Like a good proportion of the Scottish social media community we tried to help the 300 miles guys raise money for the CLIC Sargent childrens’ cancer charity.
Like the rest of the community we had high hopes and expectations of being able to harness the power of social media – specifically Twitter – to generate some noise and donations.
And, like many of those who did their bit, we’ve learned some things in the process about both the benefits and limitations of Twitter. We share some of these observations in this post.
But first our congratulations to Lee and Garry on their achievement. On Friday last they completed their epic 300 mile Outer Hebridean challenge in 57 hours & 10 minutes. They cycled the equivalent of 10 London Marathons, kayaked a half marathon and ran another marathon while ascending the height of Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Mount Snowdon combined. In the process they raised the best part of £10,000 for CLIC Sargent. Well done guys, a fantastic, inspirational achievement!
During their training and preparation for the event, Lee and Garry shared their experiences on their blog and through Twitter. They fully embraced both the virtual and real world aspects of networking as they captured the imagination of the Scottish social media scene.
Many of these people, perhaps most notably Mike Coulter, rallied round to help boost the profile of the challenge. Indeed, it was prompted by Mike’s frustration at slow conversion of Twitter buzz into money that we launched our own initiative.
We set out to make it as easy as possible to “monetise” Twitter on behalf of 300 Miles.
All people had to do was retweet (RT) our simple message and we’d donate 50p to the cause – up to a maximum of £300 for unique retweets.
We assumed that removing the need to actually donate yourself would turbo-charge the message and deliver an easy £300 for the charity. Indeed there was some internal debate as to the right level to set the donation per retweet. It was argued that at 50p we’d burn through the £300 in double-quick time and that 20p would be more appropriate.
How wrong we were.
The first Tweet went out from our Blondehaslearnt profile at 9.44 AM.
And, within 20 minutes we were being picked up as one of the most retweeted items on the planet…
But things quickly slowed down. We had been retweeted 40 times in the first 45 minutes. The first 31 retweets had the potential to reach 38,641 people (ignoring any overlap in followings of the people who retweeted us). But in the next 3 hours we added only 36 further retweets and things had slowed to a trickle.
By way of a boost we shared this information with a secondary tweet.
For a while this had the desired effect, but closer attention to the content of the retweets revealed that the further we went beyond the “inner circle” of people who knew the 300 miles guys, or at least knew about the challenge, the less likely we were to be retweeted.
In appears, quite rightly, that people don’t retweet lightly. And repeated scamming and spamming has hardened people against taking a charitable tweet at face value.
Some people, like @RicRoberts, took the time to check it out. Many others clearly didn’t and our message fell on the Twitter equivalent of stony ground.
The 140 character format of Twitter makes messages easy to digest and pass on, but it doesn’t allow for the richness and depth of communication that might perhaps have convinced people of the authenticity of the call to action.
In the end (by that I mean the fact that, at the time of writing, there hasn’t been a retweet for over 24 hours) we achieved 127 retweets with a maximum theoretical reach of 63,325 people. In other words a very loosely defined “response rate” of 0.2%. Would your average, sophisticated direct marketing charity outfit be happy with that? All comments welcome.
In conclusion, our main reflections on this quick and dirty, spontaneous piece of fund-raising activity are as follows:-
1) Things spread like wildfire on Twitter. Which is great if you have a piece of news that needs to travel fast. But wildfires have a habit of flaring up and burning out really quickly. Which is not so great if you’re looking for people to take any kind of action on the back of that news.
Twitter has a short attention span. It is a firework rather than a flare – blink, several other tweets roll in and you’ve missed it.
2) There are communities within communities on Twitter. Social media are at their most powerful when the ambient awareness for other people that you generate online is reinforced by face to face contact. This initiative worked well with the 300 miles inner circle but stuttered and quickly stalled once it moved a couple of “generations” beyond that.
3) Was our copywriting optimised for direct response? Could we have explained the offer, been more motivating, and allayed people’s authenticity concerns all in 140 characters? Indeed make that 120 characters or so given that we needed to leave room for the extra characters taken up by the process of retweeting.
Tags: 300miles, charity, fundraising, linkedin, retweet, socialmedia, Twitter
May 25th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Good points Phil.
I hope we do learn more here via comments.
Twestival seemed to do well via Twitter of course, but maybe novelty value?
Marc from @wikiup tried to open up the conversation re tweets and donations on the 1,000 member-strong 38minutes site, but only got a stingy 2 comments.
I had slightly more success when I posted on my blog, with 4 insights.
Be interesting to see if @300miles donations increase in any measure thanks to post Event publicity?
Here’s hoping, (and planning) to make that happen.
May 25th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Phil,
A fantastic initiative that promised much but perhaps failed to live up to expectations for the reasons stated above and in Mike Coulter’s blog.
Maybe, charity giving fatigue is in play. With the down-turn in the economic climate government budgets have been hammered making the charities reliant on personal donations or donations from corporate groups. We have certainly encountered apathy and a sense of corporate groups protecting themselves. Companies who a year ago might have donated £500 and told us to go away are now just telling us to go away! For regular fundraisers, we are conscious of continually approaching the same people again and again. In the fire service, not a fortnight goes by without a sponsor sheet appearing or a justgiving page being sent round. Which is why the social media sites, especially Twitter, were so appealing.
Significantly, the lack of 3G coverage in the Outer Hebrides probably contributed to some on Twitter, including @relativesanity’s, feeling of being spammed and the RT campaign being less personal (I’m sure the kid’s with cancer & leukaemia will feel that way!) Coverage on the middle block of islands (South Uist – Berneray) on Day One was horrendous and this didn’t improve overly on Day Two when we made it onto Harris. There were ‘bubbles’ of coverage around the ports where we launched and when we managed to get a spike in signal we made sure we sent a few tweets.
We took photos from the top of our first 4 hills with the intention of sending a pic to Twitpics after every hill but after getting a backlog of photos due to the poor coverage we binned the idea. With more coverage we could have made the tweets far more interesting and ‘personal’. Phone coverage, like 3G, was sparse at best but enabled me to send texts to Fran to then tweet about.
Interestingly, Three network on my Sony Ericsson had more advanced coverage, in terms of phone and 3G, than the all-singing-all-dancing O2 iPhone (I still want one though). O2: must try harder!
Tragically on Friday 22nd, whilst we were heading for the finish line, a walker died in the hills on Harris, north of our road route to Scalpay. The lack of mobile/3G communications is a problem endemic in this area of the world and would have made it difficult for the walker’s companions to raise the emergency services. There are inherent risks with the types of outdoor activities that we partake in (which is maybe why we do them) but more work is needed to improve these services to ensure a coverage fit for purpose.
Thanks for all your efforts at Blonde.
Lee
May 25th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
very interesting experiment
well done
we need to optimise a methodology that actually captures the flashfire quality of twitter attention
for money to flow towards immanent needs
May 26th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Phil, I found similar issues when I did the Robert Burns fundraiser via Twitter in January 09. For all the wonders of social media, there are a couple of things to consider:
1) A cause has to be seen to be really sexy before folk will even retweet, never mind donate.
The tweet doesn’t explain that 300miles is a charity – Twitter users can be very lazy and expect all the info and details on a plate
2) People are starting to tune out from what they see as Spam – there has be extra content to drive people to sites and donate
3) People are suspicious of freebies
4) For all the digerati like to knock it, nothing gives online activity a bigger spike than coverage in the mainstream press
5) A response rate of 0.2% isn’t too bad. Most honest marketeers will tell you that the average assumption is for somewhere between 1 and 4 per cent and that’s with things given a lot more coverage and boost. I know a bank which once spent £300k on a marketing initiative and made £46 back, so don’t feel too bad.
6) It’s all about retweeting, but it needs to be fresh each time which can be a lot of work
7) Companies now want to donate products instead of cash
Don’t let anyone knock what you did though. The lessons learned from this will help others moving forward. And even if you had only raised 50p, it’s 50p they never had.
May 26th, 2009 at 11:21 am
That smiley is actually meant to be an 8 – dunno what happened there.
September 12th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Being Blonde » Charity fundraising on Twitter
“It appears, quite rightly, that people don’t retweet lightly. And repeated scamming and spamming has hardened people against taking a charitable tweet at face value.”