Engaging Networks’ #spark11 conference for non-profits

On Tuesday 14 June 2011 I attended Engaging Networks’ Spark event in London. Engaging Networks is the new name for Advocacy Online – the supporter engagement software that allows organisations to manage fundraising, campaigning/advocacy, email and social actions in a centralised platform.

Audience research – getting to know your Facebook Fans

We all know that the better we know and understand our audiences, the more likely our communications with them will be successful. If we’re already talking to people on Facebook, what do we know about who’s listening? Facebook Insights tells us the age and gender of our fans, and where they are, but nothing about what interests them. We can look at what content we put out and see what is the most engaging, but how would we know what we’re missing? Also, how do we know how different our fans are to the average Facebook user?

NixonMcInnes adopt Unison model workplace policy on domestic abuse

It’s world mental health day today, so I thought I’d blog about a related bit of recent NixonMcInnes news.

Last year I went to the Feminism in London conference and also to a seminar on women’s rights at Socialism 2010, and while there I learnt why domestic abuse is a workplace issue.

Victims of domestic abuse are likely to be affected in ways which affect their working lives – they may need to take time out of work, e.g. to visit a healthcare professional for physical or mental health reasons and their ability to deliver their actual work may be threatened – as such, workplaces need to take active steps to make sure they are not going to inadvertently discriminate against victims.

Current themes around social media and fundraising

Max and I did a presentation last week on the current themes around social media digital and fundraising (well, c’mon, digital is pretty much all social now, right?). Here’s a few of the big ones as we see it:

• Social proof
• Gaming
• Micropayments
• Geo-social
• Fundraising for campaign comms
• Corporate social sponsorship / partnership
• Crowd-sourced products / transactional donations

Happiness vs work

As many of you know, here at NixonMcInnes, in our attempts to prioritise people before profit, we measure happiness of the workforce.

As every ‘normal’ business should, we also measure how much chargeable work we’re doing.

I wondered – when we have tonnes of work to do, do we get stressed and unhappy? So, I mapped the two figures.

• Adactio: Journal—The password anti-pattern
• Elastic lists
• Well formed data
• Facebook Data Team
• Mouseprice – property information and data
• FlowingData | Data Visualization and Statistics
• Gist Power Tip: Export Facebook Page Fans – if out of date, check comments
• Global Web Index || Global research on web behaviour and social media involvement
• London Bike Share Map
• MarketingCharts: charts and data for marketers in web and Excel format
• NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel
• PHP/MySQL Tutorial – Part 3 and how to use a form to add data to a database (PHP template)
• Sprint: Plug into Now. – interesting mobile advertising campaign
• TargetMap – Create & share customized data maps on Googlemaps
• OkTrends – OkCupid data blog on people, sex and dating
• Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web (open data) | Video on TED.com
• Twiangulate: analyzing Twitter connections and also Twitter Counter
• We Feel Fine – AWESOME data visualisation on moods
• What is the Monkeysphere?
• Worldometers – real time world statistics

What are your favourites?

RSS Feed of Beth Granter’s Delicious Activism Links

The party was at Levi’s flagship store on Regent Street in London. I arrived, wearing Primark jeans and a band t-shirt. Downstairs was a free bar and a bunch of ‘mood boards’ for want of a better term, created by SWTC ambassadors. The discussion was chaired by Annie Mac and the ambassadors included Kathryn Ferguson (filmmaker), Justice Williams (Tru Life magazine), Kristin Knox (fashion blogger), Ikonika (DJ/producer) and Anna Murray & Grace Winteringham (Patternity).

I’d guess that the crowd was 95% female, 95% aged 18-30 and quite racially diverse. It was also 95% stylish and 75% good looking IMO (which is pretty high). Once I’d finished objectifying my sisters, I thought I’d better listen to the discussion. Overall it was quite generic with people saying how important confidence and dedication is, how they don’t like being defined by being female etc. 

Then Jane Bradley one of the organisers of Ladyfest 10 dared to utter the F word. What did our panelists think about Feminism? This caused a wave of nervous giggles and awkward expressions, and one by one the female role models on stage explained that they were not feminists. Patternity said they were women but weren’t working to exclusively help women (as if feminism doesn’t help men?!), and said, “this isn’t a feminist cult!”. At this point the woman in front of me said to her companion, “why are they all so fucking scared of being feminist?”. Hurrah that woman. Out of the six women on stage, only one was brave enough to come out as a feminist. That was Kristin Knox. She then talked about boy bloggers in fashion and mentioned something about gay and straight people that seemed a bit out of context but well done for trying to bring in the subject of sexuality anyway

Overall the discussion was a bit disappointing in its lack of depth or feminist  analysis for me, but it was probably appropriate for the majority of the crowd who seemed to be interested in creative industry entrepreneurship and business rather than women working for social change. In fact, it wasn’t that clear what the ambassadors were doing in the field of social change. They seemed to be successful female role models though, and there was a little discussion about challenges with making money, and the struggles some had gone through financially.

After the talks was more networking time, then a surprise performance from The Noisettes, which was excellent and made me wish I’d brought a proper camera. The event was let down by not having any free wifi that I could find, and uncertainty of what hashtag to use. We also all got a 30% discount voucher for Levi’s which was nice. I had to leave early so missed the DJ set by Ikonika.

So this social network is clearly a branding and CSR endeavour by Levi’s and I’m interested to see how it goes. I met some good people tonight too and I think they got their target audience right. I now want to find out what Levi’s CSR policies are in term of slave labour etc. I know Primark are bad, but my reasoning for shopping there is that it’s better to give £8 to an unethical company than £80 to an equally unethical company for the same thing, when the price isn’t reflective of the workers’ wages anyway. But yeah, I haven’t researched Levi’s practices yet so I won’t pass judgement yet. I probably should have asked that question to the panel.

Some other posts by ladies there on the night, who had actual cameras not just iPhones:
Fashion Fois Gras
A Pair and a Spare
Zaiba Jabbar
Bang Bang You’re Dead

That’s what Think Pig is about – raising awareness of the different farming methods, labelling on meat, and what they mean for pigs. There’s a great educational video and animation for the campaign, a downloadable shopping guide [PDF], and lots of other information on the Think Pig campaign site. Our contribution at NixonMcInnes was to create a Facebook Game and Facebook Page for the campaign. The game is a word game – pigs being so intelligent and all – where you get bonus points for answering facts about pigs and pig welfare correctly. People can then share these facts on their Facebook Wall, and ‘Like’ the Facebook Page to keep informed about the campaign progress and to discuss the issues around pig farming and pig welfare.

There’s been some lively debate on the Facebook Page about whether it’s helpful to promote higher welfare for pigs being farmed for meat, if you don’t agree with eating pigs in the first place. However, even though I don’t eat them myself, I’d rather people were well informed so they could make an educated choice about what (if any) kind of meat they eat.

Cos I’m trying to put some weight on. Seemed like a good app, I started adding the food I’d eaten today and it counted my calories for me. Then went to put what activities I’d done. It asked me to put in my weight and target weight first so it could calculate stuff.

It then gave me this absolute bullshit:

What an absolute bitch of an app. Fancy telling underweight people they ought to lose weight! I don’t normally swear but this has really got me angry. How small minded and down-right dangerous! This app had the potential to be really useful for people trying to put weight on and they’ve just decided to only serve fatties.

I’m deleting this app right away and suggest out of support for the skinnies you do the same. I’m also going to write on the app wall about how rubbish this is.

Good advertising blogs

• Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology
• Eaon Pritchard’s blog
• Osocio – Social Advertising and Non-profit Campaigns
• CST Advertising – Home of Dave Trott’s blog
• adwomen – Feminist commentary on adverts

Specifically good items

• Influential Marketing Blog: An Insider’s Guide To Marketing On Flickr
• tesco value shampoo – spoof ad
• Sprint: Plug into Now. – Massively awesome and interesting data visualisation on today’s production
• Orange online ad dimensions / specifications – For reference
• HSBC: No “goodservice” in Sight – and Orange Ad Campaign: I Am Lost? -  about using ‘search for …’ as an online advertising tactic

As of tomorrow, it will be possible to create engagement adverts using the self serve tool. This means that you can promote business profiles and events on Facebook using the run-of-site (ASU) adverts and encourage users to become a fan of that page or RSVP to an event invitation directly from the ad space, as the (very basic!) examples below show:

New Facebook Ads - examples from Facebook - meat not my choice!

This is replacing the ‘social actions’ feature which allowed ads to link to a page but didn’t let users fan the page from the ad itself. This is potentially huge for brands/businesses with profiles (create a profile here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) as it means you can pay on a CPC basis to generate fans. This used to be only available on the homepage on a CPM model.

With business profiles becoming much more like a personal profile, they are a great way for brands to communicate with their customers on a more personal level, with status updates, videos, competitions and so forth, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/adidasoriginals The ability to run targeted ads driving traffic to those business profiles means that users can interact with their favourite brands with just one click whilst browsing Facebook. the average CPC on the self-serve tool (http://www.facebook.com/advertising) is currently around $0.25, so effectively, a brand/advertiser can gain an engaged user/consumer for about $0.25.

I’ve just emailed back with the following questions so I’ll let you know what the answers are when I get them:

1. if someone clicks ‘become a fan’ on the ad, do they still get taken to the Fan Page or do they just become fans and not move pages?
2. can someone click the ad and go to the fan page but not click ‘become a fan’?
3. can you now only pay when they become a fan and not when they click through to the Fan Page but don’t become fans?
4. can you still get ‘endorsed’ by existing fans when the ad is shown to friends of fans by having their friend’s name and picture accompany the ad? AKA ‘Social Actions’?

One feature which is apparrently going to be exclusive to 3 when it launches is the Facebook Application on the phone. The phone’s screensaver shows all of your Facebook Friend’s current profile picture alongside their current status. You can skip forward and back between them too. It tells you when they updated it, but I discovered that this isn’t always correct even when you’ve just refreshed the data, so don’t trust it if it tells you that 3 minutes ago your friend said they were in such and such a venue. Also it would be nice if you could click on them and it would take you to their profile but it just takes you to the Facebook Application Home page, which is a basic text only news feed of all of your friends’ Facebook Activity. Clicking anything on that takes you to the standard Facebook Mobile website in the phone’s browser.   I do really like the screensaver of status’ though.

When trying to take pictures it was really frustrating because it refused to zoom at all. This may have been because it was supplied without any memory card. This may also be why videos were limited to about 20 seconds. It also only has a 3.2 megapixel camera which seems a bit out of date when so many phones are 5 megapixels these days. However it does have face recognition technology which is awesome. My favourite thing is to try and draw a face realistic enough to make the phone think it’s a real face. Or find things in nature which look like faces and see if the phone agrees.

The handset is really skinny though – the skinniest handset I’ve ever owned for sure.

As to 3′s signal/reception, in my house in Bethnal Green I either have one bar or no bars and reception is generally terrible in comparison to my own phone which is on O2, which always has 4 or 5. However, at the boyfriend’s house it’s the opposite. So basically I need a 3 phone for when I’m at the boyfriend’s and an O2 phone for my house.

Despite that, it really came in handy when I was being corralled for 5 and a half hours by police when I’d stopped by the G20 protest to have a look on my way home from work. I was able to quickly and easily upload videos live from the scene to YouTube. That’s when I wasn’t being slammed into a lamp post by police (completely unprovoked – I was just waiting to be allowed to go home). Unfortunately when I saw a man being attacked by 3 police dogs I passed my housemate the phone to film it (he was closer) and he couldn’t work it out quick enough and just took a bunch of completely blurred photos. Luckily the bitten man saw my other videos and contacted me about it, so we’ll see what happens there.

Anyway, my free month of the phone was up the other day, but 3mobilebuzz promised me the phone for another two weeks in return for me and a friend doing another thing – “We’d like you both to use the phone to document a ‘Day in Your Life’, capturing a 24 hour period in 20 photos”. Fair enough, sounds good to me. So I agreed to that and now it has been called a ‘challenge’ and I’ve been sent a bunch of playing cards and a red ribbon through the post. Very mysterious. I only hope it doesn’t involve any trekking about or solving riddles!

Also, great timing or what, my other phone (also a Sony Ericsson) just broke today. Dear 3mobilebuzz, please can I keep the phone longer, or forever? I might be moving house soon so maybe the reception will be better there

p.s. all my phone pictures and videos including the 3mobilebuzz challenge and the G20 protest stuff is in a set on my Flickr.