Jonathan Waddingham

Tag: facebook

  • My notes from #f8 – anonymous login, mobile likes and a #sherylselfie

    I’ve been lucky enough to be in San Francisco this week for Facebook’s F8 developer conference. It’s been a really interesting experience altogether, being in the epicentre of the startup world and visiting the likes of Pinterest and Facebook’s offices to see what it’s like. But F8 was a conference on a whole new level – the scale, slickness and content were of a level I’ve not experienced before. It was a little bewildering at times, especially given the vast amount of information being shared, but I tried to capture as much content as I could using Storify, Flickr, Twitter, and (of course) Facebook so I had some notes to look back on and figure out what it meant for us.

    Facebook announced so much that it’s pretty hard to distil it, but I tried to pick out the most useful titbits for each part and storify the hell out of it. But possibly the most exciting part was saying hello to Sheryl Sandberg and getting a #sherylselfie.

     

    As a relatively new parent of a lovely little girl, I love what she’s doing with the #banbossy campaign: she’s a great role model for girls. But anyway, apart from that excitement, here’s all the notes I took from three chunks – the keynote, the latest on building stuff and what’s new in growth.

    Keynote notes (key notes?)

     

    //storify.com/jon_bedford/f8-keynote-mark-zuckerberg/embed?header=false&border=false//storify.com/jon_bedford/f8-keynote-mark-zuckerberg.js?header=false&border=false[View the story “#F8 keynote – Mark Zuckerberg and pals” on Storify]

    What’s new about building stuff

    //storify.com/jon_bedford/f8-afternoon-sessions-build/embed?header=false&border=false//storify.com/jon_bedford/f8-afternoon-sessions-build.js?header=false&border=false[View the story “#F8 afternoon sessions – build” on Storify]

    How to grow with Facebook

    //storify.com/jon_bedford/f8-breakout-sessions-grow/embed?header=false&border=false//storify.com/jon_bedford/f8-breakout-sessions-grow.js?header=false&border=false[View the story “#F8 breakout sessions – grow” on Storify]

    So, what does that all mean?

    In the unlikely event that you’ve read this far, er, I, er, dunno. Still haven’t quite digested the epic amounts of information shared to think about the big picture. But I do know that we’ll have a fair bit of work to do off the back of this, that some things may make our lives a little harder, but plenty will make our lives easier too – and probably help us help people raise that bit extra via Facebook.

    I also know that I felt incredibly lucky to be invited and to be able to fly halfway across the world to attend. I hope I get invited back next year…

  • The future of Facebook fundraising

    This is an article I wrote back in October 2012 and has just been published in the International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing (you’ll know it as the IJNVSM). It’s predominantly based on a presentation I gave at the IoF National Convention in 2012, so some of the data is now a bit old – for the most up-to-date data check out this presentation instead – but the thoughts remain the same…

    The future of Facebook fundraising

    When people talk about Facebook in relation to charities, they often ask what the ROI is. The general perception of Facebook is that it’s not a great way to raise money, but is fantastic as a communication and community building tool. This is true, but only to a certain extent. At JustGiving, the UK’s largest online fundraising website, we have found that encouraging and enabling individual charity supporters to share their donations or updates about their fundraising events on Facebook has a great impact on amounts raised – just one share on Facebook encourages between £1 and £18 in extra donations.

    To look to the future and understand the true potential for fundraising on Facebook, it’s first necessary to look to the past. In the summer of 2007 Facebook overtook Google to become the biggest source of web traffic to JustGiving, and then at the end of 2008 Facebook started to bring us more traffic than online email. In the intervening years, Facebook has continued to grow in importance and become the primary way that people who use JustGiving to raise money for charity tell their friends about their fundraising event and ask for sponsorship.

    In 2011 alone, Facebook drove over 1 million individual donors to JustGiving, who collectively gave £22 million – of which £1 million was donated by people coming to the site from the mobile version of Facebook. By May 2012, 32% of donations on our platform came from Facebook, a 130% year on year growth. One of the ways we reacted to this growth was by building an application that people could use to donate to charity or sponsor a friend without leaving Facebook – this generated over £250,000 in the first 9 months of 2012 . Given the continuation of this growth, we expect that by 2015, 50% of donations made through JustGiving will come from Facebook.

    In a way, this growth in fundraising reflects Facebook’s own incredible growth. As of June 2012, it had 955 million monthly active users and steadily closing in on a billion users, of which 543 million users accessed the site through their mobile. In the UK, there are over 31 million active users and over half of them use the site every day. And in a study of 30,000 adults by the London Science Museum, more people would prefer to live without toilets than Facebook! (Source: The Next Web)

    So from a British perspective, the prospective audience is huge, and more importantly, hugely engaged. But how do non-profits make the most of it?

    Making the most of Facebook

    To start, organisations that have Facebook pages should make the most of its features and plan an approach that engages their online community. Advice from Facebook themselves includes setting clear guidelines about what is and isn’t acceptable to post on your wall – this will help when users veer off topic or post things you don’t approve of. It can also reduce the risk that people will leave negative comments, a fear which puts off  many first time social media users. By having clear guidelines, you can reduce that risk and give yourselves the room to ban people who don’t abide by them.

    Another useful approach is to create a ‘conversation calendar’ whereby you plan the content you will share on your page in advance. This helps create consistency of communication, as well as making sure you have a good mix of messaging – so you don’t bombard people with messages about campaigns one week and only fundraising events the next, but have a rich mix of topics that show the breadth of work your organisation is involved in.

    For more insight on using pages, see Facebook tips, Facebook studio or the Non-Profits on Facebook page.

    Share more, raise more

    At JustGiving, we have found a way to monetize Facebook by encouraging the people taking actions on our site to share them with their Facebook friends. Specifically, when someone sponsors a friend who’s taking part in a fundraising event, as soon as a donation has been successfully processed we prompt them to share a link to their friend’s fundraising page on Facebook. As some people do not like sharing how much they give to charity, or that they give to charity at all, we frame the request as a way of helping their friend raise more money. So the perception is that sharing is an altruistic act, not a way to show off their generosity.

    Whilst we promote sharing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and by email, sharing to Facebook is by far the most popular option, accounting for 90% of shares. This is not entirely surprising, given Facebook’s scale compared to the other networks and that most people will have been asked by a friend on Facebook to sponsor.

    Redeveloping our website to encourage and highlight social sharing has had a massive impact on the number of donations made, raising an extra £1 million in eight months. This is because for every share a donor makes to a social network, a certain percentage of their friends will see that message and click on a link to make another donation on JustGiving. Our data has shown that this means each share to Facebook is worth, on average, an extra £4.50. In contrast, a share to Twitter was worth £1.80 and a share on LinkedIn £3.30. From September 2011 to April 2012, Facebook sharing generated over £925,000, Twitter £55,000 and LinkedIn, £22,000.

    What has been fascinating to observe, however, is how the impact of a share on Facebook changes depending on the context of who is sharing and what they’re sharing. For example, if a donor shares a message on Facebook about them donating directly to a charity, it is worth £1 per share, but if someone shares a message about donating to a friend’s fundraising page, it is worth around £5. But if a fundraiser (ie, someone taking part in a fundraising event for a charity) themselves shares a text update about their event, it is worth around £12 per share. And then if the fundraiser records a video about their event and shares that, the average value per share increases to £18.

    In each instance, the content that is shared appears in a Facebook newsfeed in broadly the same way, but the motivation and interest of the messages is totally different. It may be self-evident on reflection that individuals in a social network are more likely to respond to someone doing something for a charity (that the network may or may not be interested in) than a person just donating to a charity (that the network may or may not be interested in), but the way we built our product and tracked the data proves that this is actual behaviour. This could be summarised as ‘the greater the effort of the individual, the greater the response from their network’.

    So what does this mean for charities wanting to use Facebook to raise money? Well, it proves that encouraging people to share their charitable actions on Facebook can help you raise more money. And that the impact of sharing varies a lot depending on the type of content being shared, so more care should be taken on how people are encouraged to share.

    Most non-profits will have a way of accepting donations online, but very few of those processes actively encourage the donor to share their donations with friends. It is clearly beneficial to prompt those donors to share their donation on social networks, but it’s important to frame that request as a way of helping the charity raise more money from their friends and not as a way of ‘showing off’. Given that each Facebook user has an average of 130 friends, just one share could reach many people that the charity doesn’t have access too – and the message may be more effective coming from that friend than from the charity itself. In addition, non-profits should encourage people to add more content to these shares – to say ‘why’ the donor gave to that charity, sharing the interesting story that motivated the donation. Encouraging donors to share their motivation will make their share on the social network much more interesting and engaging to their network and increase the impact of that share.

    Many websites enable people to share their site on Facebook or Twitter without thinking about what content is being shared. Just sharing a link and a title of a webpage isn’t going to be very interesting to the network of the person who’s sharing, so you have to both think about how to encourage the ‘sharer’ to share, and what content is going to most engage the friends of that ‘sharer’.

    To summarise, after every action someone takes on a non-profit website, whether it’s making a donation, signing up to a newsletter or registering for an event, they should be prompted to tell their friends on social networks that they did it and equally importantly why they did it.

    Where next for social sharing?

    The future for social sharing is already changing, thanks to a feature Facebook introduced at the start of 2012 – Timeline. The Timeline is a way individuals can collate all their activity on Facebook in chronological order, but it also enables application developers to add more richness to the experiences they create. Before 2012, users could only ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ things on Facebook, but Timeline allows app developers to create their own vocabulary on Facebook that more accurately describes the actions a user is taking. It also shares the content in more places on Facebook: as well as posting content in the newsfeed like most shares, the stories are shared in the ticker and on a user’s Timeline.

    For example, by connecting the music streaming service Spotify to Facebook, you can share a ‘song’ you’re ‘listening’ to, or by using the Guardian newspaper’s social reading app, you can share an ‘article’ you’re ‘reading’. In both these examples, you can set-up the app to share on your behalf so the act of listening becomes the act of sharing, and the act of reading becomes the act of sharing; you don’t have to click a ‘share’ button to tell your friends what you’re reading or sharing. Thanks to this integration, both the Guardian and Spotify experienced huge uptakes in their user base, with the Guardian going from 0 to 3.9 million active users in just a couple of months. (Source: Facebook developer blog).

    Facebook launched JustGiving’s integration in April 2012, which allows users to share the ‘donations’ they’ve made, enables fundraisers to share ‘thanks’ to their sponsors and gives people a way to ‘remember’ someone who’s passed away, on their Timeline. (Source: Facebook developer blog). In this case, the act of clicking a ‘thank’ button on JustGiving creates a story on Facebook that you ‘thank’ that sponsor, and by connecting their JustGiving and Facebook accounts, every time someone donates, a story is automatically shared on Facebook sharing the donation. All these actions are then aggregated on a user’s Timeline, showing the friends they have supported, the charities they have donated to, and the people they have thanked.

    Open graph integration (since changed)

    These aggregations are only available if you integrate with Timeline – they add richness to a user’s history with your app, showing their friends what they’ve done in a more interesting way than a single story. Since adding our Timeline integration, we’ve seen the number of referrals from user’s Timelines be almost as much as the referrals from the newsfeed. This was surprising, but it shows that Facebook users do look at other’s profiles and find the content that’s aggregated there from Timeline applications interesting enough to click on and take the same actions themselves.

    The growth of mobile

    One other way we have seen Facebook’s impact on fundraising change has been the growth of people accessing Facebook from their mobile devices. As quoted earlier, 543 million people access Facebook every month using their mobile, and this number is growing steadily. Understanding the impact of mobile optimisation as a general trend in online fundraising is important, especially in relation to social networks.

    The growth of mobile visits to JustGiving has increased massively over the last three years, from 6% in April 2010 to 15 % in April 2011, up to a massive 32% in April 2012. Building a mobile experience for those users has helped to increase conversions by those users, but the main driver of that growth is social networks, and especially Facebook. In April 2010, mobile Facebook accounted for only 0.18% of visits to JustGiving. That grew to 4% in April 2011, but by April 2012 it was responsible for bringing 11% of all traffic to JustGiving. That’s a massive growth in a short space of time, and so we are trying to give those users who come from mobile Facebook a better experience – this will be a key challenge for the future.

    One thing we have done is encourage mobile users to share their donations on Facebook, and whilst this doesn’t have the same volume as those sharing from our desktop site, it’s still generating a reasonable impact and is growing more every month. In September 2012, sharing by sponsors to Facebook on our desktop site brought in almost £140,000, whereas sharing from our mobile site brought in £27,000. We expect these numbers to start to converge over time as people become more familiar with transacting on mobile devices and technology makes this type of sharing easier for the end user.

    In summary

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network and its scale and influence cannot be ignored. In relation to fundraising, we may not yet have reached a point where charities can actively raise significant funds themselves, but their supporters certainly can. By encouraging supporters to share donations or their relationship with charities on Facebook, it can and will bring in extra donations from the friends of those supporters. It’s key to both encourage sharing andthink about what gets shared by supporters too.

    For those non-profits who have the technical capabilities, through partners or in-house development teams, Facebook Timeline gives a new and powerful way to enable sharing by doing – to add a rich layer of context and interest that makes Timeline stories and their aggregations relevant and impactful. With the recent launch of native Facebook integration in the latest Apple operating system release (iOS 6), adding a social layer to mobile experiences is now even easier and will become ever more the norm. The future is undoubtedly mobile, so understanding people’s behaviour on mobile, making the experience optimised, easy-to-use and above all social, will be essential for the non-profit looking to the future of Facebook fundraising.

  • Open graph now open for service on JG

    Back in October, I wrote about one of Facebook’s latest BETA features and how I was quite excited about its potential (see Grammar as a platform and sentences as a service – Facebook’s new open graph). After the open graph (or Timeline apps, as they’re known) went live in January earlier this year, there have been quite a few success stories of apps/products getting massive exposure and hockey stick shaped usage graphs as a result. Notable winners have been the Guardian and social media flavour of the month Pinterest.

    Having seen their success and thought long and hard about how we could integrate, it was very exciting to hear from Facebook themselves a couple of weeks ago asking how our integration was going – as they were looking for some new apps to promote for a big European launch. Luckily, we were in the middle of working on the integration, so it was perfect timing.  I say it was perfect timing, although it would have been better to not be releasing the new feature on the day of the demo – especially as one of the features we released was just an idea on Friday and live by the following Thursday. That’s by a long way the quickest turnaround of any product from inception to release I’ve ever been involved in. Even the tech guys at Facebook were impressed at our speed, *beams*.

    Anyway, it was very exciting to be invited to Amsterdam last week to demo our new app. Cue excited tweet…

    Essentially the new integration allows you to share messages on Facebook about “donating to a fundraising page” and “thanking a donor” in the newsfeed, ticker and on timeline. And it’s the aggregations I’m most excited about, showing on a timeline the friends people have sponsored, charities they’ve given to as well as how much they gave (if that’s public). See this blog post for more, but you get a flavour from the screenshot below. It’s interesting and tells you things you might not know or remember, that’s the key.

    So anyway, as a result of this, we got a bunch of great coverage in places from The Next Web to the Telegraph, not to mention in Facebook’s Christian Hernandez’s keynote at the The Next Web conference (see video here). But my particular favourite headline was in T3: “JustGiving launches Facebook timeline widget to aid humanity“. Can’t say more than that.

    I’m really excited to see how this works out for us, and will no doubt be banging on about the stats when it does (look forward to that), but it’s nice to get some coverage about our tech work for once. We’ve got a stellar development team and I think (naturally) that we do a lot of innovative work, but that is not always acknowledged in the sector.

    Now I just need to get back to working on the next product to aid humanity…(!)

  • Finally, a charity uses Facebook integration to tell a great story

    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.

  • Grammar as a platform and sentences as a service – Facebook’s new open graph

    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:

    <meta property=”og:type” content=”mydemoapp:recipe” />

    <meta property=”og:title” content=”Stuffed Cookies” />

    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 couple of 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.