Tag Archives: Breast Cancer Care

Digital round-up – March

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With more wintery weather heading our way, poke your head out from under the duvet for some of the highlights from March 2018. It has been a bumper month (snow, data abuse, more snow, lots of hashtags) so this round-up has lots of gems.

coloured bear heads poking out of a seaside game.

Campaigns

image from Dog's Trust Pawtrait campaign

Comms good practice

infographic of the 500 most popular passwords

Also, catch up with the slides from CharityComms’ content strategy conference and read Eleanor Dean’s blog with her key takeaways – Three thoughts on creating better digital content for your charity.

Social media

Digital evolution

Have you read the Charity Digital Skills Report? How you does your organisation compare? Do you have a digital strategy? Do your trustees ‘get’ digital?

screenshot from the digital skills report

I went to the DigitalAgenda Impact Awards and heard about lots of brilliant Tech for Good projects. Here’s a blog post from Ross McCulloch about some of the winners (4 examples of digital innovation) and a blog post about the Citizen’s Advice case management system which won an award. Is tech for good on your radar? Are you working on projects or know who is in your space?

Tech trends

Charity reads

And finally….

If you are looking for some cheering up, try these:

What else?

What were your good reads in March? Please do share.

If you want more, see also:

Can I help you?

Get in touch if I can help you with digital copywriting, content planning, training or strategy. I work with charities of all shapes and sizes. Can I help give your comms or digital processes a healthcheck and ideas injection?

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Did you miss Jan/Feb’s round-up? Catch up with more good reads!

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280 characters on Twitter

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In case you missed it, Twitter started to roll-out its 280 character limit to all users today. Personally I think it is a sad day and mourn the opportunity that everyone had to get a message across clearly and concisely in 140. Of course there is no reason why you now have to use the full 280. Readers still have short attention spans so being clear and concise still wins in my book.

Many took to the platform, responding quickly and creatively to mark the change by spreading important messages using their first #280Character tweets. Here are some examples taken from my #280Characters Moment.

Samaritans Ireland reminded us what they do. Haven House Children’s Hospice shared their impact in 2016/17.

Samaritans Ireland

Mental Health Foundation shared stats about mental health (as well as an image asking for donations). Crisis simply repeated their pledge to end homelessness.

Mental Health Foundation

Crisis - 'end homelessness'

Scotland Fire and Rescue used it as a chance to share some important numbers.

Scot Fire and Rescue

Others like Breast Cancer Care, the Met Office and Rethink Mental Illness used just emojis. (See also this from the Cookie Monster!)

BCC use emojis to make a big pink ribbon

Some used the extra space to say thank you. Oxfam used a video and RNLI a simple thanks.

Oxfam's thank you video

Book Trust started a conversation about favourite characters (nice tie-in!) and got lots of replies.

Books Trust

Some just went mad with the extra space! See GiveBlood NHS, Age UK Lambeth and the Science Museum. Plus Macmillan’s cake tweet and London Ambulance’s nee-naws (currently clocking up 15,000 likes and a nee-naw-off with other emergency service accounts!)

GiveBlood NHS, Science Museum and Age UK Lambeth repeat their messages over and over!

Well done to all who reacted so quickly in such brilliant ways!

Does your comms / social media strategy allow you the space to be reactive and creative?

See the full collection including tweets from museums and heritage organisations in my #280Characters Moment.

See also How 280 twitter characters could benefit comms people by Kerry-Lynne Pyke of Macmillan Cancer on comms2point0  with notes about how the increase should benefit charities who tweet in English and Welsh.

Did you spot any other good examples? Do you have a story to tell about your reactive comms? Please share in the comments.

Saying thank you on #GivingTuesday

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Giving Tuesday started in the UK in 2014. Charities use it in all sorts of different ways. Some ask for money or time. Others ask for action. (See Do something good this Giving Tuesday by Kirsty Marrins for some examples).

Others just say thank you. Here are some of the creative and lovely thank you’s I have seen today.

Videos

Mind’s staff read out messages from people who have been helped by Mind. At the end it says ‘We can’t thank you enough for helping us to give people a place to turn and a way forward’.

Mind's staff reading out thank you messages

The Trussell Trust have been tweeting very short thank you messages covering all aspects of how people support them. There is one long one (37s!) on YouTube.

Trussell Trust's staff hold up thank you signs

The Donkey Sanctuary said thank you to their supporters with lots of lovely pictures of donkeys.

Video of still photos of donkeys

Images

War Child UK shared a thank you photo with children holding up letters and waving.

Children hold up letters spelling out 'Thank You'

Refugee Action shared ‘thanks to you’ numbers showing how many people they had been able to help.

Refugee Action - 'this year, you've helped us to...

Marie Curie have been using lots of different ways to say thank you. Here they share statistics showing the impact of their work. Other tweets show them writing thank you letters. Members of staff talked about this on their personal twitter accounts too. And they made fab personal doodles.

Marie Curie - a supporter says thanks for the fun thank you

Personal thanks

Rethink Mental Illness also called supporters to say thank you. In total they contacted 221 people!

Rethink Mental Illlness contacted 221 people to say thank you

Breast Cancer Care started a #ChainOfThanks.

Debbie's thanks to her best friend as part of BCC's ChainOfThanks

The British Heart Foundation thanked their 68,000 event fundraisers and also tweeted a special thanks to the Marathon runners. They also tweeted personal thank you’s using gifs and red and white images to certain supporters. And the CEO Simon Gillespie tweeted his thanks to staff and volunteers.

BHF: 'you ran the miles, you made it count'

Dogs Trust thanked their corporate partners, saying they were ‘wagtastic’.

Dog's Trust sending personal thanks

How do you say thanks?

It is easy but important to say thank you. How do you do it?

A general thank you works well with an image or video to attract attention. These images, videos and actions are low cost and reasonably low-effort. You don’t need a big budget to say thank you well using social media.

Have you seen any other creative thanks today? Please do share them in the comments.

Thanks for reading 🙂

See also GivingTuesday’s Twitter Moments showing some of the UK charity activity and how brands got involved.

How digital is your organisation?

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Playmobil figures staring at a screen

A recent Guardian Voluntary Sector Network article by Zoe Amar argued that charity boards are failing to adapt to the digital age. And Karl Wilding argues on the NCVO blog that digital changes everything.

Some organisations already have digital at their core. Just look at how Parkinson’s UK advertised for their new role of Director of Digital Transformation and Communications. Whereas many know they should be doing more but don’t know where to start and others just don’t see digital as a priority.

Charles Handy at this week’s Cass CCE Charity Talk talked about the need for organisations to find their second curve to survive and in particular the impact of digital on this. He predicted that online platforms (such as Uber) will be central to the way we live our lives.

Two free resources this week look really useful to help organisations understand where they are digitally and improve their skills. Share them with your boards / Senior Managers / colleagues.

Measure and develop digital skills in your organisation

NCVO released a new free toolkit developed by Helen Ridgway. Building a digital workforce ‘includes templates, resources, tips and examples – and a series of bespoke workshops, training and support – to help you plan, design and deliver a comprehensive digital skills development programme for your organisation’. It is packed with 25+ documents including several about conducting a skills audit.

Also on my radar this week is the Third Sector Digital Maturity Matrix developed by Breast Cancer Care. It was developed to ‘to assess the maturity of an organisation’s digital capability (i.e. the current state) and compare it to where they aspire to be (i.e. desired to-be state)’. Download it for free.

What do you use?

Have you spotted any other useful resources? Or like NCVO and Breast Cancer Care, have you shared your own tools for other people to use? Please share in the comments below.

What can we learn from #nomakeupselfie?

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On Wednesday (19th March) social media exploded with #nomakeupselfie. It was started by someone independent of any charity. It quickly caught on and was met with a mix of joining in and dismissal (‘what has this got to do with cancer’?). Two days later it quite clearly has got something to do with cancer as the meme has resulted in £millions being donated to various cancer charities (including £8m+ to Cancer Research alone), lots of self checking messages and widespread news stories.

Sample #nomakeupselfie tweets

Clearly viral explosions of this size don’t come along very often and are impossible to create (see this blog post from Social Chic on why you shouldn’t replicate #nomakeupselfie). What can we learn from it so that it / when it does happen (on whatever scale) we can be ready?

1. Be ready to react

The beauty of social media is that it is ever changing, fun, interesting – bringing unexpected challenges and opportunities to charities. When something big happens, you have to decide quickly what to do. If you have to put in a business case to react three days later, you are going to miss out. Sometimes the decision to ignore or get involved is obvious, sometimes not.

Your social media strategy can be your friend here as it should include some element of crisis comms planning (good and bad). You could create a flow chart like this one from the American Airforce which shows how they decide to deal with comments on blogs. Your social media strategy should also be loose enough that you can drop everything to run with a big event such as this.

2. Just go with it

It might not be on-brand or on-message but if your supporters are involved, then maybe you should join in? This event evolved and organically became a fundraising-related.  But charities helped this with strong messages and an easy ask.

BCCare tweet: We didn’t start it...but thanks #nomakeupselfie supporters! http://bcc.cx/1nDfA2W . Here’s how your support will help http://bcc.cx/1cqSuRi

3. Keep watching

A number of cancer charities chose to ignore #nomakeupselfie because the early message didn’t fit with them but didn’t join in when it did change. For the charities who chose to get on board with it, it has raised unexpected income.

On day 2 charities were better at joining in with the spirit of it, sharing their own photos. On Friday Male CEOs of Macmillan and Beating Bowel Cancer both shared their selfies.  And the meme was copied and evolved into #manupmakeup, #whataman and even #YorkshireSelfie. Macmillan’s male staff did their own Vine.

When the excitement showed no sign of stopping, charities started buying ad words connected with #nomakeupselfie. Clearly the world was searching for information so they spotted an opportunity to raise their profiles further. Clever.

4. Have your JustTextGiving details to hand

Make it easy for people to donate. Make sure your JustTextGiving details are easy for people to share. Giving a regular reminder of these details is useful.

You can’t watch every hashtag. This meme turned from fun into fundraising because people got frustrated at its sharing with no action. It was easy for them to share the JustTextGiving details and equally simple and short for people to donate this way. (See more about Twitter fundraising.)

NB, it is important to check and double check your details. See this BBC article: thousands make #nomakeupselfie donation error.

5. Say thank you and share success

People like to feel involved especially if it is something big. Donating £3 might be a small action but the collective effort has made the news. For every person who did something, it has been an important part of their day. So say a public thank you to everyone. Say how much has been raised and what difference this will make. This builds trust and makes people want to get involved again. (See more about transparency.)

This thank you tweet from Cancer Research has been RTd 14,000 times. And their brilliantly written FAQs post about how they’ll use the money (published on Tuesday 25th) is an important response to the millions of people who helped raise such a significant sum.

CRUK thank you tweet

#nomakeupselfie – what the charities say

Coverage and comment

Charity insider blog posts

What do you say?

What have you learnt from this week’s events? What do you think of #nomakeupselfie? Have you done your crisis comms planning for events like this?

This Nan selfie is my favourite:

Nan selfie RTd by Cancer Research

Can I help you?

Please also get in touch if you’d like me to help you review your crisis comms, digital fundraising channels or supporter engagement. I am a freelance web editor and can help you give your communications a healthcheck and ideas injection.

You can also sign up to receive my blog updates by email. Just add your address to the text box on this page (top right).

Is your SMT/trustees page inspiring?

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How to give the web pages about your senior managers and trustees a digital facelift.

Most charities have a page introducing their senior managers and trustees. These pages are mostly dull and uninspiring. But they could be so much better. With a few tweaks, they could help to boost transparency and trust. They could be inspiring; bringing the passion your team has for the cause, to life.

street painting of lots of faces

Bog standard

A standard ‘meet the team’ page has a photo and biography information for the CEO and other senior managers. There may be a separate page for trustees using a similar style. These sit, reasonably buried in the ‘About us’ section, often in a subsection called ‘How we are run’ or ‘Our people’.

On the face of it, it might feel like these are must-have pages which don’t need much content investment in them. They probably don’t get a lot of traffic other than from journalists or people looking for jobs / trustee roles. They are usually very functional pages which accidentally help to highlight the lack of diversity in the organisation’s management. Because they don’t get much attention, they don’t give any insight into the cause, or an understanding what and why these people do. The pages are very static, not doing much to sell your organisation. They are a website dead-end.

But actually these pages are important. Done right, they make organisations feel more personal. They help with transparency.

Here are some suggestions for how these pages could be improved to drive a deeper insight or conversation.

1. Integrate social media

Zoe Amar and Matt Collins have been on a mission to get CEOs tweeting since 2013. They produce tips and examples as well as an annual list of the top 30 Charity CEO tweeters. Many senior managers do embrace social media as a way of sharing successes, challenges as well as learning from and connecting with others.

But many ‘our people’ pages still don’t include these links. Few promote the CEO’s Twitter address (including most of the winners of Social CEOs). And even fewer, include their blog or LinkedIn profile. Links for the senior team are not included either. What does this convey about the digital culture of the staff and wider organisation? If your senior managers are representing the organisation on social channels, this page should help people to connect with them.

Organisations which do promote their team’s individual Twitter addresses are few and far between. Out of the 50 or so charities I looked at, I only found Breast Cancer Care, Islamic Relief, Diabetes UK, The Scout Association and Parkinson’s UK who were doing this.

Breast Cancer Care's page with clear links to senior manager's Twitter accounts

A few organisations were going further and including multiple channels. For example, SCVO’s full staff list includes contact details, individual listings include blog posts, NCVO’s who’s who pages links to blog posts, Twitter and LinkedIn, as does the people page for JRF.

Do your trustees tweet about your charity and the work they do to support it? If so shouldn’t this information be included in their biogs too? Show current and future digitally-savvy trustees that you want them to use social media in their role. Even if just one of two of your trustees use social media or are happy for this information to be shared, add this to your page.

There aren’t many organisations who are doing this. For example Clive Gardiner of NSPCC is the only CharityComms trustee who has his Twitter and LinkedIn links included in his biog. Small Charities Coalition have added buttons to the profiles of their trustees who are on Twitter. NAVCA have Twitter links for their trustees alongside their short biogs.

NB While thinking about transparency and contactability, what is your organisation’s policy on publishing the email addresses for senior managers or trustees? How contactable are they? Contact information for trustees is especially rare to see. Take a look at Crisis who include the social contacts and email addresses for those who have them and Trussell Trust who have email links for all their senior team.

2. Write biogs which people will read

Cutting and pasting detailed information from someone’s CV just isn’t interesting or engaging, especially when it is replicated in a long list of trustees. Of course senior managers and trustees have impressive backgrounds and experience but supporters may also want to know about motivations, personal experience and skills. Equally, including information about someone’s CAMRA membership or love of ballroom dancing may not be appropriate.

Here are some alternatives:

You could illustrate your team in a completely different way. How about a skills profile for the team (think LinkedIn endorsements)?

LinkedIn skills profile

See more about writing great staff biogs in this nonprofithub post.

3. Get good photos

Getting a photographer in to do individual head-shots of everyone in the same style is worth it. A page where people have supplied their own photos of varying degrees of quality, can look messy and unprofessional. Instead get relaxed, warm pictures of your people. I love these pictures of the team at Ministry of Stories and how they are presented

poloroid-type images, with 'paperclip' attaching the imae to the page at a jaunty angle. Looks friendly and cool.

Rather than head shots can you show your team in action? For example trustees from Blue Cross are pictured with their animals. Youth Music have roll-over images where the second picture shows each member of the team making music when they were younger.

A group picture of the team working together could be a good alternative if it is hard to get lots of single pictures. For example this from The Brain Tumour Charity in 2013. (NB This is now replaced by a video of senior managers talking about their strategy and individual headshots against a branded backdrop.)

Brian Tumour Charity - meet the team

If you can’t use photos for whatever reason, try something more creative. For example NSPCC use brightly coloured blocks for their trustees.

4. Think about your audience

Like with any page on your website, you should think about who is reading this page. Who is it for? What do you want them to do as a result (donate / feel sure that the charity is in safe hands / apply to become a trustee / want to know more)? It may be that all this biography information is not relevant, reading the detail of someone’s career can be quite alienating.

Keeping it simple might be the best answer. Try limiting each person to one paragraph or a certain number of words. Or just including their role and a brief summary. Beanstalk shown here in 2013 do a mixture of both which is really clear.

Beanstalk trustees

You could also think about doing more to showcase the people in your organisation who are doing frontline work. Their stories may be more engaging than the CVs of senior staff. Stop being so hierarchical.

Take a look at this series of videos from Macmillan in which we meet nurses, helpline staff and therapists. Breast Cancer Now do this well too.

screenshot from Macmillan's videos

British Lung Foundation do a really nice job of using their people profiles to link to more information about key areas of their work.

Test what works best for your audience by looking at your page statistics. Make some changes and see how it influences traffic and bounce rates. Change it back or do something different if it has a negative effect.

You could also try putting a call to action (donate / sign up to newsletter etc) at the bottom of the page and see whether anyone acts.

Checklist

  • Do you have a page for SMT / trustees / ‘our people’?
  • Do the photos / video look professional and help to make people feel approachable?
  • Is your text interesting and appropriate? It should bring the work your people do to life. Be aware of word count and usability – realistically who is going to click on a page of names and through and read each one?
  • Do you include contact details? If it is relevant, include social media, email, phone numbers, links to blog posts etc
  • What do your stats show about traffic to these pages? Are bounce rates low? What can you do to improve click-on’s and make them more interesting?

Gold star examples:

How to convince your boss?

The internal politics and processes connected with tweaking these pages is not necessarily simple. Can you show senior managers these examples to help convince them that it is time for a digital facelift.

The profiles of the brilliant people who work of volunteer for you should do them justice.

Show that you are a digitally confident organisation and that your people naturally use digital channels to connect, share and learn. This could help to attract more digitally skilled staff and trustees to apply for future roles. See more from Reach Volunteering about how to attract and recruit digital trustees.

What do you do?

How do you make your staff pages useful? What difference has improving your staff pages made? Do you have reasons for not including social contact details? Please share good and bad examples you have seen. Am especially keen to find examples from small charities. Please share – go-on, add a comment!

Please also get in touch if you’d like me to help you improve your staff pages.

<This post was written in 2013 and updated in 2018.>