Have you been keeping up with your email lately?  What about the news?  Your favorite blogs?  Twitter?  The internet has vastly improved our ability to learn and share information, but as it expands, it’s getting more and more difficult for us to keep up with our preferred information sources.  Information overload is an increasing challenge to technology users: with so much content, how do we find what we want?  How do we stay on top of everything when “everything” keeps growing?

And, if you’re a non-profit: how does this affect you ability to reach your supporters?  (more…)

Since Google bought YouTube, they’ve made several attempts to monotize their content. They floated the idea of premercials, but users revolted, noting that most YouTube videos were so short, it wasn’t worth watching a 30-second ad to watch a 15-second clip of a cat riding a skateboard. Google also maintains the copious banner ads that appear on the site, but adblockers often make short work of them. And while AdWords appear from time to time, they’ll likely have to wait for some sort of content recognition to be effective. A little money comes in from gigantic advertisers, but one thing Google has always shown itself to be adept at is reaching the little guy.

YouTube’s latest monotization attempt comes in the form of ads  that pop up at the bottom of the video during play (pdf). While users can click to remove them, they appear randomly and are built into the player, so adblockers can’t find them (yet). And while everyone acknowledges that YouTube needs monotization from somewhere to remain free (they’ve probably got the biggest bandwidth and storage bill on the internet), a new Ipsos study shows a gap between users who accept ads in TV shows streamed online and those who would accept the same for YouTube.

Ars Technica theorizes that this is because users are already used to seeing ads in their TV, while they aren’t used to it with their YouTube, but I suspect that it’s because users understand that while someone has to pay for that episode of Heroes to be produced, and are willing to subsidize it, they also understand that the popup that’s appearing on someone’s YouTube video is likely not going toward a revenue share with the creator, and they don’t see YouTube’s hosting as a value add to the point that they would put up with interruptions.

For non-profits, though, these popup ads raise an interesting question: what’s going to appear in the middle of your video? Is your ad asking people to protest a company’s action going to see that company’s ad appear? Will Congressional candidates be attacked for ads that appear in their video, the same way they’ve been attacked for the places their ads appear? I suspect this loss of message control may scare some non-profits away from YouTube and toward other services, like BrightCove, where they have more control over their content.

On a recent trip to my mailbox, I was shocked to see a direct mail solicitation from Barack Obama’s campaign. I wasn’t shocked because they included me in their prospect pool, since I’ve donated before. I wasn’t shocked because they had my home address, since I gave them that. And I wasn’t shocked because he was asking for money – even with his fundraising prowess, Presidential campaigns are expensive. No, I was shocked because I realized that this was the first piece of snail mail I’ve ever received from Obama.

It made me think about how small a part direct mail seems to have played in his meteoric fundraising campaign. I’ve been donating online since February, but even the thank you’s for my online donations came in via email, with no supplemental thank you/re-ask message arriving in the mail. How is it that Obama for America could shatter all fundraising records with small donations, without making direct mail a central part of their strategy? And what could this mean for the future of non-profit fundraising?

My thoughts on these, and other questions, below the fold…

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Follow the links below to read recaps of some of the specific sessions at last week’s American Marketing Association Nonprofit Marketing Conference:

• Keynote:  The Power of Storytelling (Andy Goodman)
• Breakout:  Attracting Diverse Audiences (Donna Walker-Kuhne)
• Breakout:  Modern Day Movement Building (Bill Toliver)

We’re proud to announce the launch of our first Facebook application: Employees! Employees allows page managers to add bios for individuals without linking to their actual profiles, hitting the balance between showing off their team and respecting the privacy of their actual Facebook accounts.

We came up with the idea for Employees when we were first building our own Facebook page: we wanted to show off the Beaconfire staff, but many of us didn’t want links directly to our personal Facebook profiles. In addition, because of the way Facebook cordons people off, those profiles would mostly only be viewable by folks in the Washington DC area. We also wanted to be able to write short bios on what our staff do at Beaconfire so that people looking to work with us knew a little about the people they’d meet.

Adding Employees to your Facebook page is easy – just click here to learn more about the application and click “Add to Page.” Then you can populate it with your team’s bios and pictures (sorry, caricatures not included!). If you’d like to see Employees in action, just visit Beaconfire’s Facebook page to try it out (about halfway down on the right).

Building this application taught us a lot about working in an entirely new space – unlike most development projects we work on, where the platform is stable, the Facebook developer environment is always changing. In the next couple weeks, we’ll have a few posts here on the Wire about developing for Facebook, and some of what we learned – part of this project was getting our feet wet on a project for ourselves so we’ll be prepared to dive right in when we start work on client applications.

Beaconfire will be presenting at the 2008 Bridge Conference, which will take place at the Hilton Washington Hotel in Washington, DC, July 23-25, 2008.

Beaconfire VP & Co-Founder Michael Cervino will be presenting Micro Campaign Sites and Communication Integration on Thursday, July 24 from 10:30 am – noon. One of the fundamental dilemmas in any fundraising campaign is how to find real estate for it on your site. But what if your campaign WAS the site? More and more organizations are using micro-sites to highlight their various campaigns, build brand around issues, and serve as the hub for their fundraising efforts. In this session, participants will explore several examples of micro-sites and the on- and off-line communications used to drive donations.

Tuesday night was shaping up to be a typical evening in the exhibit hall at this week’s AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference. Michael Cervino and I were chatting up conference attendees and handing out Beaconfire literature and tchotkes (a small BF-branded booklight/flashlight), glasses of white wine in hand, as the highly efficient Mandarin Oriental staff circulated with hot hors d’oeuvres.

Midway through the reception, a young gentleman who was attending the conference with his family stopped by the booth. Michael offered him a booklight, and he politely declined. “Are you sure?” asked Michael. “They’re free.” “No thank you,” he responded and moved on to the next booth. We both shrugged and returned to working the room.

About 30 minutes later, the young man returned with his father. Pointing to the booklights, he asked, “May I have one of these?” “Of course,” I responded, thinking that he had changed his mind or gotten the OK from Dad. He picked one up and asked, “Would you like a picture?” “Yes, thank you!” He then presented me with the above drawing. Dad explained that his son was an avid reader and had very much wanted one of our booklights, but didn’t feel right about accepting one without giving us something in return.

I can only hope that this is truly representative of The Future, because if it’s led by people like this young man, I think it looks pretty bright.

Privacy on social networks

Social networks (socnets for short) are all about connecting with people, from friends to coworkers to that kid from the 3rd grade who always made you laugh. Part of the fun of these sites is that random people you have lost touch with can look you up and send you a message. Most socnets have privacy settings that allow you to control who sees your profile, which prevent that creepy kid from 6th grade from getting to know you better.

So what else is there to know about socnet privacy settings? Well, there’s actually a lot of variation on privacy policies (written and unwritten) from one site to the next. For this post, I’ll focus just on what outsiders can find out about you via a simple search.

Most socnets have default privacy settings that are fairly lenient. Generally if you set up an account and you don’t review those settings, outside users will be able to see your profile – including number of friends, who your friends are, pictures of you, your age, your late-night-ramblings, etc.

However, even if you change your settings to the strictest options possible, chances are someone who knows your email address can easily find out if you belong to a given social network and usually some additional information about you.

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Beaconfire’s own Michael Cervino and Steve MacLaughlin, Director of Internet Solutions for Blackbaud, led a highly interactive pre-conference tutorial session this morning at AMA’s nonprofit marketing conference in Washington, DC.  More than 20 participants from a variety of nonprofit organizations benefited from Beaconfire’s and Blackbaud’s combined expertise in creating integrated marketing campaigns that produce results that shine.

The session focused on integrating online efforts into organizations’ overall fundraising and advocacy programs.  The hottest topics of discussion included:

• Creating a strategy for the use of social networking tools
• Integrating data across multiple platforms and software packages
• Setting priorities with limited staff and budgets
• Convincing stakeholders to embrace new technologies appropriately
• Differentiating between “trendy” and a trend
• Focusing on doing one or two things well
• Learning how to say no to diversions

Download the session slides:  One to One Marketing presentation (PDF).

Anyone who’s worked for Congress has stories about the goofy and sometimes contradictory rules imposed by the various ethics committees and rules. These rules are almost universally outdated, a result of governing bodies that have the unenviable role of policing themselves, and inertia is a powerful force in keeping things from being changed.

The latest casualty of these archaic rules is the twitter feed of Representative John Culberson, a Republican(?!). Culbertson won some notoriety as he suggested that a letter sent by the Committee on House Administration (pdf) implied that,

They want to require prior approval of all posts to any public social media/internet/www site by any member of Congress!!!

Now, while few Members of Congress generally express themselves with three exclamation points, this is really his Twitter feed – in his capacity as “Most Connected Congressman,” Culbertson uses an impressive array of interactive web tools, to communicate (h/t for most of the info in the previous paragraphs to Personal Democracy Forum and the Sunlight Foundation, who’ve been providing continuing coverage of this issue).

For my part, I think that it’s time we modernized the rules that govern Congressional use of the internet, for reasons I’ll go into below the fold…

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For every person who says cause marketing and corporate philanthropy are “feel-good exercise[s], generating little value for a company’s shareholders” like Marc Gunther at Fortune, there is another saying “Executives tempted to cut back on their corporate philanthropy in a slowing economy should think again” like Rachel Cohen at Forbes.com.

With hard economic times, the debate about the merit of supporting nonprofits in any capacity is front and center for corporations, foundations, individual donors and the nonprofits that benefit from them. These days it feels like every other story in the news is about how to save at the pumps or cut costs during a recession. It is during times like this, when nonprofits begin to question their donor strategy, that it’s useful to remember what provokes engagement in a cause in the first place.  A number of these points were highlighted at the Cause Marketing Forum annual conference which I attended in May. The bottom line: no matter the state of the economy, humans are almost uniformly consistent.  Nonprofits would do well to remember these timeless nuggets about consumer behavior.

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Hundreds of Facebook friends.  Thousands of YouTube hits. Millions of dollars from community fundraising. Lively email groups and message boards. A veritable cyber-utopia of intellectual discourse.

A thriving online community, all centered on your cause.

You know you want it.

Or do you?

Many an online community project can be railroaded into the ground with one simple, seemingly innocuous sentence. “How can I stop ‘the bad people’ from?”

“The Bad People? ” Who are the bad people? There are different types of bad people. People who will use profanity. People who mean well, but egregiously write in online short-hand. Then, there’s the scariest people: those who don’t agree with your mission.

There are a series of filters you can use, depending on your application, to stop the profane. There’s even a stupid filter to prevent the low level of discourse online short-hand can create. But there’s only way to keep that third group in line: moderate.

But be careful. Once you decide to go down the path of moderating, you need to make sure you have a plan  and the man-hours to keep it up. Many non-profits just don’t have the resources. But you don’t need to toss that online community out yet.  You just need to prepare.

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Beaconfire will be exhibiting and presenting at the AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference, which will take place at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC, July 14-16, 2008.

Beaconfire VP & Co-Founder Michael Cervino will be presenting One to One Marketing: Using Technology to Connect with Individuals with Steve MacLaughlin, Director, Internet Solutions for Blackbaud, on Monday, July 14 from 8 am – noon.  This session will demystify emerging communication channels collectively known as social media. Participants will reach a better understanding of how to use email, websites, RSS feeds, direct mail, stewardship, and social networking sites to improve people-to-people marketing, fundraising and friend-raising. During the interactive portion of this session, participants will work with peers to develop a wireframe multi-channel marketing plan based on real-world cases.

We’ll also be in the exhibit hall at tabletop #9, so be sure to stop by to visit us.