Last year I was honored to be invited to record a session for the Smart CMO Virtual Forum, an innovative online event providing top-notch content to a remote audience.
The Smart CMO team just shared a video of my session to share with all of you, check it out to hear about all the work we’re doing in marketing at charity: water:
The next Smart CMO virtual forum is scheduled for March 1 2012 – sign up to see more content like the above, from even better speakers than yours truly, such as the CMOs for both the NFL and SAP.
Like many of us, I spend most of my waking hours touching an Apple product. First thing in the morning I fire up my iPhone to check overnight notifactions. For my full workday I bang on my MacBook Pro. When I get home I’m liable to unwind with some Fifa 12 on my iPad. Apple products and electronics surround my life, but I rarely stop to think about where they come from.
Like Mr Daisey the narrator, I always assumed a high tech factory used robots to construct my products with some human oversight. I didn’t think about an army of workers assembling my products painstakingly by hand while they barely made a living.
Thought provoking. Especially the analysis afterwards – are sweatshops like this a fact of life in developing countries that lead to growth despite our western sensibilities? Or do we as consumers, and more importantly Apple, Dell and their ilk who make massive profits from the labor, have a responsibility here?
Humblebrag (urban dictionary): Subtly letting others now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or “woe is me” gloss.
Like some other nonprofits, charity: water, a New York-based organization dedicated to providing clean drinking water to people in developing nations, uses traditional and nontraditional fund-raising methods for separate purposes. Big gifts from private and corporate donors fund the charity’s operations, from staff salaries to ink for the printers. That allows 100% of donations from alternative channels, such as social media and the organization’s various websites, to directly fund water projects—an assurance meant to appeal to potential small donors concerned about where their money will go.
Seventy percent of donations to charity:water come from digital channels, mainly from individuals donating on its main website, by pressing the “donate” button, or going to mycharitywater.org, where anyone can set up a fund-raising campaign and ask friends to donate.
Mycharitywater.org has raised $11.5 million since August 2009. Individual fund-raisers have done everything from running marathons to setting up lemonade stands. The average campaign has raised $1,000, says Paull Young, director of digital engagement at charity: water. “Justin Bieber had people donate for his birthday,” he says. “Little girls have friends donate $7 for their seventh birthday.”
charity: water is experimenting with a new site, waterforward.org, that also relies on people’s social connections to expand the charity’s reach, but in a different way. The site maintains what it calls a “book”—a compilation of photos of people who have had a $10 donation to the site made in their name by someone they know. Once a person is in the book, he or she can bring in any number of other people by making a $10 contribution for each of them. Those people can then do the same, and so on. In effect, every donor becomes a fund-raiser.
The site is designed to make donating fun and engaging, and to allow donors to see that their contribution goes beyond the amount they can give, since each donation can lead to so many more donations, says Michael Birch, a major fund-raiser and contributor to charity: water who has helped the organization build its websites.
The second was more amusing. For 4th of July this year I embarked on a Texas trip with a bunch of rugby mates. For the occasion, I was in search of a stars’n'stripes Speedo… a surprisingly difficult item to acquire.
I turned to Zaarly, an awesome iPhone app turning commerce on its head, and a few hours and $50 was delivered a US flag speedo by a very confused personal shopper.
That same confused personal shopper appeared in a WSJ video today talking about his experience with Zaarly… his most awkward moment (you guessed it), my speedo.
I’ve recently had the pleasure to meet and learn from Simon Sinek as he has been doing some work with our charity: water executive team.
Simon’s clarion call is to ‘start with why‘ – he boils down the need for purpose to be at the core of businesses in today’s web-based business world into a simple, but highly compelling framework that will change how you think about your brand.
Then, think about what the ‘why’ is for your organization.
For charity: water, our ‘what’ is to bring clean and safe drinking water to the nearly one billion people living without.
We’re still working on firming up our ‘Why’, but you can guarantee it will revolve around helping people see their impact.
That’s why we mark every water project on Google Maps. That’s why we devote energy, time and resources to developing features like Dollars to Projects. And that’s why we’re different from every other cause out there.
Mary Meeker is one of the most respected Internet trends analysts. The report she shared yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit has some amazing data, key points:
81% of users of top global Internet properties are outside the USA
In 3 years, China added more Internet users than exist in the USA
55% of Twitter traffic is from mobile devices, 33% of Facebook traffic
“Mega-trend of 21st century = empowerment of people via connected mobile devices”
85% of world’s population covered by commercial wireless signals – compared to only 80% having access to electricity
Full report is here – if you’re at all interested in where the web is heading, read it!
This September charity: water turned five. Here’s how we celebrated:
We made hundreds of personal thank you videos for our donors and supporters. You can see them all on a special YouTube channel here, and our staff favorites are up on the blog here.
And my personal favorite was getting to say thank you to Andrea Harrison’s dog, Sabin:
I’ve rarely felt as happy and professionally fulfilled as I did on our 5th birthday as we got to say thank you to our donors and show them what they mean to us.
This comment from Beth Kanter stood out, and shows why I was so proud of my team for their work on this:
The videos feature staff and you can just feel the love they have for people who share the organization’s passion for its mission of getting clean water to people around the world.
I view digital and marketing strategy through the sphere of relationships, and there is no better way to build a strong relationship than to give back to those who give to you!
If you can get to the event on Thursday in NYC please join us, but if not – never fear! I covered similar content earlier this year at the Fundraising Day conference and the awesome folk at SankyNet were good enough to record and share my presentation.
Last week a good friend of charity: water Simon Mainwaring stopped by the office during his NYC trip for the launch of his new book We First.
Not only is Simon a fellow Aussie (so you know he’s a good bloke), he’s also one of the smartest people thinking forward about how capitalism will change as the consumer conscious starts to guide purchase decisions (enabled in large part by the Internet).
I’m a big fan of Simon’s work so I took the chance to film a quick flip cam video with him in our office. Here’s the result – a quick conversation between the two of us focused on the future of cause marketing and brand partnerships with non-profits:
If you enjoyed that (I hope you did!) then you’ll love Simon’s book. I’m biased because he’s a mate, but I strongly recommend a read of We First to any marketer – it will help us not only lift the brands we represent, but also show how we can play a role in making the globe a better place for brands and consumers alike!
There is a plethora of online fundraising platforms out there, and more emerging every month.
I recently asked one of my awesome interns at charity: water, Alicia Kim, take on as a project a quick review of the many players out there with some assessment of what differentiates them.
She did such a good job with this interactive presentation I thought it would be a crime not to share it with the world – so enjoy!
