldridge on the role of technolocy in the “Big Society”. It’s well worth a read:
I’ve not blogged much here in 2010, or even on the JG blog much since I moved jobs. And the reason is that the time I’d normally spend blogging, I’ve spent writing presentations – an awful lot of them. So it’s been interesting (to me at least, as a numbers person) to check my calendar and see how many talks and slides I’ve presented this year – to be honest, I’m quite proud of how much I’ve done. And interestingly enough, Seth Godin’s latest post is about writing about what you shipped this year, so it seems like I’m in decent company in looking back and sharing.
In 2010 I’ve spoken at 25 events or conferences as a speaker or panellist, presenting a total of 744 powerpoint slides to around 1,800 people. The 14 slidedecks I’ve shared on slideshare have had more than 16,500 views (20,000 if I include some fundraising tips I pulled together for our community team). In that time, I’ve also written 29 blog posts for JG, although only a couple for my Fundraising blog, which appears to have been the main casualty of all that speaking.
(here’s me seemingly trying to eat a microphone at the Facebook developer garage in October – it appears to be the “best” photo of me speaking this year)
Looking back at those numbers, it seems like one event every other week is quite a lot for someone who has a day-to-day job too and isn’t a professional speaker. Still, I do really enjoy presenting and those interesting conversations you have with people at conferences during the breaks, so it doesn’t feel too much like work at all. Even when I do a lot of the work in my own time, I do love getting up and talking about things I’m passionate about (and I’m very bad at saying no too).
As for enjoyment, probably the most fun speaking gig I did in 2010 was MC-ing the first ever JustGiving awards – it was an amazing night filled with meeting inspirational people and hearing the most heart-warming stories – I’m already looking forward to MC-ing it again next year.
But aside from the JG awards, I will be speaking at as few conferences as possible next year to give myself (and the charity conference circuit) a rest from my dodgy puns and endless ‘amusingly’ captioned flickr photos. Unless, of course, you need anyone to talk about a certain fundraising website’s new set of APIs…
What is a blog for if not some shameless self-promotion? Say you needed people to vote for you in a masterchef-style cookery competition, the obvious thing to do would be to, well, ask on a blog.
So, if you happen to come across this post, please take a second to vote for Recipe for Disaster.
This is what it’s all about:
What is Nom Nom Nom?
It’s a fun competition for bloggers, writers, photographers and food enthusiasts. Over one day eight teams of two will shop for ingredients & cook a three-course meal for four, to be judged by a panel of experts. Afterwards, there’s a public “Viewers Choice” vote for the bloggers who produce the best online record of their meals.
You can read the whole story about what we cooked (including videos) over here, but just look at the ile flottante below. Isn’t that enough to tempt you to vote Recipe for Disaster?
After four different roles at JG on the charity side of the business over the last 5 years, I’ve now taken the awfully exciting jump to our Product and Innovation team to be a product manager.
The last few months have been really interesting for me in setting up our social media monitoring tools, creating social media strategies for different internal teams and working on specific projects like getting our new blog up and running, starting our relationship with Twibbon and managing our ipadio project, but I wanted to do more – whilst I love speaking about what we’re doing and what’s happening in the market, I felt like I could be making more things happen.
I now have the chance to do that – which is both an amazing opportunity that I feel very lucky to have, and also quite scary – there’s a lot of pressure, and I have a lot to prove.
Our immediate plans (as always with us, subject to change) are to make sure JG is much more integrated with social media, primarily with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and I cannot wait to start getting some of our ideas implemented. Further down the line, I’ll be working on how we expose our data and services using APIs, but we need to do plenty of investigation first before we start to get too excited about that…
Anyway, I have shed loads to learn in the next few weeks and months from extremely smart people on the product team like Liz, Jamie, Lee, Will, Adam, David, Rich and Kai, but I shall likely be calling on the lovely people of the internet for help and ideas along the way too.
As you may have read, ITV HD managed to run an advert at exactly the same time Steven Gerrard scored for England against the USA last Saturday. OK, it’s the worst possible timing for that to happen, but they do have previous – the same thing happened during an Everton v Liverpool FA cup game earlier this year.
I was one of the unlucky ones to have missed the goal (and all my best friends who I invited round to watch the game on my new HD TV…) but I’m resisting the temptation to rant (barely), and trying to be constructive instead. As what has annoyed me almost as much as missing the goal has been their poor response to unhappy fans online. So here’s a list of do’s and don’ts I’ve helpfully written out for them (which they’ll probably ignore too).
When a mistake happens, say sorry
“We’re really sorry that you missed the goal, we don’t know why it happened yet, but we’ll let you know when we do”.
This isn’t what ITV said on its twitter stream. Instead we got the wonderfully vague and corporate…
I don’t think I need to explain why I think this is bad.
Respond as soon as possible
What was the first tweet ITVfootball sent after the goal wasn’t broadcast?
Not something that would annoy someone who missed the goal first time round then…
And when did their apology come? Yes, two hours after the missed goal.
Make sure you’re listening
If people are being negative about you online, you probably want to know about it. And if you’re using a particular platform to talk to people (ie twitter), it’s useful to be checking said platform for what people are saying about you.Because when you listen, you can then respond to people who have complaints. Which leads me on to…
Respond to individuals as much as possible
1.5 million viewers were apparently affected by the goal blunder. You can’t apologise individually to all of them, but you can to the 10s (not 100s) who might be berating you on Twitter. In the case of ITVfootball, there were a fair number of people complaining on Twitter – but not hundreds of thousands. And even just replying to the people who had used @itvfootball would not have taken very long. An individual message would’ve been so much more effective for those people.
Vodafone tried this approach, and whilst the way they did it wasn’t perfect, it was better than nothing.
Be human, not corporate
The above advice could be summed up by saying it involves empathy, urgency, listening and responsiveness. Unfortunately, I do have some experience of dealing with this sort of thing (see an old post on comms in a crisis) but I think the main thing is to remain human and humble.
When you make mistakes, people will get annoyed. But if you can empathise, and connect on a human and individual level with the person who’s annoyed, you can make them less annoyed, if not totally turn that relationship around. But I’ve seen no effort from ITV to try and reach out to individuals, or anyone on the channels they are using. This is what has frustrated me more than anything.
But then, I don’t know why I expect a broadcaster to do anything on social media other than, well, broadcast.
****
If you’re interested in reading more about this, there’s a great write up on NMA of ITV’s failures as well as a great article on a missed opportunity for the brand featured in the advert that interrupted the goal.
Oh, and you can contact ITV at viewerservices@itv.com if you were also unlucky enough to miss the goal. I wouldn’t recommend trying to get an answer on Twitter though…
Jonathan Waddingham 