How do you measure the success of Dog to Person Fundraising on Social Networks? Dollars or Doggie Treats?

Gus, one of the contestants for the Humane Society's Spay Day Photo Contest

The Humane Society of the US launched an online photo contest in honor of Spay Day.  The contest  combines wisdom of the crowds with person to person or rather dog to person fundraising.  If I was a friend of Gus's owner, I'd donate to the Humane Society. (Well, as you know I'm both a dog lover and a supporter of animal welfare organizations, not just because I'm sucker for cute dog photos.)

The contest offered a web and Facebook version.   It looks, from the point of view of an outside observer, like a success. I look forward to hearing more about the contest and the lessons learned from Carrie Lewis, HSUS's social media rockstar.   She'll be presenting at SXSW, on a panel about social media and ROI.

Over the years, I've watched the Carrie Lewis at the Humane Society do a fantastic job managing the organization's social media strategy and projects.   In 2007, the Human Society implemented its first photo petition campaign to protest Wendy's treatment of animals . They tracked the number of photo submissions they got, but they also listened carefully to the responses they got from participants.

As Carrie Lewis mentions in the comments in the blog post , "Since this was our first run at a photo petition, it was difficult to get across exactly what we wanted people to do without writing a book. So every person that wrote in and needed help was answered personally. This gave us a good idea of how to more clearly explain ourselves next time." This particular photo campaign had many technical glitches and ultimately the number of submissions was less than impressive. Did HSUS proclaim that photo competitions were a waste of time?

No.

The next iteration of a photo contest, LOL Seals , made it as easy as possible for people to participate. That's what they had learned from the first campaign. The first contest, they asked people to upload their photos and tag it themselves, which meant they had to create a Flickr account and know what “tagging” was. The second contest, they used the Flickr API which made everything automatic -- from tagging and uploading without the user having to even touch Flickr. They had about 3,000 submissions and captured about 2,000 new email addresses.

I think the secret to the Humane Society's success with social media is that they have used metrics to learn what works and what doesn't.    They are also masters at the Listen, Learn, and Adapt methods.  Now with some years of experience and knowing what works, what doesn't, they can do a traditional ROI process.

Over on the Convio Connection Cafe Blog, I found this gem of a video presentation by Grace Markarian who is the Online Communications Manager for Humane Society of the United States.  It's from a session at the Direct Marketing Association meeting on multi-channel marketing.  During the presentation, Grace shares how her organization has integrated social media into their communications, advocacy and fundraising efforts. 

Grace mentions how the Humane Society has successfully broken down staff silos.   The HSUS team has daily 9 minute meetings, unless there is something really important then they can run a few minutes longer. These short briefing meetings have helped them be more efficient and effective with every aspect of multi-channel campaigns.  This is a great examples of how one nonprofit has embraced social media and that it isn't an isolated activity by one person.

In the presentation, the Humane Society shares both the tangible and intangible benefits that their social media strategies provide.   This is the first step in a traditional ROI process.   These are:

Tangible:

• Increased email database
• Obtained original content
• Obtained free PSAs
• Raised some money
• Recruited new donors
• Recruited members, fans, friends

Intangible

• Raised awareness about our issues
• Engaged people to participate in the issue
• Generated discussions on our issues
• Received buy-in from the top
• Received recognition and media attention (online buzz)

How do they know they've been successful?   They use metrics to measure the results and translate into values.   What metrics do they use?  Here's a list:

# of submissions/comments
# of friends, fans, members over time
# of new names added to email file
# of donations/amount of donations
# of video / photo views
# of subscribers (RSS, blog)
# of blog and wall comments
# of voting participants
# of blogs linking to us / covering our story (consider quality)
# of friends recruited (TAF)
Frequency of bulletin reposts on MySpace
Content of keywords, comments (what are people talking about?)

Grace Markarian also offers some tips to get started where she emphasizes the importance of getting buy-in from your organization's leadership, gotten over fears of "losing control" of messaging, accepted that it takes time to listen and build your presence, and your organization is ready to integrate social media into other Internet activities.   Her conclusions - and I wholeheartedly agree, are:

• Integrating social media into your nonprofit's marketing and fundraising campaigns can help build buzz and online actions (like donations) slowly, but their email marketing is the #1 driver of success.

• Social media allows HSUS to reach audiences that may not reach through other channels or at all, but you must allocate the resources to monitor and communicate with this audience to sustain success.

• Participating on social network sites allows them to experiment with new technologies, but it requires constant willingness to learn.

Update:  Chronicle of Philanthropy writes a blog post about the Spay Day Photo Contest.  It's raised over $500,000.

Comments

[Scott Henderson]

Three things stick out in my mind as I read this:
1. Email is their conversion driver and is accelerated by the many other touch points
2. They've done an excellent job of stating & measuring their goals
3. An internal shift has occurred within the organization to support the external shift of their fundraising strategy & tactics.

With some of the chatter about "is Web 2.0" over, I think it's more accurate to say the Web 2.0 hype is over. We've now moved into a time where our organizations are realizing the importance of aligning these new tools with time honored principles of success. Thanks for pulling case study together for us to consider.

@scottyhendo

[Alex]

Very interesting article, Beth. Also, it was a pleasure to hear you speak via Skype at IoF North!

Our metrics are almost always feedback-related - numbers of subscribers and numbers of people on databases but also numbers of messages, degree of interaction (which is why Twitter is more successful than MySpace from our point of view).

Of course it depends on the site. On DoggySnaps it's not the number of members overall but the number of returning members (50%) and active forum members. We consider it a major success that we rehomed a dog through Twitter, and that we're tracking increasing numbers of people coming to us asking about specific dogs or about general dog care. We're getting dogs into homes AND meeting our aims and objectives of spreading information and education.

For our Facebook App and DoggySnaps Dog Show photo competitions we can add a financial metric which is great. We're believers in a social fundraising strategy that includes lots of ways to give small amounts. The same team that set up the pages / application etc is the one to read the feedback and respond to questions. We can increase the number of entries from one month to the next in response to popular demand, we can choose categories based on the number of entrants / votes in the past and the requests of the members; we can also craft a wish-list of added features that users actually want that we can implement one day if budget allows (and explain to users directly why we have or haven't included something).

If all of this sounds pretty familiar to HSUS, then it's because we take a very similar approach! In fact, the last three summary points could easily have come from us - I couldn't agree more, especially about the willingness to learn. We try to just apply common sense, and it's clear that's what HSUS is doing as well.

It's really helpful to be able to compare our approach to others, as that's a crucial route to learning. Our internal structure is quite different to HSUS and I found their meetings process particularly interesting.

Hope to read more posts like this soon!

[Kate Bladow]

Beth - I'm also a huge animal lover. One of my favorite animal organization's to follow is the Rolling Dog Ranch (http://blog.rollingdogranch.org/rolling_dog_ranch_animal_/), which is just outside of Ovando, Montana. For being such a small organization, they devote a fair amount of resources to communicating stories about the disabled animals that they help.

And I think that their blog posts are great examples of "asks." They make certain to say what they do with the money instead. In fact, a blog post yesterday (http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2009/02/how-do-you-measure-the-success-of-dog-to-person-fundraising-on-social-networks-dollars-or-doggie-tre.html) generated over $1600 in funds over about 1 day (Scroll to the bottom: http://blog.rollingdogranch.org/rolling_dog_ranch_animal_/2009/03/foxy-lady.html).