The British Red Cross has recently launched a new site as reviewed by Econsultancy.

In 2009, I was part of a research group at website design agency, dotAgency,  who reviewed 15 top charity websites for our our popular charity website benchmark report:  Hitting the Heart.

The former website of the British Red Cross was one of the sites we analysed, reviewed and scored, so I was interested to see how their new website stacks against our assessment of their former site.

Getting the most from your online donation path

Part of the Hitting the Heart report focuses on the effectiveness of the donation path. Their former website had hits and misses in this section of the report:

• There was no there DPA compliant email opt-in box at point of data collection in the donation path.
• There was a clear choice of donation payment options and method and the site offered Gift Aid and Payroll Giving options
• The journey offered good up-sell donation prompts
• We received an automated  online donation email response within the hour of making a donation. However there was no email or off line follow up via phone call or direct mail as some charities did.

Donating on the new website

I was interested to see how the donation path has been re-developed on the new site so I chose to make a donation to the Pakistan Flood Appeal.

When I visit the British Red Cross website I am prompted to donate to the appeal by the main banner on the homepage. The image conveys a sense of urgency and I am invited to donate relatively high sums (£20, £50, £100) using radio buttons.

I like the fact that the page has been updated with a news bulletin section below the fold. I also get a sense my donation will contribute to something tangible from the shopping list on the page.

The site communicates well that the personal data I provide will be secure and the donation path includes an Opt-in for email communication and help pages. There is a phone number for contacting the donor care team as well as the Fundraising Standards Bureau logo. I am given the option to Gift Aid my donation.

The thank you page prompts me to:

• sign-up for direct debit
• tell my friends I have made a donation, by automatically updating my status on Facebook and sending a tweet on Twitter

I received the email confirmation less than 5 minutes after clicking the Submit button. So far I’m giving them top marks for the new website donation path and I look forward to the donor care follow up.

My tips for better donation paths:

• Follow fundraising best practice and show good will by communicating to donors that you are DPA compliant and that donating is safe. Today a £10 donation is hard to win so be sure to acknowledge donations promptly. The Red Cross site has for instance a link on fraud and help pages detailing processes.
• Make full use of social networking sites as this can create donation leads via networks of friends and families and this spreads the word for free.
• Keep your donors updated on the work they are funding: timely news are good but  good updated blogs are more interesting.  I like how Oxfam merges fresh sticky content including video on the field and donation prompts.

As you’ve probably read already, Facebook has announced that it has hit 500 million users!

That’s equivalent to:

• One in every 12 people in the world
• The entire population of the USA, UK, France and Germany combined
• Half the number of people that own computers in the world

So what’s the secret behind this success story?

In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg started thefacebook.com while at Harvard University. The website allowed students to register their details and post information or pictures about their activities across campus with early reports stating the site generated 450 visitors in the first 4 hours of going live and 22,000 photo-views.

While these early numbers pale into insignificance compared to the figures released this week, the future was bright for the new service. Despite thefacebook.com being forced to close briefly over security concerns (sound familiar?), when it reopened it quickly expanded across every University in the US.

By 2004, Facebook received its first investment from the co-founder of Paypal and purchased the domain name facebook.com for $200,000. In 2006 it opened its doors to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address and today, only four years later, facebook.com has reached 500 million users and $1.1 billion of revenue.

So the big question is: what’s next for the social giant?

Banner advertising has been the largest source of revenue for Facebook to date and, with a wealth of data about every user, banner advertising has never been so targeted. Users supply their age, interests, location, gender and occupation, which allows advertisers to target an exact demographic.

Facebook cites the example of a company called CM Photographic (PDF link) that specialises in wedding photography. CM invested only $600 dollars on Facebook, targeting 24 to 30 year old women whose relationship statuses on Facebook indicated they were engaged. An amazing 60% of users who clicked on the ad became a qualified lead and generated the company nearly $40,000 of revenue.

Despite this, Facebook’s advertising click through rate is only 0.04%, compared to Google’s 8%. Compare this to open rates than can be achieved other digital areas, such as email. Facebook’s challenge is to leverage their user base and overcome user perceptions of marketing on social channels users ‘see ads as not always relevant to them, but don’t like personalised ads either as these are an invasion of privacy” (source: IAB /ICD research July 2010).

So is there another way for Facebook to make more money in the future?

Social gaming

The answer may come from another favourite pastime of Facebook users: gaming. With games like Farmville bringing in over 61 million Facebook users regularly monitoring their farm growing crops and raising livestock, does online gaming offer a financial opportunity?

Facebook credits have remained fairly low key so far, but we think this could just be the next big thing.

Currently you can buy Facebook credits (one credit is equal to $0.10) using a credit card, Paypal or a mobile device. You can then use these “credits” to purchase premium items in some of Facebook’s top games or applications and send gifts to friends.

We’re not the only ones that think this could be big with RockYou, Facebook’s largest game developer, recently signing a five-year exclusive deal to use Facebook credits as its online payment method. Companies like RockYou will earn 70% for every credit it sells and Facebook takes a healthy 30% too!

Facebook credits

But using credits for games is only the start. What about the ability to convert credits back into money? Would this allow social games like poker/roulette to reward users with credits which they can then convert into money that they can spend? Or how about using the service to pay your friends back money you borrowed? What about earning loyalty points in day-to-day retail stores in the form of Facebook credits?

Only two weeks ago, MOL announced it will allow customers in its stores in Asia and Australia to purchase Facebook credits in-store but also convert “MOLpoints” into Facebook credits.

Take this to its natural conclusion and you could even see brands giving Facebook credits to fans that post products on their wall and encourage their friends to purchase. Could this start a whole new affiliate system?

So is this the next Facebook money making idea? We suggest you watch this space!

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Are retail brands effectively using social media to connect with customers?

We were keen to find out, so we did some research…and we’re launching the results today, with a free benchmark report, giving you all the juicy details: www.dotcommerce.co.uk/social_ecommerce_solutions.

We found that social media is being used by 42% of UK retailers, but they’re not very keen on expanding their activity across multiple networks, with only 12% using more than one form of social media channel to engage with their target audiences.

When it comes to the channels retailers are using, more brands have a presence on Twitter (26%) than Facebook (24%) despite the latter having been around for a lot longer and with far more users.  But what surprised us most was that the majority of brands with a social media presence are failing to tell anyone about it, with no links or references to their Twitter or Facebook pages anywhere on their websites.

Want to know more? Download our report which details the full results of our study, with lots of best practice guidelines to help your brand get the most out of social media. There are also over 60 handy tips for Twitter, Facebook, User Generated Content, Blogs and other sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube that will help your business get ahead in this exciting new landscape.

And, if you’re one of the 58% of UK retailers with ecommerce solutions not already using social media for marketing, what’s stopping you? Entry costs are low, and the potential for spreading marketing messages virally through social media sites is high. Read our report and give it a try – and drop us a line on our Twitter, @dotCommerce, to let us know how you get on.

We are all spending an increasing amount of time reading blogs and participating on social networks. Research from Nielsen shows that globally, we spent 82% more time on social networks like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook in December 2009 than we did at the same time a year before.

This increased interest offers great potential for marketers; by tapping into social communities you are geared up to reach a wide new audience through one of the most effective marketing tools – peer recommendations.

Email marketing provides you with a fantastic way to tap into your recipients social networks, but it won’t happen on its own. We’ve picked out four top tips on how to use your email marketing to encourage social sharing:

• Add sharing links – ‘Share this’ buttons have become common on most web content, so make sure you add them to your emails too! They allow readers to quickly and easily share material they find interesting with their social circle. Indeed, a recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that including sharing buttons on an email marketing message produced a 25% boost in reader interaction and a surge in inbound traffic from social networks
• Publicise your newsletter to social communities – When you send out your email newsletter, why not post the link to the web version on your Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook account. This will encourage your followers to read the message and, if you have a prominent ‘subscribe’ link in the email itself, they might even sign up
• Add a ‘follow us on Twitter’ link – As well as giving recipients the option to share newsletter content, make sure you publicise your social network accounts so that recipients that aren’t following you on Twitter for example can have the option to add you. This will help you deepen the relationship and will make it more likely that they will share future content with their network
• Encourage social media interactions – Where possible, try and encourage recipients to take actions on social networks. For example, could you use your email message to invite feedback on your latest product via Twitter or on Facebook. Or why not encourage your customers to submit pictures of them using your products on Flickr?

By creating a link between your social media marketing and your outreach via email, you can begin to join the dots between your separate strategies and use both forms of communication to support and increase customer retention and acquisition.

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Whilst I generally live and breathe digital marketing, I do have one other passion: windsurfing (an interesting combination, I know!).

Because of this, I have shopped with Fat Face in the past and I’m also on their email marketing list. I was very impressed by a recent email/social media campaign they ran, so I thought I’d share it and reveal some of the reasons why I thought it was so effective.

Win a Classic VW Camper

I first caught wind of it on Facebook, when a friend posted a link. When I clicked through  the site offered me the chance to win a vintage splitscreen VW campervan worth £30,000… every surfers dream set of wheels!

Now, running a competition is not a new tactic for data capture, but the prize was perfectly suited for Fat Face’s target audience. It certainly worked with me!

But it was when I clicked through to the landing page that things got really interesting. I duly filled in my details and pressed submit and was then taken to a customised page completed with a unique URL: http://winacamper.fatface.com/tinktaylor

On this page was an option to share the competition with my friends.

Again, this is not a new concept, but I was told that for every friend that entered via the unquie URL that had been generated for me, I would be given a further entry into the competition, therefore enhancing my chances of winning!

This was a great way to incentivise me to share the competition with as many friends as possible. They also gave me the option to do this in a variety of different ways – email, Facebook, Twitter etc – all perfectly customised for the particular network, to make the sharing easy.

[I should mention here that there are issues around email permission that Fat Face would have to be wary of]

It seems that my surfer friends were just as interested in the competition as I was – a fact that I’m sure Fat Face was counting on… Everytime I logged into Facebook my news feed was littered with links to the competition that had been posted by others.

So why was this campaign so successful? There are a few key things to note:

-          Relevancy and targeting – Fat Face makes niche products for specific audiences. By using their existing subscriber base and offering an incentive that would be particularly interesting and appealing to them, the company was able to very effectively target a specific consumer group

-          Functionality – By making the ‘sharing’ process quick and easy, Fat Face made it very simple for me to tell a vast number of my like-minded friends about the competition. I doubt I would have done this if the process had been more complex (and if I wasn’t incentivised to share the information)

-          Tapping into the power of social networking – This campaign is a great example of how email can be the initial spark that spearheads wider, but still very targeted, social media activity

-          What better way to build an engaged list – I was incentivised to send this to friends who shared a common interest. It’s a win-win situation: my friends that signed up gave me another chance to win and also gave Fat Face valuable access to potential, targeted customers.

So well done to FatFace. Thank you for a great competition: a fantastically simple and fairly low budget viral campaign. But most of all thank you for not going out like many others and buying a list, which we know does not have high levels of engagement. This is a shining example to everyone on how to leverage social media and email marketing.

When we talk to our customers and prospects about this functionality, there is a real interest and appreciation of how this could really be used to increase their data capture in practice. Let us know if you think it could be useful for any of your future campaigns our friends at dotAgency would havppily build you one of your own!