Yesterday I was contacted by Kirsty Stephenson from Childsifoundation via Twitter asking if I could give them some quick advice on their social media activities.
Childsifoundation is a charity aiming to build a home for abandoned children in Uganda and their business strategy is purely collaboration which is the perfect fit for Web 2.0 harnessing the power of the community and crowdsourcing. They already use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and have a great blog. Their strategy at the moment is outreach and increasing word of mouth marketing for the charity before they move onto asking for money donations.
I immediately replied to their request to give some advice on the use of widgets as part of their social media activity for the first step. Below is the e-mail I sent:
Hi Kirsty,
With regard to your Facebook group the first thing you should really look to do is create a ‘widget’ and place it on your profile page.
Widgets simply allow consumers to grab and share your social ad at the same time promoting your charity and encourages word of mouth marketing.
This can not only be shared amongst your Facebook group but can also be shared with other major social networking sites increasing your reach and seeding content further.
Earlier this year I interviewed Ted Hunt from innocent drinks who used this form of social advertising to promote their buy 1 grow 1 tree campaign: http://grow.innocentdrinks.co.uk/
A widget is essentially a ‘pin badge’ for your supporters web pages, profiles, blogs etc… and increases the virality of the campaign. This is a perfect fit not only for your charity’s business strategy as it is focussed on word of mouth marketing as you want to spreading the word via communities, but it also continues engagement simply by updating the content within the widget such as week by week progress reports of your charity’s activities.
Because you already have video content you can make this immediately into a widget, but ensure that the video gets its message across in 20 secs max as attention span of consumers will not go beyond this.
You can also create a variety of widgets for example another widget would include a the list of charitable things that you want users to do, so they can quickly view this list and click on what needs to be donated - as a result you increase your reach.
Take a look at the following ‘In Widget’ example at http://www.clearspring.com/services/widgetmedia/gallery
You can transform your ‘Get Involved’ list into a dynamic list that users can click on and find out more. Your ‘Get Involved’ page is a really engaging page as consumers can interact as see if there is anything they can help with or contact their friends if they know someone else with the skills to assist. Engagement is the key to social media.
Place this widget on your blog too as your blog is the launch pad for all other social media activity and visitors will be able to grab and share this application at any time. You can also track where your widget has been shared so you can monitor your campaign performance and reach.
You can then use this widget as a donating tool later on when you move onto the next stage of your strategy.
Set up an account and create your social widgets over at http://www.clearspring.com/ it is very simple to use and effective.
Hope this helps you out at this stage.
Best regards,
Tom.
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