Nonprofit Fundraising: Powering Through the End-of-the-Year Push?

In June this year, I accepted the volunteer Chapter Director position for the Silicon Valley chapter of One Brick, a nonprofit that I've been deeply involved in since 2009. It's more work than I anticipated, but it's rewarding to be making a difference.

As an event manager and member of our social media team, I've always been aware of the annual campaign, take advantage of IBM's automatic payroll deduction plan to donate throughout the year, and donate online when the annual campaign kicks off on Giving Tuesday.

As a chapter director, I found myself immersed in the fundraising process: writing and sending fundraising emails to my chapter members, creating social media tiles and a small video, and taking responsibility for meeting the donation goal for my chapter of the organization.

In the midst of this end-of-year flurry of activity, I noticed that my personal email filled with donation requests which made me curious about end-of-the-year charitable giving. Not surprisingly, I turned to Charity Navigator, the "nation's largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities" to satisfy my curiosity. All of those fundraising letters obviously pay off: 31% of all giving occurred in December and 12% of that in the final three days of the year.

Now that I'd answered that question, I found a few more interesting giving facts from Charity Navigator including:
  • 58% of people share information about charities on social networking because they feel it makes an impact.
  • 62.6 million Americans volunteered in 2013 for a total of 7.7 billion hours. That service is worth an estimated value of $173 billion.
  • Volunteers are almost twice as likely to donate to charity than non-volunteers.
  • 69% of Americans donate to charity and 64% of donations are made by women.
  • The average annual household charitable donation is $2,974.
  • Americans donated $358.4 billion in 2014, 5.4% more than in 2013.
Have you made a donation to your favorite nonprofit yet? Did you know that even small amounts —$10 or $20 — make a difference? Don't delay — you only have a few more days to take advantage of the 2015 tax deduction. Happy Giving.

Museum Week: An Engaging International Twitter Campaign

Did you know it's Museum Week? And that there's an organization, website, Twitter ID and Twitter #hashtags all in support of  this first ever internationally coordinated Museum Week? Museums and museum lovers across the globe are sharing their photos, Vines, memes and selfies on Twitter with the hashtag #MuseumWeek from March 23 to March 29, 2015.

This group of leading-edge museums have evolved in how they engage with their newest patrons — the Millennials and Generation Z — who interact differently and more socially than their parents and older siblings, and aren't content to passively stare at exhibits.

7 Days of Hashtags
As an article in the Guardian explains it, "Instead of shouting at rule-breakers with camera phones, more and more museums around the world are starting to embrace the twitter crowd by removing their restrictions on photography and by providing free institutional wireless access so we can snap-and-live-tweet photos of their collections. This was an important decision because everyone knows that a few tweeted photos can provide only the tiniest taste of reality, and for that reason, often serve to lure in more inquisitive people rather than fewer."

I'm smitten with the entire #MuseumWeek program, and eagerly comb through my Twitter feed, thinking "I'll retweet that one and that one....". I follow the @MuseumWeek ID, and check my Twitter feed several times a day for new tweets. The entire program is a feast for the eyes, and the "7 days, 7 themes, 7 hashtags" program is ingenious, eye-catching, and ground-breaking in how they're re-positioning their collections.
  • The organizers have cleverly included  a Twitter space page on the website that includes current statistics, with lots of clickability built in and includes:
  • A representation of tweets and retweets of the eight official hashtags since March 15
  • The top museums as represented by number of tweets and filterable
  • A list of the countries represented by the participating museums (2207 strong)
  • A map of those tweets
  • And of course, the tweets themselves. 
If you're so inclined, there's even a widget builder to customize and embed #MuseumWeek content into your blog or website.

It's a fun and interactive page that's definitely worth checking out.












This Twitter campaign definitely deserves an A+ for creativity.

Musings About High School Career Day and a Career in Social Media

I'm one of those people who can get pretty excited talking about a topic I'm passionate (and knowledgeable) about.  And if you ask me questions? I'm over-the-moon happy when I'm interacting with an engaged audience. The power and excitement of social media happens to be one of those topics. (Volunteering, social good, animals, and books are also on that list. :-))

Social media training is a part of my job that I truly enjoy; I've trained 200+ colleagues and coached several executives in the last year and a half. So for someone like me, being invited to talk about my career at a local high school's Career Day is fun. Really fun. And because social media is a topic that interests many people, including high school students, I'm guaranteed an interested audience.
Screenshot of PPT deck title page
View the deck on SlideShare by clicking on the image

"#Hashtag with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake"
Presenting my material three times in a row on Career Day at Cupertino High School enabled me to tweek  my presentation on the fly for the next audience — including moving the #Hashtag with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake video from the end of the presentation to the middle, since I ran out of time and didn't get to show it for the first session. (It's one of my favorite clips, and I laugh every time I watch it.)

Generation Z, our current high school students, are smart, passionate people and digital natives who've never known a time without either socially sharing their lives, or having them shared for them by their parents. A 2013 Pew study confirms this social media saturation, "Eight in ten online teens now use social media sites."

So I was not surprised that the majority of these digital natives had seen the Ellen DeGeneres 2014 Oscar selfie, but only about half were familiar with the 2013 Superbowl Oreo tweet. And every student in each of those three classes had either participated in an Ice Bucket Challenge or had a good friend or family member who had participated in the challenge.

Generation Z is going to be joining the workforce very soon. Millennials are changing the face of the workforce to meet their needs, and I think we'll see another significant workforce engagement change when we start working with the Gen Zers. I for one, am looking forward to it.