Avectra

The Benefits of Crowd Funding

What NFP's can learn from the revolutionary concept of Crowd Funding
 

Times are changing!  We now see the terms Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing popping up all over the Internet.  Crowd Funding (sometimes called crowd sourced capital, or street performer protocol) describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the Internet to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding

As far as Crowd Sourcing goes, when putting a variety of definitions together, we get the picture.  Personally, I like CBS Jennifer Alsever ‘s definition, … “the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. Yet free labor is only a narrow part of Crowd Sourcing's  appeal. More importantly, it enables managers to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want.” 

Basically, Crowd Sourcing means to "use talents of the crowd", and is a play on the word outsourcing. The origins of the word Crowd Sourcing are credited to Jeff Howe, a Wired Magazine writer who first brought Crowd Sourcing to people's attention and vocabulary with his 2006 story, "The Rise of Crowd Sourcing".  http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/Crowd Sourcing.html

Whatever term you want to use, you can’t get away from the fact that Social media is impacting fundraising.  In fact, Crowd-funding is changing the way not-for-profits and Associations operate today. Non-profits don’t need to lag behind the corporate world when it comes to IT  - so maybe NOW is the time to ‘take it to the Crowd!’

Take a look at just a few of the online crowd funding websites you can take advantage of and raise the funds you need for your specific project.

1. Profounder  ProFounder is a proud sponsor of the Hello Etsy Summit on Small Business and Sustainability. Profounder follows strict guidelines to legitimize Crowd Funding investments.  They offer a step-by-step fundraising system, to providing unique individual tools to assist entrepreneurs at all phases of their community funding journey, to holding events, to simply building awareness and community around this vision, we've evolved our products and will continue to do so to best meet entrepreneurs' needs. 
2. Kickstarter.com is a popular crowd funding site. “Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.  On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.
3. BlueSwarm.com -  social fund raising for political campaigns. 
4. Apps.funder funds new mobile apps.
5. Start Some Good  is a new platform for social good initiatives to raise funds and grow a community of supporters.  
6. IndieGoGo.com  one of the first crowd funding sites, launched in the beginning of 2008. IndieGoGo’s Slava Rubin notes a slew of competitors now-a-days .. “We just focus on maintaining an open platform, customer happiness and being global. We just want lots of happy customers all around the world.”

Just think, what if you could actually drive your cause through crowd sourcing and funding?  In citing just a few, clearly, Crowd Funding shines as the latest fundraising trend for nonprofits.  The question is how to get started.  Listed below are several Crowd Funding websites to get your non-profit on the road to success.  Why not take time to review these valuable aids and kickstart your non-profit in 2012!

• Looking to the Crowd – Crowd Funding Options for Your Nonprofit
• Online Fundraising, Cause Marketing and Crowd Funding Platforms that Benefit Nonprofits
• 15 ways to crowd fund your startup or project 
• A valuable resource!  How to Compare Crowd Funding Websites
• Social Entrepreneur Funding Series: Crowd Funding Your Startup
•  Can’t find an investor for your startup? Try Crowd Funding!
• Stop Begging, Grovelling & Pleading. Try Crowd Funding Your Small Business or Startup Instead

This year, why not let your customers drive, direct, and finally directly fund your operations!

At Avectra we believe Crowd Funding can have huge implications for the future not for profits! Avectra delivers fundraising solutions for non for profits including A-Score™ and Moves Management. And coming soon, even AvectraLabs will have some new Crowd Funding concepts to share!

• Have you evaluated and maximized the quality of customer interactions?
• Is your organization prepared to stand out - differentiate themselves and do something of last value in 2012?  In what ways does your organization show value to members, customers, suppliers and the community at large?
• Has your organization dipped its toes into the Social CRM waters yet? (Today’s reality) What tools are you using and what do you need?
• Are you exceeding member expectations? (At times it’s easy to keep doing the things that we know will work. New ideas have to be great ideas that will exceed the expectations of our competitors and our members.)  Yes! 

• Core values
• Strengths
• Challenges (specifically with retention and recruitment due to changing member expectations)
• Competition (why your services are superior)
• Leaders  (great leaders will reinforce core values)

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee Limited, an online community consultancy, and The Pillar Summit , an exclusive course in Professional Community Management. Richard's clients have included the United Nations, The Global Fund, Novartis, AMD, BAE Systems and several youth & entertainment brands. Richard is also the the author of the Online Community Manifesto. 


Avectra, the leader in web based membership management software, is proud to partner with FeverBee Limited to help organizations around the world understand best practices for creating thriving online communities and build invaluable communities of their own.  For more information on MemberFuse, Avectra's private online community platform, and Avectra Social CRM for Associations, click here.

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee Limited, an online community consultancy, and The Pillar Summit , an exclusive course in Professional Community Management. Richard's clients have included the United Nations, The Global Fund, Novartis, AMD, BAE Systems and several youth & entertainment brands. Richard is also the the author of the Online Community Manifesto. 


Avectra, the leader in web based membership management software, is proud to partner with FeverBee Limited to help organizations around the world understand best practices for creating thriving online communities and build invaluable communities of their own.  For more information on MemberFuse, Avectra's private online community platform, and Avectra Social CRM for Associations, click here.

• Membership value, process and touch points
• Designation process
• Departmental programs and responsibilities
• Members’ frequently asked questions
• AMS training

1. Have you formulated a detailed action plan for your new business model - For-profit/Non-profit fusion?  What about CRM? I’m sure there is a lot to learn from those who have paved the way. 
2. Does your plan coincide with your non-profit’s mission?  Make sure the mission is not overshadowed by the profit.
3. How much money will you need and where can you find it?

Questions of this nature and many more, were on the table at Global Engagement Summit (GES). "The Best of Both Worlds: Merging For-Profit and Non-Profit Models,"  In the endeavor to wrap up the discussions, Jamie Jones, associate director of the Social Enterprise at Kellogg (SEEK) Program, is reported as saying, “we’ll see success when social responsibility is not just a program but an integrated part of any company. Only when CEOs start to see social responsibility as a financial opportunity - as PepsiCo. recently demonstrated in its large-scale, historic investment in Mexican sunflower farmers - will we finally see true scale and social impact throughout the business world.”  (see full article)

"Social entrepreneurship is really taking off around the world," says David Bornstein (@dnbornstein), author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Bornstein hails the work of Ashoka, an organization that helps fund entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to social problems.

According to Bornstein, the relentless won't-take-no-for-an-answer quality of entrepreneurs is what gives them their edge in business. "They absorb the failure, they learn, they surround themselves with a good team and then they redirect." These same attributes, when applied in the social realm, can result in community-changing solutions.

In addition to the abovementioned,  Social Entrepreneur – Blake Mycoskie (@blakemycoskie) offers some great insight to set the gears in motion as he writes, “Social Entrepreneurship is, first and foremost, a business. That means it is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers, but it trades primarily to support a social purpose (not profits for shareholders!). Like any business, it aims to generate profit, but it reinvests those profits in the business or in a social cause. It is, therefore, not simply a business driven by the need to create profit for shareholders or owners. Social Entrepreneurship is committed to commercial viability but the prime motivation is building a better society and finding a solution to social problems.”

As social funding has indeed become a critical strategy, take a look at CRM in Not for Profit, wherein a critical question is posed, “Is CRM as effective within organizations that operate on a not for profit basis?"  I really appreciated the response by Graham Hill, “Despite the emphasis on profitability in much of commercial CRM today, there is no reason why CRM as a business capability cannot be used to equally good effect in a not-for-profit ….  The heart of commercial CRM is managing contacts with customers such that sales are generated, customers are satisfied and relationships are developed. All of this at a profit.”

In the comment section, I was ‘all ears’ when reading a note by Barnabas Tiburtius .  “It is heartening to know that this model is in operation elsewhere in the world. The background of starting the hybrid model in the state of Tamilnadu, India was the lack of accountability in an NGO run organization. This is in the business of Microfinance. We are serving 10,000 members in nearly 600 Self Help Groups. The NGO model was in operation for 8 years and sustainability became critical and the Hybrid model For-profit Non-profit was put in place in 2004 and today we have turned around the organization. We have gone one step further by launching an initiative for technology evolution in the market place for improving the impact of the microfinance program.”

An interesting observation is made in consideration of Microfinance in an excerpt from ‘Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, “There was once a time when the future of microfinance was contingent on the fortunes of the Grameen Bank. Today, microfinance is no longer dependent on any one institution. No one is “too big to fail.”   If the Grameen Bank collapsed, its borrowers and staff would certainly suffer. But in time, other microlenders would absorb them. (There are hundreds in Bangladesh alone.) Seeds have spread and a forest has grown. The vitality of an idea, widely understood and accepted, keeps it alive. Significant credit for this change must go to Sam Daley-Harris (@samdaleyharris), the social entrepreneur behind the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which helped thousands of independent organizations coalesce into a global movement that achieved audacious goals in less than a decade.  People will continue to create newer and better microfinance organizations into the future because they know they can do it, they know how to do it, and they know why it is worth their effort. 

No doubt, it will  be interesting to follow this golden thread and see how value and impact is maximized through these hybrid evolutions.

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee Limited, an online community consultancy, and The Pillar Summit , an exclusive course in Professional Community Management. Richard's clients have included the United Nations, The Global Fund, Novartis, AMD, BAE Systems and several youth & entertainment brands. Richard is also the the author of the Online Community Manifesto. 


Avectra, the leader in web based membership management software, is proud to partner with FeverBee Limited to help organizations around the world understand best practices for creating thriving online communities and build invaluable communities of their own.  For more information on MemberFuse, Avectra's private online community platform, and Avectra Social CRM for Associations, click here.

• Check your email at the most every two hours. Seriously, what will you miss?
• Turn off email and social media notifications. Shut down social media apps when you’re not using them.
• Take a hard look at your newsletter and blog subscriptions. What are you really reading and why?
• Set examples for colleagues by changing how you use email and run meetings.

Tweet it.  Before 2006, this would have been a nonsensical phrase, inciting nothing but the whistling interpretation of a bird call. But now this common, every-day phrase conjures the image of the small blue bird, the icon for Twitter.  Twitter has rapidly become one of the most widely used social media forums in the world and gains new users every day.  While it began primarily as a method for keeping up with the daily activities of celebrities and friends, many organizations quickly realized the potential audience for marketing and developed methods for using Twitter as a successful recruitment and customer service tool.

Unlike the relic of marketing past—the print ad—Twitter is not a one-way conversation, and therein lies its brilliance and benefit. Particularly, when it comes to a non-consumer oriented organization, i.e., non-profits, associations, community organizations; Twitter offers a unique opportunity to create loyalty, promote events and services, and to listen not only to what people think about the organization specifically in a direct conversation, but also what people think about in general through monitoring and listening to what is being said. Campaigns must be run carefully, however, to minimize the potential to develop a bad social reputation.  Below are four tips to help run a successful Twitter campaign.

Tip 1:  Be human

Twitter should never be approached as standard advertising. No post should appear to “push” anything. Instead, it is important to approach posts with as much humanity and personality as possible.  Rather than using a purely business tone, posts should be written in a casual, friendly voice that draws people in and makes them feel like they know and are able to connect with the author.  When followers feel they can trust the author, they can also trust the services or products that stand behind the brand.

One of the best ways to gain followers’ trust is to intermittently sprinkle personal comments between business tweets.  Allow your followers to know who you are. Who are the people at your organization? Why should they care what you say on Twitter? Ask employees to participate in your organization’s Twitter campaign, and give them the opportunity to create a unique voice. Encourage your employees to use real photos of themselves and to have their real names in their bio. To manage your association’s risk, you might ask your employees to put this short phrase in their Twitter bio: “Opinions expressed by me do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.”

Individuals involved in membership, fundraising, event planning, etc., have varying perspectives of your organization’s needs and goals. Allow that to drive a real conversation, but set best practices to keep the messaging concise and consistent. A simple solution to the task of constantly monitoring your organization’s outgoing Twitter messaging is to select a social media management tool to organize your authors, and schedule post content. With a social media management system, employees can be granted the ability to draft tweets for your organization’s Twitter account, but an administrator is able to approve or edit all the tweets before they go live.  By allowing other members of the organization to participate in Twitter marketing, you can create a sincere and likable persona and reputation for your organization.

Tip 2:  Monitor your account

No good will is served by setting up a Twitter account, posting a few times, and then never bothering to check back. Twitter has to be nurtured; you need to follow the right Twitter users, find your own followers, study what topics are trending, and then tweet continually. Interacting with followers is the key to a successful campaign.  By responding to tweets and messaging new followers, you show an active interest and once again “humanize” the organization.  An easy oversight is neglecting to thank followers for following your organization.  Without an employee monitoring the account 24/7, this is a difficult task to achieve. Instead, set up an automatic direct message through a social media management system that simply says, “Thanks for following!” when a Twitter user follows your organization. 

This is more than simple politeness; it is an essential business necessity, which is particularly important when a follower posts a tweet referring to your organization. Always re-tweet or reply in a reasonable time (say, within 2 hours if during daytime hours and within 8 hours if overnight); conversations in 140 characters or less move very fast. The urgency of Twitter is at a pace far faster than most media.  Once again, there is no reason to have a Twitter account just to forget about it or check sporadically.  Responding to followers, re-tweeting posts and replying to posts directed at your organization builds a genuine relationship and should be taken seriously and nurtured like any relationship.

Tip 3:  Get attention

Because there is a 140-character max on Twitter posts, lengthy commentary is not possible.  To the best of your ability, make those 140 characters as witty, thought provoking and attention grabbing as humanly possible.  Once you have built a following, tweeted regularly and nurtured the relationship with your Twitter followers, focus on GETTING THEIR ATTENTION. Your followers will not hesitate to click on links you tweet when they know and trust you, and when your tweet stands out on a scrolling list of tweets that updates by the second. It’s daunting to attempt thought-leadership in bursts of grammatically-incorrect, text-speak sentences with funny looking short URLS while competing with millions of other Twitter users for the attention of people that really matter to you: your members and potential members. But that is the task at hand. This is our new reality. How do you offer the best, most up-to-date and relative content? Somehow, you need to notice, catch and catalog the tweets that garner the most feedback. You have to analyze where you’re making an impression, and identify a pattern of success that can be recreated. This is another benefit of using a social media management system – you can view reports on which links are getting the most clicks, giving you insight into the types of tweets that are most attention-grabbing.

Tip 4: Listen

When social media came onto the scene, it forever changed marketing and consumer opinion-gathering. Everything on the web is immediate, and Twitter is no exception; in fact, it could quite possibly be the best example. But regardless of the pace, keeping up is still a necessity of modern business practices. And because it is so important to know how you’re perceived by your members, the two most important habits to form are tracking replies and re-tweets and creating unique hashtags to identify topics. To determine what type of reaction your tweets get, you’ll need to monitor which tweets at what time of the day garner the most participation to build your marketing techniques around the trends that you identify. A hashtag is simply a keyword that helps users to group tweets, making them more search friendly. For example, placing #Avectra in a tweet will group the tweet among others with the same topic. For each campaign you run, create a unique hashtag to identify the campaign the tweet belongs to. This way, when members and potential members want to comment on a topic, they too can utilize that same hashtag to identify the topic of their tweet and follow the conversation.  This is a great best practice for associations to use for conferences and events (#AUDC12), discussions (#assnchat) and more.

There is much debate within the industry of how to best measure the success and ROI of technologies such as Twitter. In the end, each organization needs to judge if Twitter is an appropriate part of their respective organization’s “social” strategy.  But, by having a social media management system, your organization gains the ability to listen and participate in the discussions members are having with other members about the important issues facing your membership and your industry. This will allow your association to make smarter business decisions regarding the products and services you offer.

• Nonprofit mission-driven membership institutions governed by member boards
• Engaging audiences through education
• Traditional and hierarchic cultures
• Professional staff siloed in departments
• Risk-averse and slow-moving
• Striving to remain meaningful to a growing younger market

1. Organizations will work at communicating in sound bites – thinking of the critical information to get across in their mobile apps, social media outposts, podcasts, and video.
2. Activity-based apps will track user’s actions and will adjust, self-learning on their own.
3. Associations will begin demanding social sign-on for their private and public online communities.
4. Video will receive more attention as organizations try to make the most of their members’ preferred formats for data consumption.
5. Social and multimedia training for staff will become mandatory for more organizations.
6. More associations will store information in the public cloud and look for help with security questions.
7. Associations will either have an app or will investigate developing an app.
8. HTML5 will be focus by year’s end – moving into 2013.
9. More association staff will use mobile devices for work (iPads over laptops).
10. Move towards "app store" on the desktop following mobile and gaming console model.
11. The first flexible screen device will be mass produced (tablet or smartphone – not sure which)
12. The value of check-ins will be questioned and only apps that provide some type of value for checking in will survive.
13. The line between social media and online learning will continue to blur as blended learning experiences continue to gain traction.
14. The higher comfort level with SaaS programs will lead to their increased use among associations.
15. Associations will begin/continue to shift their technology staffing and structure to accommodate some of the above trends.

1. The social media management dashboards are mature.  From permissions and assignment to tagging and team dialogue about social conversations, social media management dashboards provide an environment that supports open communication.  Multiple team members can support multiple profiles on multiple platforms including YouTube, Flickr, email lists and more. Go TEAM!
2. APIs (Application Programming Interface) are everywhere opening door-to-door communication between cloud-based apps like never before. CRMs talk (share data automatically) with email list management apps (like mailchimp.com or constantcontact.com) and invoicing programs talk to expense management programs that tie to CRMs. And, they are all socially connected.  It’s getting easier and easier to build systems across platforms and across the organization so the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.  I predict that this is the year of exponential API growth. Doesn’t that excite you? Go TEAM!
3. RSS Feeds (REALLY Simple Syndication) is a characteristic of most social media sites. RSS makes streaming content from one wall or profile feed to another REALLY easy! It is typically a 5-minute task to install an app to automate it. Picture this: The CEO’s blog can be streamed with RSS to all the company Facebook pages or twitter profiles. The event or education coordinator’s facebook page wall announcements can be streamed with RSS to the company Twitter profile. RSS makes sharing of information EASY. Go TEAM!
4. Organizations now have internal gurus. There are experienced social media leaders in many organizations. When everyone was a newbie, and we all were, the focus had to be on learning the platform and reaching a specific objective for a single department.  Keeping it simple was essential.  Where there are experienced gurus, integration can be the focus! Go TEAM!
5. Our people – the ones we’re trying to reach – aren’t newbies either. They are “there” on the social web in greater numbers and with more interactions. They’re comfortable talking on the social web – sometimes too comfortable.  But that’s OK. The organization’s social media gurus are listening and getting to know the people for better or worse. Social Business. That’s what we do. Go TEAM!

Our 12 predictions for 2012 are actually not so much predictions, but social media trends that we're seeing through all of the work we're doing with organizations around social media management.

Associations will:

1. continue the hiring trend, adding more headcount for social media management and community management.

2. start to figure out mobile, by asking the right questions.

3. find the ROI of social media, through aligning social data with membership management.

4. expand the social layer around their events and conferences

5. continue to incorporate more user-generated social activities like tweetups and unsessions

6. continue to ignore geolocation, which may or may not be dead in the water

7. decide whether Google+ is worth paying attention to.

8. do more great work on their social media policies

9. experiment more and more with social learning and participatory learning

10. start building their social CRM practices

11. build with more internal collaboration through technology

12. Humanize.

The industry's social media work is maturing.  We're excited to be part of it.  Happy Holidays from the SocialFish!

This is a guest blog by Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, part of a series of predictions for 2012.

So we know some of the big problems facing associations in the year to come:

Getting messages through the communication clutter – How many emails can we really handle a day?  Some say 50, but let’s be honest – who doesn’t get over 100?  Whether through email, social media, multiple news sources – communicating with member, and not at member, is a growing challenge

More to do, fewer resources to do it with – The list of programs and assignments that associations are expected to accomplish continues to grow, even as they see smaller budgets and reduced staff. 

Volunteer burnout – Not necessarily new to 2012, but a definite problem – how do associations handle positions that have been held for too long by volunteers that are coming up on retirement when there is a lack of new recruits to take their place.

1. Instead of just trying to fill open volunteer positions, associations will start investing in the personal development of volunteers.  Working with volunteers to identify their short/long term goals and linking the skills they would like to gain for their professional path will lead to ongoing commitment, and a variety of volunteer opportunities.  Though this kind of personalization will be time consuming, and slow to start, the volunteers developed will continue to grow in the association as well as be an advocate and resource for encouraging involvement from their colleagues.  These volunteers will cease to represent a singular committee or program, and instead become advocates for the association as a whole.
2. Volunteer recruitment will take a back seat to volunteer recognition.   For most associations volunteer recognition is an afterthought, if a thought at all.  Yet, if associations are going to start recruiting the right people to serve as ongoing leaders instead of taking whoever will fill an open role, they will need to demonstrate loud and clear what they are looking for – and can do so by increasing volunteer recognition.  By raising volunteer recognition on the priority list, associations will not only grow loyalty amongst their current top volunteers, but will be able to tell a story of personal growth and opportunity that other will want to emulate.  Recognition of volunteers will both set the example of what mutual positive affect giving back to the association can have for a member while serving as a recruitment tool unto itself.

Restructuring their approach to volunteers, in 2012 associations will develop leaders who will be the spokespeople that are ten times as effective as an email.  By recognizing their volunteers and letting the volunteers share their stories, associations will find a plethora of new hands to help plan and execute new programs.  Finally, focusing on aligning opportunities with a volunteer’s personal development plan, the problem of burnout will take a back seat as volunteers are able to recognize their new skills and successes as they continue to take on new challenges in the association.

Guest post by Lowell Aplebaum, Association 141+, part of a series of predictions for 2012.