Volunteer numbers are growing...

The Cooperation for National and Community Service, a government agency which runs programs like AmeriCorps, has produced its report on volunteering statistics for the 2009 calendar year. This was clearly a priority of the Obama administration and the statistics indicate some success on this front. Some notable stats:

• Total time volunteering: ~8.1 billion hours
• Estimated value of time: $169B
• Americans spent 100 million more collective hours volunteering in 2009 than 2008
• 1.6 million more people volunteered in 2009 than 2008
• The increase in volunteers is the largest single-year increase since 2003.
• There is a negative correlation between unemployment & foreclosure rates and volunteer rates. Meaning, higher unemployment and foreclosure rates will result in lower volunteer totals.

Some rankings...

Large cities with highest volunteer rate:

• Minneapolis, MN 37.4% (pictured)
• Portland, OR 37.1
• Salt Lake City, UT 35.8
• Seattle, WA 34.9
• Oklahoma City, OK 33.9
  

Mid-size cities (note the representation of college towns):

• Provo, UT 63.6% ( Brigham Young Univ.) (pictured)
• Iowa City, IA 50.0 (Univ. of Iowa)
• Ogden, UT 47.7 (Weber State Univ.)
• Fort Collins, CO 40.7 (Colorado State Univ.)
• Madison, WI 40.0 (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison)
  

Free Non Profit Webinars - Week of 6/14

Highlighting some of the upcoming free webinars identified by Wild Apricot's blog. This week there are a few to check out. If you know of others please email me so I can add them or use the comments section to share the info.

Making Volunteer Engagement Everyone's Job
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
2:00PM Eastern

From: VolunteerMatch

Stand Out – How to Differentiate Your Group
Tuesday, June 15th 2010
3:30PM Eastern
From: Tera McHugh, Association of Women Entrepreneurs

Topic: Building a community of like-minded individuals for networking and support

A Newbie's Recipe for Producing and Presenting Webinars
Wednesday, June 16th 2010
1:00PM Eastern
From: Fran Simon, Chief Engagement Officer of Engagement Strategies

Opportunities & Pitfalls in Facility Planning
Wednesday, June 16th 2010
1:00PM Eastern
From: NonprofitWebinars.com

Giving USA Report Summary

In case you did not see the plethora of coverage given to the Giving Institute and the Giving USA Foundation's announcement on charitable giving in 2009, you can find the basic numbers by clicking on either of the images below. Some highlights:

• Total giving dropped 3.6%
• Third consecutive year of total USA giving over $300B
• Charitable bequests fell by almost 24%
• Individual giving and foundation grants also fell (4% & 9% respectively)
• Corporate giving increased by 5.5%
• Sectors seeing a growth in giving: International Aid (+6.2%), Health (+3.8%) and Human Services (2.3%)
• Sectors seeing a decline in giving: Grants to Foundations (-8%), Public-Society Benefit Organizations (ex: United Way) (-4.6%), Education (-3.6%), Arts (-2%) and Faith-Based/

And some takeaways:

• It's a great sign that giving only dropped slightly, given all the economic troubles the United States and its citizens experienced during 2009.
• The realization of bequests will continue to decline as the death rate follows a similar trend. That being said, planned giving operations should not be shutdown. Rather, they should be more focused and the metrics used to evaluate success should consider the trend in bequest realizations. Also, your planned giving officers should be developing methods for approaching donors/prospects earlier than the field has historically. People traditionally write a will for the first time when they have kids. Consider making an initial approach to prospects when they are in the late-20's or early 30's. A potential strategy is to offer a flyer via mail or web that helps guide your constituents through the basics of writing a will/trust. Include a brief bit on why they should include your organization.

Images for the basic stats:

Thoughts on the 20 "Worst" Charities

It's hard for me to dub charities the "worst" at their craft, considering that I believe all charities are at least started with wonderful intentions. That being said, the folks at MainStreet.com used Charity Navigator's statistics and some additional research to list the following as the worst in the country based on the percentage of funds/gifts that go to administrative costs.

Administrative costs should not be too high (see figures below), but remember they also should not be too low... If your admin costs are in the single digits or even the low teens, you may not be investing enough in fundraising, particularly the long-term fundraising often dubbed "annual giving."

When I reviewed the websites of the twenty labeled organizations, only 4 promoted a social media presence on their home page, including none of the bottom six (Those ranked #1-6... Couldn't really bring myself to call them the "top six"). A correlation? Only that it is another example of bad management.

All of that being said... here is the dreaded list.

20. Tucson Audubon Society - Tucson, AZ (Administrative expenses: 42.8%)
19. New Hampshire Audubon (Administrative expenses: 42.8%)
18. Gospel to the Unreached Millions (GUM) - Houston, TX (Administrative expenses: 43.1%)
17. American Psychiatric Foundation - Arlington, VA (Administrative expenses: 43.7%)
16. Marshall Heights Community Development Organization (MHCDO) - Washington, DC (Administrative expenses: 44.1%)
15. Please Touch Museum - Philadelphia, PA (Administrative expenses: 44.9%)
14. American Friends of the Open University of Israel (AFOUI) - New York, NY (Administrative expenses: 45.2%)
13. Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics - Washington, DC (Administrative expenses: 45.4%)
12. Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens - Akron, OH (Administrative expenses: 45.8%)
11. Victorious Christian Living International - Phoenix, AZ (Administrative expenses: 46.0%)
10. Center for Individual Rights - Washington, DC (Administrative expenses: 46.1%)
9. Changed Lives - Chattanooga, TN (Administrative expenses: 47.4%)
8. Vision New England - Danvers, MA (Administrative expenses: 48.7%)
7. Charleston Area Medical Center Foundation (CAMCF) - Charleston, WV (Administrative expenses: 48.8%)
6. National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame Saratoga Springs, NY (Administrative expenses: 55.1%)
5. Cherokee National Historical Society - Tahlequah, OK (Administrative expenses: 58.2%)
4. Union Rescue Mission, Little Rock (Administrative expenses: 62.1%)
3. National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) - Washington, DC (Administrative expenses: 64%)
2. Boys Choir of Harlem - Harlem, NY (Administrative expenses: 66.3%)
1. American Tract Society - Garland, TX (Administrative expenses: 68.0%)

World Cup Fever... with Non-Profits

First... Go USA! (I happen to be a huge soccer/"proper football" fan)

Now that I have that out of the way, there are some interesting ways to capitalize on the momentum and coverage associated with the FIFA World Cup. For example, check out the (RED) campaign's current effort highlighted in the screenshots below. (RED) is encouraging soccer fans to play against each other in an online penalty shootout. For each goal scored, one US Dollar goes to the (RED) efforts to fight AIDS in Africa. What are your ideas for using the World Cup to help your campaigns?

The game's landing page:

Promoted on Twitter feed (second status down):

Promoted on their Facebook page:

And on (RED)'s main website:

And a look at the actual gameplay (note the personalized jersey as a nice touch):

6/7 Follow-Of-The-Week: Human Rights Campaign

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Twitter: @HRC
Name: Human Rights Campaign
Web: www.hrc.org
Bio: The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality.
Followers: 11,572 + you!
Why Follow? If you visit the Philanthropic Holidays page you’ll see that June is National GLBT (Gay,Lesbian,Bisexual & Transgender) Awareness Month. This, along with the good work HRC does and the way in which they use social media are all good reasons to follow HRC. The Twitter account provides timely updates on GLBT issues and events.
You will find the following images from HRC below - the Twitter account (note the nice use of custom URLs in the background), the HRC website with social media links well-displayed, a great Facebook landing page that immediately requests action from a visitor, and the HRC You Tube page.

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Twitter Page:

Twitter Image with custom URLs:

Home page for www.hrc.org:

Facebook landing page (note consistency and immediate call-to-action):

You Tube page:

Celebrating National Cancer Survivors Day w/Social Media

You have likely seen the buzz all over Twitter and Facebook today - it is National Cancer Survivors Day. The odds are unfortunately also likely that you or someone close to you has been faced with cancer. To that end, American Cancer Society has been (along with the USA Today Kindness section) asking survivors via their More Birthdays campaign website, Facebook page and Twitter feed to share stories of how they overcame cancer. Great use of social media. If you aren't interested in viewing it as a great example of social media use, you should at least check it out for the inspirational stories.

Naming a Penguin via Social Media

This week's spotlight features the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York. They recently engaged current fans and recruited new constituents via a contest to name a penguin... See the Spotlight on Facebook here.

The Spotlight is to highlight best practice among the many great non-profit social media efforts. Have suggestions? Submit them here.

Other organizations that have been in the Spotlight.

Subscribe to the More Donors Blog here:

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Rosamond Gifford caught my attention because of their campaign to name a penguin that was born in mid-April at the zoo. Voting on the final six candidates for the name was conducted primarily through RGZ's Facebook page. The stories behind the names were included, as well as the location of the person submitting the entry. Before social media, I think it is doubtful we would have seen a leading candidate from a kindergarten class in Chile naming a penguin in Syracuse!

The contest was highlighted on the top right of the main Zoo site:

As you can see below, RGZ highlighted each of the six finalists via a Facebook note.

...and kept visitors abreast of results via status updates and comments.

The winner is scheduled to be announced tomorrow. Kudos to RGZ for the engagement of new and current constituents via this contest.

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What do you think of these? Any suggestions for others to highlight?

#AmericaWants Ad Runs for To Write Love On Her Arms

Network issues prevented me from posting this earlier, but I do want to share that the To Write Love On Her Arms ad ran last week. Kudos to TWLOHA and USA Today for this:

New Facebook Privacy Information

When logging into Facebook you may have recently seen (or will soon see... the roll-out will take a little while to get to all users) a message titled "Improved Privacy Controls" at the top of your News Feed... It should look something like this:

As has been well-documented, Facebook has faced a great deal of criticism for their privacy and programming changes as well as how they initially failed to respond to users' concerns. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has finally responded to criticism and is hoping the changes highlighted below will gain some of the lost trust of users back for FB. You can click on the image for a more detailed view.

This image highlights the core privacy controls:

Sharing on Facebook - Suggestion: "Friends Only" across the board. The only thing I have different is that some of my email addresses are only visible to me on the page (which begs the question - why is it still on the account? ...the answer: because it is what I use to log in)

Basic Directory Information - Suggestion: This one is actually more based on your personal preferences. I would suggest that everyone be able to send you messages, in case there is a potential connection you do not realize. I would also advise you to make your friend list private - people (the not-nice-variety) use these to mine for information and deceive users.

Applications and Websites - Suggestion: IMPORTANT - the "Information accessible through your friends" and "Instant personalization" categories are what make many users sketchy about recent FB changes. I would strongly urge you not to share anything with your friends' applications. If one of your friends makes the mistake of adding a bad/malicious application, you will likely avoid being victimized. As mentioned previously, you can/should also disable the instant personalization, as it provides your information to third parties. This privacy setting page (Apps & Sites) also provides a list of all applications you have given permissions to... I found it as a useful way to cleanup and remove those that I no longer need.

Block Lists - Suggestion: Block those people and applications you do not want to hear from... that simple.
"Additional controls" and privacy comments. These sections are worth reading if you have any concerns or lack of understanding on the current FB policies and settings.

If you still have questions after reading these - let me know and I'll do my best to answer your questions.