Perfect Pitch – IT presentations available for download
Howard Lake | 5 December 2006 | News
Presenters at last week’s UK Fundraising Perfect Pitch – IT event in London have kindly shared their presentations. They are now available for download in PDF/Adobe Acrobat format at no charge.
UK Fundraising’s second Perfect Pitch – IT event last week offered fundraisers and charity staff a showcase of leading practitioners covering areas such as mobile payments, on-demand CRM tools, interactive websites, online donation services, fundraising from supporters’ web searches, digital video viral marketing, and online charity shopping malls.
Ninety two people attended the free event, the sixth in UK Fundraising’s innovative Perfect Pitch series, near the Barbican in London.
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David Barker of White Box Digital kicked off the presentations with examples of how the company has applied its work with leading B2B and B2C commercial brands to the charity sector. He demonstrated what the company had achieved with charities involved in homelessness and sexual abuse.
His demonstration included playing a video that he had uploaded to YouTube as part of a ‘hidden homeless’ campaign to highlight the fact that not all homeless people had mental health or alcohol problems.
Ben Belassie then explained how Generate Enterprise, a new Community Interest Company, was helping charities implement the powerful customer relationship management (CRM) tool from global database company Salesforce.com. The software is available as a free donation to charities from the Salesforce.com Foundation, and Belassie works to help charities customise it to their needs.
Generate Enterprise is the sole implementation partner for this in the UK. Around the world 1,200 nonprofit organisations are using the tool.
Polly Gowers of Everyclick shared the latest developments and opportunities from the search engine that donates 50% of its gross revenue to charities each month. The company had already teamed up with Charities Aid Foundation to enable site users to support any registered charity they chose, and they were planning to work with other providers such as Mission Fish (eBay for Charity).
Charities could now make use of a customised marketing toolkit, with logos, banners, search boxes, and PR templates. There is also an income calculator allowing charities to estimate how much they might generate from Everyclick, depending on the number of supporters and corporate supporters they could reach.
Indeed, the new search box tool is proving very effective. A school that added it to their intranet is now raising more than any other organisation on Everyclick. Hope and Aid Direct also report that they have raised 10% of their annual income just from supporters searching at Everyclick. They had found that promoting the giving option in their email signature had been particularly effective.
Lou Cook of Giving Matters began the final section of the day announcing a major new website designed to offer supporters a wide variety of ways to give to charity, and indeed to any charity, large or small. She demonstrated ThirdSay, due to launch to the public soon, showing how visitors could search for a charity by name, activity or postcode, and then decide how to give.
The site goes well beyond offering online credit/debit card donations. Charities can set up ‘products’ for sale, enabling them to have their very own ‘beneficiary gift’ catalogue. Supporters can set up their own page for their sponsored events. Charities can gather signatures for a petition, and use a range of other tools. Supporters can generate further income for their charity by shopping online from a growing range of suppliers whom ThirdSay, a registered charity, judge to meet ethical standards of business.
As with other online credit/debit donations, there will be a small percentage levied, but otherwise the online fundraising tools are provided at no charge to any registered charity in England and Wales, with Scotland expected to follow.
Jody Davidson of Blackbaud Europe then explained how charity and voluntary organisations could build an effective interactive website for their supporters. She began by explaining who was now online and what they now used the Internet for: users now spend 45% of their time online shopping and buying.
Referring to the Nonprofit Industry Survey 2005, she reported that an estimated £15 billion had been donated online to nonprofits around the world and that this was expected to rise to £40 billion by 2008.
She recommended that charities work to emulate the successes of online businesses who offer self-service tools online. It is these tools, applied to the donor environment, that will engage visitors and help generate loyalty.
Christopher Torvald and Lauren Martin of LUUP ended the day with a demonstration of their mobile payments system. Charities can use it to receive donations via SMS, WAP or online ranging from 1p to £800, considerably more than the current limits on offer from premium-rate SMS providers. Furthermore donations are received instantly by the charity.
LUUP had recently help the FAREPAK campaign to handle mobile donations, setting up the tool in just a few hours. A donor could then make an SMS donation of £25, for example, by testing PAY FAREPAK 25 to the relevant number.
LUUP can be used by anyone over 14, and is regulated by the UK Financial Services Authority.
Christopher and Lauren demonstrated the system in action with a live donation from Chris’ mobile, with Lauren demo’ing the instant receipt in the web-based admin section.
LUUP used Perfect Pitch to announce that it was offering to add 20% to the first donation of each new user that charities could generate until 15 December 2006, up to a maximum of £25 per user.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.