Reporting from CFG London Members' Meeting: Social Media and Fundraising sessions
Howard Lake | 11 October 2012 | Blogs
I was lucky enough to attend the CFG London Members’ Meeting yesterday at UBS in Liverpool Street. The subjects for a difficult audience of charity finance directors and finance controllers were:
• How social and mobile are transforming fundraising – Anne Marie Huby, Justgiving
• Finance & Fundraising: natural partners – Catherine Miles, Anthony Nolan Trust
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• Social Media Myth-busting – Vicky Browning, Director of CharityComms
All three presenters were charismatic and captivating and kept the audience interested at all times.
How social and mobile are transforming fundraising
Anne-Marie’s highlights were:
Value for money per donation on the JustGiving platform
• Facebook (£19.54 average donation) representing 20%-25% audience
• LinkedIn (£32.98 average donation) representing 0%-5% audience
• Twitter (£23.07 average donation) representing 0%-5% audience
• YouTube (£19.80) & Google+ (£18.98) representing 5% audience
• Facebook Mobile (£16.85) representing 10% audience
The content was full of statistics and pleased the delegates who were very well into their numbers…
She also highlighted that a post-donation share on social media is worth another £5 and predicted that by mid-2013 mobile will overtake desktop web traffic. Lastly she highlighted that in-memory fundraising is central to event participation, with cycling events being up by 52% whereas running event participation remains stable.
Finance & Fundraising: natural partners
Catherine Miles, Fundraising Director from Anthony Nolan Trust, took over and held a very interactive session on how fundraisers and finance professionals can work together for their cause.
She stressed that young donors are not less likely to give to good causes, just like a recent CAF survey demonstrated, and that fundraisers have to adapt to catch the short attention spans of Generation Y. Young donors live their lives publicly online and social media is critical to build relationships with this type of supporters.
Social Media Myth-busting
Vicky Browning from CharityComms followed and I had to admit that she was the highlight of the event. Her compelling way of delivering her presentation into social media myth-busting charmed the delegates and the content was also spot-on.
Her nine social media myths were:
• Social Media is free
• A Facebook page is a social media strategy
• You can’t control social media
• You can’t fundraise on social media
• We must have a presence on all the latest channels
• Social Media is cosy
• An audience is a community
• It’s all about the numbers
• Our audience doesn’t do social media
She went on to “bust” the myths but also present specific examples of charities being social media champions on each myth.
Would you like some more detail on each social media myth? Then I guess there will have to be a part 2 for this blog post.
Over and out…for now
Vasileios Kospanos (@vasilakosp) is the NFP Marketing Exec for @theaccessgroup. He’s an online marketer, into social media, blogging and fundraising, committed to the third sector and fundraising best practice. Some of his previous blogs:
Fundraising through gaming
Seducing a donor on Twitter
Coupons For A Fundraising Event: Any Publicity Is Good Publicity?
Glühwein fundraising
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.