5 Ways to Promote Viral Fundraising
October 1, 2008 By Britt Brouse, Associate Editor, Inside Direct Mail3. Capture Outside Events and Run With 'Em
Be prepared to respond to viral influences from outside your organization. For example, at the time of publication, Planned Parenthood is focusing PR and marketing efforts around the thousands of unsolicited donations it's received in response to vice presidential and pro-life candidate Sarah Palin. "Thousands and thousands of people, completely without any solicitation, are donating to Planned Parenthood in honor of Sarah Palin right now. Planned Parenthood has never solicited that. It is truly, truly viral," Stanionis comments. To maximize an outside influence, be prepared to respond to a phenomenon and spin it in favor of supporting your message and encouraging future response.
4. Campaign Around Newsworthy Items
PETA released its Chinese fur farms video to coincide with the Beijing Olympics. "I think a lot more people were reading about China and its animal rights records, just as they were reading up about its human rights records," Phillips says. Another good example of finding viral campaign material in the news is how the Humane Society campaigned around Michael Vick's arrest for animal abuse. "All [the Humane Society] had to do was send an e-mail to [its] list ... it got picked up by hundreds of thousands of people, but it never would've happened [without] the news ... and [if] everyone wasn't all of the sudden outraged by this," Stanionis shares. "It really is about listening to and tapping into the emotion of what people are feeling when they read the newspaper that day and being able to respond to that in one fell swoop," she adds.
5. Have the Right Tools in Place to Respond
Web 2.0 donors are a different breed than traditional offline and even Web 1.0 donors who click a "donate now" button. "If something goes viral, you need to be able to respond to where people are coming from and in the language and the source they came in through," Phillips says. In addition to readying social media tools, Stanionis suggests prepping your e-mail and donation processing systems to handle an influx of activity. Mansfield points out that retaining a Web 2.0 donor may be impossible via traditional means: "The last thing they want is a print thank-you letter in the mail. They want everything to be done online, all kinds of communications inside of MySpace and Facebook," she says. In the hopes of building successful retention programs for Web 2.0 donors, PETA separately codes donors responding to viral events and tracks their response across other retention channels. "Hopefully in the course of a year, we can track how the people who have donated as a result of this video have responded to traditional fundraising material," Phillips concludes.
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