When: Thursday, July 1, at 10:00 am PST / 1:00 pm EST

Cost: FREE

Register at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/237301601

Presented by:

• Dave Raley, director of new media, Masterworks
• Jacob Smith, new media strategist

Who should attend?

• Those interested and intrigued in the evolution of technology use in the nonprofit world.
• Those interested in using new strategies in their fundraising and marketing/communications programs.
• Those in roles responsible for fundraising and marketing/communications, as well as in general positions of leadership.

The world is changing. And micro-engagement techniques are gaining steam. This was especially evident during the Red Cross’s relief efforts in Haiti following their devastating earthquake earlier this year. To date, their text message-giving campaign has raised $32 million — nearly 8% of the total funds the Red Cross has raised for Haitian relief.

But micro-fundraising isn’t the only technique that’s gaining relevance. Four other micro-engagement strategies are also gaining popularity — micro-blogging, micro-advocacy, micro-volunteering and micro-connections. We’ll examine examples of each strategy to illuminate trends in the micro-engagement sphere.

At the end of this webinar, you’ll:

• Know the key trends in micro-engagement for 2010.
• Understand how you can tap into these trends to increase engagement in your organization.
• Act on practical recommendations to stay on the leading edge of micro-engagement in 2010.

At Masterworks, we’re committed to helping you maximize your Kingdom impact. That’s why we’ve put together this enlightening and practical webinar – for you!

Register HERE for Micro-Engagement Goes Mainstream

Please feel free to share this with your peers and colleagues who may be interested!

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP, 2003 Server or 2000

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4.11 (Tiger®) or newer

Mobile fundraising is a relatively young channel, and we know it can be complicated and confusing sometimes — so we’ve put together a whitepaper on the current State of Mobile Fundraising to help you out.

Download The State of Mobile Fundraising

The whitepaper spends significant time addressing specifically Text2Give — currently the most common method of giving in mobile (involves sending text messages and $5 or $10 gifts — this is how most money for Haiti was raised).

Discussed topics include:

• A fledgling channel … still.
• The players are many.
• Cultural adoption is going to take time.
• Text giving isn’t the only mobile fundraising option.
• The hurdles are high, very high.
• The importance of promotion (the real cost).
• There are bright spots.
• So what should nonprofit organizations be doing?

Mobile giving continues to evolve and change rapidly (we’ve seen plenty of major changes and breakthroughs happen just weeks apart). So check out the whitepaper now, before it’s out of date!

The PayPal deal represents another step for Facebook toward making purchases on the social network a normal part of our everyday lives. This is an important trend for fundraisers to watch.

Why should this be important to fundraisers?

IF Facebook succeeds in making the exchange of money via social networks a culturally normal thing to do, THIS would be a huge breakthrough for all commerce, including online fundraising. Facebook already plays a large role in many people’s social lives and consumes a large percentage of their time online – adding regular commerce to that is the next big thing.

Most fundraising on social networks has continually struggled to perform. The notable exception is event-based fundraising, which is seeing repeatable, predictable success when integrated with sites like Facebook.

So be on the lookout for how Facebook payments continue to evolve and be adopted – it should be a valuable indicator of how successful we can be in fundraising directly through Facebook.

While this may start as an iPhone-focused product, it is clear from Square’s website that it won’t stay that way. You don’t hire developers for Android and Blackberry unless you are looking to create a broad mobile product.

The card reader and application will cost only $1. Square can do this because they’ll be taking 2.9 percent of every transaction. It won’t require fund recipients to have a merchant account, so the 2.9 percent fee is competitive for taking credit card transactions.

If you read the comments on the post linked above, you’ll read about a number of security and privacy concerns. Concerns I share —though I’m fairly certain that it’s a bit premature to say the product isn’t safe when it won’t launch for six months.

Regardless of this product, mobile payment solutions tied to cell phones are coming— and coming soon. For ministries, I see a number of possible uses.

The first that comes to mind is events like concerts or conferences. Instead of keeping volunteers behind a counter and requiring possible donors to fill out forms, volunteers could be out front. Each one equipped with an iPad showing a video presentation. If a donor is moved, the volunteer simply swipes the donor’s card and processes the transaction.

At only $1 per device, you could even imagine sending these out into the field with advocates for your organization. For example, someone is giving a talk to their Sunday School class about your ministry. You send them a Square device, and they can immediately take donations.

Of course you can raise objections, like control and others, to these ideas. It is always easier to tear down a new idea than to embrace it. New ideas always have an element of risk, and this one is no exception. From everything I’ve seen, it is clear that ministries are going to have to do things outside of their comfort zone if they hope to continue to thrive.

The question for your organization is: “Are you willing to be out front, or are you going to follow behind?”

More angry protestors are beaten back by the Basiji, the Iranian regime’s oppressive militia. Neda is an innocent bystander passing through. Not even innocent bystanders are safe. A Basiji sniper bullet rips into her heart. She lays on the ground bleeding to death. Her father cries out for help.

Within days, her face is everywhere in Iran. Protestors hold posters of her face emblazoned with the slogan “we are all Neda.” She’s become an international symbol for the courage of the people of the Green Revolution. A reminder of the brutality of the Iranian regime.

All because of a cell phone video.

Traditional media outlets were almost completely locked out of the events of the last few months in Iran. But people around the world have followed the emotional protest — all because ordinary Iranians captured the destabilizing protests on the street, feet away from the military and militia, with their cell phones.

None of this would have been possible without Twitter, texts and cell phone audio and video.

One of Masterworks’ clients, GAiN, used these same techniques in responding to last month’s devastating earthquake in Haiti. GAiN president, Duane Zook, was in Haiti just a day or two after the quake to assess and report. He sent in reports via phone that were uploaded with photos. The result? Compelling multimedia reports that connected donors in an immediate way to the urgency of the need. Each report was highly trafficked and motivated people to give generously.

Hear Duane Zook’s reports from the field.

How can nonprofits produce gritty video and audio reports? How can they bring their donors to the core of their work?

By using their field personnel as a built-in media corps for fundraising.

As I understand it, there’s cell phone access even in the most remote, far-flung areas. Almost any cell phone made in the last few years has audio/video/image capability.

These cell phones could capture day-to-day compelling stories; giving nonprofits the chance to showcase the heart of their work in a raw and compelling way.

Of course, staff members need to learn that videos of smiling aid workers don’t help raise money. Cell phone video of conditions in a refugee camp or a video of a homeless man who is struggling to survive on the street do. They could provide the most compelling argument for donors to give . . . a window into the real-life problems that their gifts help solve.

Spam Assassin has already released a patch to fix this bug, but of course that requires server administrators to implement it.

So what should ministries do?

Spam Assassin is fairly popular so lots of un-patched servers out there could cause deliverability issues, but by this point any decent IT department would have already patched the issue. Especially since it would mark any message sent in 2010 as spam, including normal business correspondence.

However, it is possible that some smaller internet service providers may be behind the curve, so it is worth monitoring for the next few sends.

Watch your bounce and delivery rates, and if you see a dip explore further. Check to see if most of your undelivered messages are to a single email service provider, you can tell by looking at the part of the address after the “@.”

For example, if most of the undelivered email was to emails @masterworks.com, it might be that Masterworks hasn’t updated their software (for the record we don’t use Spam Assassin and if we did we have great IT people so we would have the patch installed).

If you see a problem, search for that domain on the internet, get their information and give them a call, you can reference this post and see if they do indeed have an old version of Spam Assassin.

Overall I expect the impact on deliverability from here on out to be minimal, but if you did a big send, in the first few days of the new year, you may want to look at your numbers and if they are off, do a selective re-send to just those people who didn’t open.

But I’d like to call out two predictions in particular that nonprofit fundraisers should be on the lookout for:

Facebook Gets into…Payments
…Leveraging Facebook Connect, it’s conceivable that Facebook will launch a PayPal competitor, providing e-commerce sites with not just an easy way to accept payments, but also rich data about who their customers are based on their profiles and connections.

Facebook, with more than 350 million active users worldwide, has been a Siren to nonprofit fundraisers. The problem is that with the possible exception of events-based fundraising, it just hasn’t worked. But the closer Facebook integrates e-commerce to the Facebook experience, the more likely it will be that fundraisers will find success on the social network.

If Facebook does indeed launch a payments system, it will be something for fundraisers to watch very closely.

Now for that second prediction:

Live Video Goes Mainstream and Becomes Immensely Profitable
We’ve recently highlighted some of the huge numbers that live web video broadcasts are generating. Much of that has to do with live video evolving from people turning on a webcam in their bedroom to professionally produced programming with celebrity talent, as highlighted by the recent Ashton Kutcher Katalyst HQ broadcast. In 2010, I expect this narrative to move from “wow, huge numbers” to “wow, it’s a real business” as top live video broadcasters are able to turn their programming into mini-media outfits with the help of sponsors.

Online video continues to dominate in it’s importance as a relatively new channel to fundraisers and nonprofit marketers. But 2010 will be the year when livestreaming will become mainstream. Tools such as USTREAM, Livestream and Qik are making the process of web streaming live video very easy. How can you engage your constituents using livestreaming in 2010?

Mashable is one of the best social media/new media blogs out there. You should check it out if you’re at all interested in this space.

You can follow us at www.twitter.com/masterworks.

Happy Tweeting!

The video targeting tool also allows targeting of videos by keywords, viewer demographics, interest-based categories, or some combination of the three.

One possible application for nonprofits

In a disaster-response situation, particularly with disasters in developed countries with solid technology infrastructures, a lot of user generated content finds its way onto YouTube. Savvy nonprofits should be looking to target all of the YouTube videos being made around the disaster, with direct links to landing pages optimized for donation response.

Note: The targeting options are officially in beta, so they may not be available to everyone just yet.

In fact, there are more videos watched every day than searches performed, as attested to in this post excerpt:

According to comScore Video Metrix, 120.5 million Americans watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com in August 2009. That 82.6 videos per viewer a month.

According to comScore qSearch, Americans conducted 9.4 billion searches on Google in August 2009.

Yep, the numbers are right. There are more videos being watched on YouTube than there are searches being conducted on Google in the United States.

Are you using video? If not, you probably should be.