You should attend the Word of Mouth Super Genius conference in New York on July 20. Learn from the best in the business, get hands on knowledge from people who are ‘doing’ not just talking, and best of all: support charity: water.

Register for the conference and use the code ‘paullismyhero‘ to get $101 off the registration fee… or you can donate that $101 to the events’ mycharitywater fundraising campaign. By doing so you’ll provide clean water to 5 people in the developing world for 20 years.

I’ve attended dozens of social media and word of mouth conferences over the past few years and I rarely get truly excited for them – Word of Mouth Super Genius is a rare one that bucks that trend. The sessions all focus on short, sharp ‘how to’ information, not the standard ‘social media bingo‘ highlights: ‘customer service is marketing’, ‘social CRM’, ‘United Breaks Guitars’ etc that you’ll hear at each and every conference.

The speaking line up speaks for itself: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh keynoting, Hugh McLeod of Gaping Void fame, my friends Geno Church from Brains on Fire and Lindsay Lebresco at Converseon and big brand speakers from the likes of National Geographic, General Mills, Makers Mark and Yelp.

Plus yours truly sharing the charity: water word of mouth story – a preview of which you can listen to via this interview:

How charity: water is using social media tools to connect with their cause’s biggest believers — live with Paull Young from GasPedal on Vimeo.

So are you in? July 20 in New York City. Register here and use the discount code ‘paullismyhero’ to donate $101 to charity: water. See you there!

One of the coolest things about working in digital with charity: water is the sheer power of the creativity of our fundraisers at mycharitywater. This struck me in a big way last week when Maggie’s Sweet 16th fundraising drive raised enough to build a well via the support of social news aggregator Reddit.

Last monday I checked out our Google Analytics and noticed a big traffic spike on Thursday and Friday. Digging deeper it turned out thousands of visitors were hitting Maggie’s page from Reddit. Looking at the comments we could clearly see this traffic was converting to donations – even anonymous users donating $160 with comments like “Happy birthday Maggie from Reddit! Your concern and dedication for others in the world is inspiring. Please stay exactly as you are!“.

Inspiring to see yet another example of the online community doing good, and more inspiring to hear from Maggie that the experience changed her life.

My colleague Mo Scarapelli did a great post for our corporate blog on the campaign, some highlights here:

Your campaign exploded right after your dad put a his post on reddit. In three days, you had 5,000 people hit your campaign page! Were you surprised? Especially that so many strangers donated?
I was shocked!!! I didn’t expect any response because I didn’t think strangers would care about my campaign, much less donate to it. Then, I started receiving anonymous $16 donations, and some were donating $160, and I was completely shocked! People were leaving such thoughtful comments, trying to help me reach my goal and it showed me that there really is a lot of kindness in the world, even from strangers, and proved that people will rally around a good cause.

Your cause really impacted others… how did the campaign really impact you?
My grandmother passed away four years ago, and I was really close to her. When my aunt heard about what I was doing, she said that my Nan would be so proud of me. This really touched me, and made me cry. Running this campaign has changed my life. I’m a teenager, and so I never thought I could actually do something influential that could make a difference in others’ lives. But this campaign has completely proved me wrong. The feeling you get when you know you’re helping others is the greatest feeling in the world, and definitely the best birthday present I could have ever asked for.

Thanks for the inspiration Maggie!

Just Means filmed a great short video with my boss Rod Arnold at yesterday’s #ThePromise event in NYC.

If you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare check out Rod outlining our mission:

If you’d like to make a donation to support us you can do so in my name here.

Friday morning we were treated to an inspiring meeting at charity: water when the co-chair of our partner A Glimmer of Hope, Philip Berber, came in to the office to share their story & latest news.

Together to date, charity: water and A Glimmer of Hope have provided clean water to over 400,000 people in Ethiopia. There’s still much to be done. You can help. Check out these three videos from A Glimmer of Hope that Phillip shared with us. And if you feel like making a donation to help click through to my fundraising campaign and make a difference.

A view of Burbax, Ethiopia

The Importance of Water

September 2008: Philip Berber & charity: water founder Scott Harrison watching one of the water projects we’ve built together in Ethiopia break ground

Video of the Month: Sept. 2009 from A Glimmer of Hope on Vimeo.

Insipiring stuff right? I hope it inspires you to make a donation – click here right now to do so!

As a data-driven communicator, one of the very first things I did in my new role with charity: water was to dig deep into our Google Analytics and immerse myself in some numbers.

With Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics 2.0 in one hand and my mouse in the other I first looked over the long-term trends in the data and key referrers to see what stood out. Amongst the many interesting things I found there’s a standout I’d like to share here: The story of Twitter’s emergence, as told through our data.

Now charity: water does Twitter extremely well. We were the first charity to reach one million followers. We were the focus of the first Twestival that raised over $250,000 for water projects. Twitter holds us up as an example for other non-profits. Hugh Jackman donated $50,000 last year after asking his Twitter users to select a charity. Many of our staff tweet – we’ve even got a screen streaming Tweetdeck in the middle of our office!

So without further ado I’d like to share some traffic stats, in the interest of knowledge sharing, to give some background to the highlights above:

May 2008 – May 2009

• Traffic from Twitter only equates to 1.55% of total traffic
• Facebook sent 50% more traffic than Twitter
• August 31 & September 21 2008 were two of our best traffic days of all time – on these dates we had only 1 visitor from twitter (but whoever they were stayed for 17 minutes!)

May 2009 – May 2010

• Visitors from Twitter increased to 7% of site total (8 times as many visits as the year before)
• Twitter becomes the top referring site, with more than double the visitors than Facebook
• November 2 2009: Helen’s Story, a beautiful piece by my fiercely smart colleague Becky Straw, goes viral on Twitter and recieves over 5,000 visits on this day alone
• March 22 2010: charity: water marks World Water Day by launching the Unshaken campaign for Haiti. We have our second best traffic day of all time and 20% of visitors come from Twitter

Just a few interesting tidbits for now – I’ll aim to share more data and insights moving forward. And here is where the ask comes in: I’m looking for a true Google Analytics guru who would be interested in volunteering some time to work with me and my team to deepen, extend and amplify our Analytics backend to ensure we’ve got a measurement backbone on par with the smartest data-driven organizations out there. Rewarding work for a great cause – if you know someone (or even better ARE someone) that fits the bill please give me an introduction!

I like throwing up a video post every now and then on a Friday arvo as I’m guessing so few of you are working .

In honor of my new gig, this week I thought I’d throw up a few great charity: water videos. Enjoy – and if you’re moved, click here to make a donation in my name.

2009 September Campaign Video: The Story of charity: water

The story of charity: water – The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

Promo Video Featuring ‘Time Bomb’ by Beck

charity: water promo featuring “Time Bomb” by Beck from charity: water on Vimeo.

Haiti Unshaken Campaign Video

Unshaken – charity: water’s campaign for Haiti from charity: water on Vimeo.

And remember: you can help. $20 gives one person clean water for 20 years. Make a donation to my campaign right now!