Comic Relief embraces social networking sites
Howard Lake | 16 March 2007 | News
This year’s Comic Relief Red Nose Day campaign has embraced a wide range of social networking sites and services, demonstrating just how much a charity can use these services to generate interest, support, donations and website traffic.
Comic Relief’s attempt to exploit the potential of social networking sites is clear from it’s “In a nutshell” section at the bottom of its Rednoseday.com website.
“Find us” it says on a range of social networking – OK, Web 2.0 if you prefer – websites, namely:
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* MySpace
* Bebo
* eBay
* Flickr
* YouTube
* Piczo
There’s also a Red Nose Day Moblog (or mobile blog) for this year’s campaign where people are encouraged to take a photo of themselves wearing a red nose and texting it to the website. Girls Aloud and The Sugababes, who have created this year’s campaign song, have all used it.
While reaching out to use these services Comic Relief hasn’t forgotten its experience and history of providing its supporters with material for them to use on their websites, blogs and social networking pages. It is offering banner adverts, button adverts, photos/images, and videos. It encourages supporters to cut and paste these assets and generate further publicity and support for the campaign.
Indeed, this year Comic Relief has for the first time added “Your Personal Fundraising Space”, offering volunteer fundraisers the chance to create their own MySpace-type page on the site. Fundraisers can use this tool to publicise their fundraising, contact their friends and family and generate further support for their efforts. At the same time they can keep track of how much money they have raised from all these contacts.
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.