Charity apps - to do or not to do

In the past few days I had a number of discussions with colleagues about smartphone apps - should charities do them or not?

We ended up with two schools of thought:

1) you build an app which people will find genuinely useful and will fire it up every now and then. Example of such apps are - Water Aid's toilet finder, Marie Curie's tea app, MacMillan app that helps you find an independent coffee shop where you are, St John's ambulance first aid app.
2) you build an app which will serve up your content in a simple, clear, easy to navigate way, much neater than your website - such as the latest one.org app (US only), Amnesty International app (AI candle) or Red Nose Day.

Plus in both scenarios if the app is new, cool and everyone is talking about it - you get PR. Think Ihobo app.

I personally favour the first school of thought and see the logic in the PR argument although would think twice before investing a lot of money.

Just optimise for mobile

And here's why - there are three main barriers with apps:

1) people need to download them
2) they need to actively open them
3) and sometimes, they need to actively update them to get new content

This assumes a good amount of enthusiasm and some kind of need at user end.
And this is where I usually have a reality check......

We know that most of website content comes through our own marketing push through email, online advertising, PPC, media stories and now more and more through social media. With apps, at the moment, we don't have this mechanism unless people allow push notifications (and I am not sure how many people really keep them on).

So the user journey you have is:
User receives email, they pick it up on their mobile phone, they click on the link and...... they end up on your website... Which is ok, but not that easy to use as links are tiny and you can't press the link easily etc etc... User needs to be really keen to go and fire up the app in order to access that content...

Much better investment of time and money is to just optimise your emails and websites for mobile.

Apps graveyard

There is a graveyard of apps out there - most popular and used are games, and even only few of those catch on. In summary - really really difficult market.

Saying this, I think Red Nose Day app worked really well, but it had a clear ambition to serve a specific audience that they know they have access to for a limited period of time.

Also, there is no doubt that some charities have a very committed supporter base who will happily use their favourite charity app because it does something they need.

All in all it does come down to the basics of developing any digital/comms product - you need to clarify what your objectives are, what does success look like, how you'll measure it, who is the audience you are aiming the app at and what's their profile, how will you promote your app to that audience, etc etc..

Costs

From my experience prices of app development vary wildly and it's all dependant on how much of new design and technical wizardry you need for an app. I think it's best to keep it simple, use features that are well established, tried and tested because if app doesn't work once, that's it - it's unlikely users will try it out again.

Also, my tech colleague has been playing with Iphone app platform and has built some really simple apps. So if this is of interest, it's good to get internal teams to experiment. You just need to register with Apple.

Plus, there is an opportunity to partner an agency who want to do an innovative new thing in this space. As a result, a charity gets a free app and PR and the agency attracts new business :)

There are couple of other articles on this topc from the US which offer some additional insight along these lines:
http://www.frogloop.com/care2blog/2010/11/26/are-nonprofits-wasting-time-developing-mobile-apps.html

And in this article they give some more examples and advice
http://www.frogloop.com/care2blog/2010/8/31/nonprofits-take-a-dive-into-mobile-apps.html

And what about Android?

Keep a watching brief. Android market is not growing as the predictions have you believe and it's mostly because the app market is not managed and it's like Wild West. So a lot of rubbish

out there. Android adoption is on the up no doubt, but if you want to test app market, starting with Apple is probably the best first step. Both developer and consumer markets are more mature and if your apps works in this environment, it will work with Android too.

Evaluating and Monitoring (impact of) digital communications

Monitoring and Evaluating Online Projects With online communications we can measure and evaluate a lot more than in offline communications. The trick is to understand what stats are relevant/useable, what they tell us and what we can learn from them.
What do we mean by 'impact' in the world of digital communications and how we evaluate it.

Metrics:
Open rates, click-though rates
Conversion rate
Page views
Visits
Email sign-ups
Referrers

What can we evaluate online?
-how many people came to the website
-how many times people loaded (viewed) the page
-where they went after they viewed the page
-where they came from, what they searched for to end up on that page
-we can even analyze the behaviour of a specific segment of people ( for example -everyone who visited a page, or came from a specific location)
-how many people successfully took a journey we’ve set through the website

email

-how many people opened an email (HTML)
-how many people clicked on the links
-how many people who opened the email finished the journey (for example, donated or took a campaigning action)
etc, etc

Based on this data we can get a good idea of how successful a specific content is, what positioning of elements on a web page leads to more conversion rates etc..

Impact

In order to be able to measure impact you need to be clear about your communication strategy and how this contributes to impact of you initiative.

So old-school comms planning is the key and I always try to do it in an iterative way with the teams I work with:

1.When you identify objectives (why are you producing a piece of communication) immediately think how you’ll know that you’ve achieved it. Can you measure this – do you have internal systems set up to do it? If not, have a think again.

So for example a typical objective would be “To educate our supporters about XYZ”. How will you measure this? By the number of email sign-ups? Number of packs distributed? Online survey of your supporters before and after? None of these answers is wrong, but they do clearly set out what would reaching a specific objective mean for your organisation.

By asking these questions you identify the RESPONSE you need from your supporters.

2.Who is your audience? What are they like? Are they likely to respond in the way you want them to respond? If yes, great, but if no, maybe you need to rethink your objectives and therefore your response?

How to set your targets?

The best way is learning from the past or from baseline studies.
Or you can just evaluate by monitoring trends – for example, “%increase” or “more of ….”. But then you need a baseline which shows what the current situation is – so you have something to compare to.
If no baseline, compare to same industry benchmarks (e-benchmarks study),

Baselines
E-benchmarks study - US http://www.e-benchmarksstudy.com/

Performance benchmarks - UK - www.fairsay.com

Charity virtual gifts

I am looking at virtual gifts that are out there in the market.

oxfamunwrapped

Design
gifts+images
mix of photos and illustration

What you get (fulfilment)
fridge magnet, giftbox with DVD (celebrity-packed)
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/content/unwrapped/how_it_works.html
personalised card/ecard
Choice of ecards - so you can send a Christmas ecard and a goat magnet and card! - value for money!
envelope can say "Do not open until......"

Themes
9 themes with 6-9 gifts

Language
'eco-warriors' for climate-change related gifts
'super women' for women rights
humour
extra stuff
- wedding lists and wish lists (via login)

Earmarking
'I am happy for Oxfam to use my money for something else if need be' tick-box (more)

Promotion
- celebrity DVD
- youtube videos promoting the gifts (celebrities)

http://www.LivingGifts.org.uk

What you get
Voucher - so you can choose how can the donation be spent (in which country)
This is a fantastic way of capturing gift recipients!!

Buying experience
personal message
goes directly to recipient
choose card design to go with your chosen amount
preview of the voucher with the personal message
interactive online catalogue

presentaid.org/
Christian Aid

- celebrity video explaining how the scheme works

Buying experience
- e-cards
- prices in euros
- promotion of other products
- recipient reviews
- can't buy without registering (bad bad bad)

What you get
- e-card
- no idea! couldn't find out from the website! (because I didn't want to log in)

musthavegifts.org/

Design
Photos not illustration

Buying experience
- if you liked that you might like these....
- buyers comments as they buy
- wishlists (but 36 gifts)
- chose a card, different ways of personalising

Promotion
- youtube videos promoting the gifts (online catallogue)




- celebrity endorsment (What others are saying)

Language
humor

Other ideas
Interactivity
Katine village - interactive tour
Kroo bay - webisodes

charitywater.org/birthdays - ah - what a website!

What is it about this website that is so brilliant?

Communication style and content

As soon as I came to the home page I knew what the website was about and what I was meant to do. And that is because three red buttons on the left clerly indicate that this is about your personal involvement in fundraising for this project.

What NGOs call 'issues' or 'educationsl content' is secondary content - on the bottom left.

This website is a perfect example of how to communicate online - a text-light website, focussing on video. Video clips are short and narrated in an accessible, everyday language.

Acknowledging that watching 33 case studies could be too much they offer a Guided tour of the project where they present 5 projects covering different issues related to lack of water.

Live updates of the latest on the website - new pages, new donations, comments - make the content of the website fresh 24/7.

Fundraising
The ask is very clear and there is an ask for a specific amount.
The fundraising model is also interesting - instead of doing wish-lists people are invited to put money towards the project.

Design
Flash - a bit annoying because you can't navigate directly to some pages, but it means that website owners have a very good control over how people will interact with the site.

Creature discomforts

I saw the new set of Ads by Leonard Cheshire...
http://www.creaturediscomforts.org/

Done by Aardman the ads have kept all of the humour of the original Creature comforts while very clearly describing the issue.

I am really impressed by Leonard Cheshire for going ahead with this ad campaign. I would be surprised if there wasn't a lot of fear of and resistance to this ad campaign in the organisation because people thought that the characters and the name will be seen as insulting and politically incorrect by disabled people.

And have you seen what they did to their logo - very clever branding I think. Again, some organisations would never allow that, fearing that it confuses the brand. While I think that it refreshes it - I never took notice of this organisation/brand before...

But the website shows that people got the message and love the characters - even the people who did the voices ('Making the Ads' section on the website). Since the launch of the new stage of the campaign on 3rd July (I think TV ads only went out in the past few days) they had 15 comments about the campaign. The forum had few discussions since November. The Creature dicomforts Facebook group attracted 338 members, while Leonard Cheshire has only 23 friends (although this might be because the organisation is represented as an individual profile rather than a group or a fan of page)

By using Aardman characters people are drawn into the issue that is not necessarily at the forefront of their minds. And once you are drawn in, the story is told in a simple way, by disabled people themselves. Not by policy wonks ;)
And it seems that there are badges and some other bits or merchandise featuring these characters which are I am sure very popular.

Unfortunately, the Get involved section of the website doesn't ask people to take a political action - the first stage of the campaign asked people to email their MP. However, the actions people can take (send and e-card/spread the word, sign up to e-updates or take the quiz) encourage people to sign up to their e-news. So once the organisation has an action they will have a list of 'warm' people to email and ask to take the action.

Signing up to Twitter feeds without a Twitter account

Doh!

I am probably the last person in the world who figured out only now that you can sign up to follow a Twitter account without creating a Twitter account.
You just need to do is SMS "follow [username]" (without inverted commas) to +447624801423 - US number has a shortcode.

A good explanation of how it all works is here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/can_non_twitter_users_follow_by_sms

Why am I so excited?

It means that charities can use Twitter as a free SMS updates tool. For example I am at a rally or at an event and I can sign up to get updates on what's going on on the other end of the rally or in negotiations about the issue we are rallying about, etc...
Updates would have to come from people who have Twitter accounts and are friends with the main account (the one that people are following)

Things to investigate....

1) If someone who follows me anonymously (which is what happens to people who sign up in this way) when I publish "me and friends" RSS feed - if they sent an update to the twitter number - will it show in this feed?

Because what you really want is to be able to use twitter in both ways as a broadcast tool but we could also ask supporters to post a message to a politician via Twitter SMS. This is then published as an RSS feed with everyone's messages (again me and friends feed) on a charity blog or website as well as on the Twitter page.

2) Can you set up a shortcode that would go to the twitter number? Is it possible to have many shortcodes for one mobile phone number/SIM card?

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