Is Save the Children missing a trick with Kroo Bay?
Howard Lake | 25 June 2008 | Blogs
If you can’t take donors to see your programme ‘in the field’, then perhaps creating a virtual experience is a substitute. That at least is the thinking behind Kroo Bay, a mini-site created by Save the Children UK, which takes you into the life of a community in Freetown, Sierra Leone. www.savethechildren.org.uk
The site allows you to take in a 360 degree panorama of the slum, and to hear the stories of some of the residents who appear before you. Some of these stories are conveyed through video.
Rachel Palmer from SCF is talking about the site at a One World peer learning event on 2 July (contact
an********@on******.net
for details.)
When I was first emailed about the site I thought it was pretty cool. I donated £15 to see what would happen, and selected the option of email as my preferred communication medium. By return I recieved a nice thank you email – automatically generated. And since then? Nothing.
Maybe I’m a one off. Perhaps some glitch meant I fell out of the system. These things can happen. But if other donors have had a similar experience then SCF is missing a trick. Great looking websites which win awards don’t translate into donations unless contacts are followed up, involved, and asked to give again. Is my experience with Croo Bay unique or does anyone else have a similar story?
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.