Source: Steve Oblas, Executive Director
of Internet Services, Lehigh University,
Bethlehem, PA.
--------------------Volunteer
Trends--------------------
Make Most of Entertainment
Industry's iParticipate Campaign
Hollywood
is making volunteering cool.
The San Francisco-based
Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) has
launched a groundbreaking effort called iParticipate.
The multi-year initiative designed
to inspire a new era of service among Americans features a series of public service
announcements featuring Hollywood stars and First Lady Michelle Obama.
While officials
at many nonprofits like KaBoom (Washington,
DC), the Hands On Network (Atlanta, GA) and
AARP (Washington, DC) planned for this moment
and designed
specific opportunities to attract and engage the right volunteers, it isn’t
too late for your agency to take advantage of the volunteerism movement.
First,
think about how the right volunteers can support your mission. Be specific.
For example, do you need volunteers to paint
a school or provide free legal service?
Do your volunteers need to speak Spanish? Should they be good with kids or
have a background in sports?
According to
Victoria Pacchiana, communications associate
with VolunteerMatch (San Francisco, CA),
an organization that helps nonprofits find
volunteers
and volunteers find opportunities, a big part of this preparation is thinking
through
the types of opportunities they have for volunteers. Knowing this will help
you focus on finding the right volunteers and reduce the odds of being overwhelmed
with well-meaning folks.
By registering for a free account
at www.volunteermatch.org, nonprofits can
post an unlimited number of
listings for volunteer opportunities.
“When a nonprofit posts
on VolunteerMatch,” Pacchiana says, “its
listings not only appear on our network for volunteers, but also on 100-plus
partner websites such as Coca-Cola Live Positively, iParticipate.org, Serve.gov,
and many more.”
Persons interested in volunteering
go to www.volunteermatch.org and enter their
ZIP codes for a list of current volunteer
openings in the
area and
agency contact
information.
One prominent example of how
VolunteerMatch is being used is at The George
Washington University (Washington,
DC). Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama
challenged the
university’s students to perform 100,000 hours of community service
by May 2010. VolunteerMatch created a special website to help track students’ volunteer
hours. “We want to make participation in this challenge as simple
as possible,” says
Robert Chernak, senior vice president for student and academic support
services at the university.
Sources: Entertainment Industry Foundation,
Los Angeles, CA.
Victoria Pacchiana,
Communications Associate, VolunteerMatch,
San Francisco, CA.
--------------------Technological
Trends--------------------
Twitter Generates a
Buzz Over Event
Toronto’s
techie community banded together to organize
HoHoTO (Toronto, Canada) using
Twitter (www.twitter.com) as the driving
force to generate buzz about the December
2008 event, which drew the attention of
the technology, marketing and public relations
professional communities and raised $25,000
for the local food bank.
Michael O’Connor
Clarke, vice president of Thornley Fallis
Communications (Toronto,
Ontario, Canada), talks about HoHoTO and
how it became a success with
less than two weeks of planning:
How many people attended the event?
“There have actually
been two HoHoTO events. The first in December
2008, and a
recent summer party we threw together on
a whim in August. Pronounced ‘hoe hoe
TEE oh’ — the T.O. stands for
the affectionate local nickname for Toronto, ‘the
big T.O.’ — the first event drew
close to 650 people raising $25,000 in just
a little more than 15 days of planning. The
August event drew 500 and raised $13,000.”
To whom and how many was information transmitted
via Twitter?
“It’s really hard to say how
many people we reached through Twitter. We
sent out simple messages to let friends and
followers know we were working on this insane
plan to host a huge charity party, with about
15 days of prep time. Our friends helped
spread the word. Friends of friends spread
it further.
“This is the network effect of Twitter at its best. From initial messages
posted to Twitter by a handful of us, it went viral. At a couple of points in
the run up to the first event, and on the night of the event itself, the name
of the event was the top trending topic on Twitter. Trending topics are Twitter’s
way of tracking big news items and other daily themes that emerge when a large
group of people online are all talking about the same thing. People logging into
the main Twitter home page or using one of a number of the popular third-party
Twitter tools would have seen the HoHoTO topic rising to the top. Many Twitter
users then asked on Twitter what HoHoTO was, further spreading the word.”
Why was the Twitter marketing campaign so
successful?
“First, the group of people behind
HoHoTO are well-connected people in the Toronto
(and broader) online community, yet each
of us also has a particular area of influence.
One of the key HoHoTO team members and our
de facto leader, for example, is Rob Hyndman,
a technology lawyer. I’ve been in the
tech business my entire life, and know many
of the people Rob knows in Toronto and elsewhere,
but we also have big networks that don’t
overlap.
“Our organizing team included a diverse group of people — including
the nonprofit sector, professional photography community, music business professionals
and many more — with big personal networks and local influence among certain
related but very different communities. The only thing we had in common is that
we are all enthusiastic social media users, big Twitter fans and self-confessed
geeks. This set of connections helped us spread the word far and fast.
“Secondly, the idea. I think we just struck a chord. Toronto was in the
thick of the downturn and in that grey, miserable, not-quite-winter time of the
year. People wanted an excuse to party and celebrate the vibrant geek community
in Toronto.
“Third, the cause. There had been quite a bit of news about the plight
of the local food banks in the run up to the holidays. This galvanized us and
made it easy to get powerful messages of need across to the community.”
How much potentially was saved by marketing
via Twitter versus standard
marketing methods?
“Thousands. We did no real marketing
at all. We used e-mail between team members,
a Google Groups setup (like an instant Intranet)
and Twitter as our communications tools,
marketing channels and project management
essentials. There were some costs involved
in staging the event, but we managed to convince
almost everyone to give us their services
or products for free as in-kind donations.”
Source:
Michael O’Connor Clarke,
Vice President, Thornley Fallis Communications,
HoHoTO, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
