GlobalGiving connects you to the causes and community-based projects you care about through their online marketplace. Joan Ochi, the Director of Marketing Communications and Robert Dubois, a Marketing Associate who provides support to the organizations online social media strategy, share how GlobalGiving uses direct marketing to encourage people to donate to the causes they support.

Both Joan and Robert have experience in marketing-communications. Prior to GlobalGiving, Joan provided marketing support for clients such as Fannie Mae and HP. Robert worked at Burns Marketing, Colorado’s fifth-largest marketing-communications agency.

BB: What was your biggest achievement on the social media front in 2008?

GG: Being a part of America’s Giving Challenge - an initiative spearheaded by the Case Foundation earlier this year. The objective of America’s Giving Challenge was to inspire Americans to use online tools such as widgets to participate in a fundraising for a cause - either a project on GlobalGiving or an organization on Network for Good. The Challenge ran for about 6 weeks and attracted over 130 “fundraisers,” more than 13,000 donors, and generated approximately $364,000 in donations. Interestingly, many of the top fundraisers who participated in the Challenge relied not just on social media tools such as widgets and blogs, but used traditional outreach vehicles such as phone calls and email messages as well.

We continued to experiment with other social media tools (Facebook, our own blog, Second Life, etc) as well, and learned that every tools is not right for every organization. Participating in and maintaining a presence on social networks is time consuming and resource intensive, and we found that merely having a presence on social networks has for the most part not been effective in developing online communities or building relationships with new or potential donors.

BB: Tell us about your organization’s marketing/communications strategy for 2009.

GG: Going forward, we are focusing on both acquisition and retention by creating a more engaging website experience - one that will motivate people to return regularly to take advantage of and participate in the more community-oriented features on GlobalGiving. Some of the functionality under development include fundraising tools (which would allow individuals to come together to raise funds for a project in which they have a common interest), tell-a-friend features that enable viral marketing, online discussions between donors and project leaders, and enhanced donor profiles.

BB: What big hairy audacious social media goals will help you achieve your objectives next year?

GG: Once again, we feel that community – oriented features – the ability for donors to connect and interact with project leaders, as well as with other donors – are becoming increasingly important. For example, if I can see what projects my friends support, I might be more likely to support those projects, too. We want our donors to feel connected - with projects and the people that run them, with other donors, and with the broader GlobalGiving community in general. Today, we enable donors to add comments to reports posted by progress leaders - we’re working to make this more dynamic and hopefully turn this “back and forth” into interesting, lively, and educational conversations. And of course, we’ll continue to promote widgets and integrate more video and audio (e.g. podcasts) into our site.

BB: How do you plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing mix (e.g., direct mail, email marketing, mobile, media relations, etc.)?

GG: We typically use email communications to encourage individuals to visit gg.com and engage on our site. Traditional media/public relations also tends to be very effective in driving qualified visitors to our site. Our goal is to create a unified/consistent user experience, so we employ landing pages that are customized based on where the person may be coming from - e.g. if we place an ad, we’ll direct viewers of that ad to a specific landing page that might leverage the same look/feel/messaging, etc.

BB: What is one challenge you face when executing new, social and/or digital media strategy? How are you overcoming this hurdle?

GG: Being a small organization, we have limited resources and therefore a very long wish list of desired features and enhancements - and of course, we can never get these features in as quickly as we’d like - so prioritization is especially important. In addition, it’s hard to evaluate how much time and resources to put into a new (and perhaps unproven) social media tool. We have to ask ourselves “is this the next best thing, or something that may fizzle within the next six months?”

BB: What will be the final measure of success for your digital plans?

GG: Put simply - meeting and exceeding our goals, usually around donation volume as well as other more standard web metrics such as conversion, bounce rate, repeat visitors, etc. As we expand our community, we will implement goals related to community participation and engagement, referrals, etc.

BB: Do you foresee any particularly enticing opportunities that can help nonprofits/causes reach their social media goals in 2009? Any advice for how to take advantage of related trends?

GG: There’s so much out there that it’s tricky to stay on top of all the latest developments. Reading blogs like this one :-) and taking advantage of the myriad of opportunities out there - from Google applications and seminars, to resources like Progressive Exchange, Net Squared, TechSoup - and you’d be amazed of the tips we get from Twitter, too! It’s important not to try to use every social media tool at once - figure out what your organization’s needs are, and then identify the tools that you think would best meet your specific needs.

PS. Could 2009 be the year that mobile actually breaks through as a social media tool in the US in a big way???

Today marks the 60th Anniversary of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, the day after the 60th anniversary of the UN’s pact to end genocide. To commemorate the Human Rights pact, bloggers throughout the world are discussing their first human rights memory of import.  And because so much of our work at the agency involves social causes, the Buzz Bin will participate (image: Fires over the Hills by Timm Williams).

My first memory of human rights was not a good one, a prolonged period of time in which my Jewish family was harassed and attacked by anti-semites for a period of years. I do not like talking about that time, so instead I’ve decided to blog about the thing that had the most impact on me from a human rights perspective this year. By far, reading Amy Chua’s World On Fire had the most weight.

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability is  Yale professor Amy Chua’s unrelenting examination of how sudden free trade and democracy together can actually destabilize countries and cause ethnic hatred and genocide. Region by region, continent by continent, from Burma and Russia to Africa and Latin America, Chua demonstrates her case.  The book clearly shows how Western, and in particular U.S. free market democracy, has created some of the worst human rights violations of our time, including the genocide in Rwanda.

And the secret recipe is simple. Inevitably, when you have a free market, one minority group rises to the top and succeeds financially - this is true of the Chinese in Burma and the Philippines, the Jews in Russia, the Tutsis in Rwanda, etc. etc. Next, enter the democratization aspect.  Now you have a poor, down-trodden and uneducated majority that’s angry about being robbed of the promises of free markets. Stating it in oversimplistic terms, when a minority rises to power, the majority brings political pressure to bear,  leading to everything from ethnic hate crimes and oppression to manipulation of political power by the minorities or even genocide.

World on Fire provides sobering humanitarian reasons to end Friedman-like declarations for simply flattening and democratizing the world (the American version of Empire).

Instead, I advocate for preparing countries to handle free markets and democracy.  We should focus on creating education, building country-wide infrastructure, raising health standards, and ensuring people can eat everyday. By doing so we can help the world embrace the great human rights principles that allow for true democracy and freedom.

Working on the Save Darfur campaign has provided me great relief, in part because I understand some of the underlying causes.  While this is in essence fire-fighting, at least we can stop the flames. Then we can put in some fire codes with better global policies that involve a more sober view of human nature when faced with poverty and hunger.

I encourage you to read World on Fire. And I encourage you to do your part not just today, but everyday, a little something to help human rights efforts throughout the world.  Finally, if you want to help the Livingston Communications team  in our efforts to end Darfur, sign the petition either on Facebook or on the Add Your Voice site.

The reality of business is that crisis happens. Whether it’s cyanide in your medicine, your inability to get airplanes off the ground, or a financial implosion, companies inevitably face difficult, even life threatening situations. Those situations demand crisis management and communications.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to the airline industry vis a vis the National Transportation Safety Board on how social media can impact companies in this scenario (see above presentation). Clearly social media offers a fantastic toolset because it allows direct access to stakeholders. Consider how during times of crisis the American Red Cross uses social media tools to keep both stakeholders and the media informed.

At the same time, the social web can be a lightening form of brand damage or death in a time of crisis. It’s conversational, and companies have a limited scope of meaningful dialogue to offer, especially when something goes wrong. Consider jetblue’s Valentines Day crisis and the beginning of the end for Toshiba’s HD-DVD standard respectively.

See the social web is so open, so uncontrolled that companies with active communities online must communicate. Further, in life-threatening situations it’s even more paramount. Online there is no way to tell if the voice tone, no body language to read, no facial expressions. In the cases of audio or video, you can at least hear voice or see body language (though editing and re-recording can mask this). Then there’s the person to person interaction.

It all equals a very emotional place that requires not only communication, but a company that will listen and react appropriately. Reacting appropriately means not getting caught in the emotions of the moment by either shutting down or over-promising resolution. Acknowledge community frustrations, but company representatives must be factual, prompt and genuine. Otherwise social fire may catch.

Consider the worst case scenario, a plane down over the ocean and no one knows exactly where. How can you promise rescue? Further, given the government’s role in investigations, you can’t even offer deep insights. But you can communicate and interact and answer questions about the families, etc.

It gets back to meaningful dialogue. People want to have a real two-way conversation about the situation. That’s why companies that have high risk scenarios should do everything they can to prepare so when crisis does occur, the teams and tools are in place to best communicate between all parties.

“Our mission is to break the world’s oil addiction.”

Compliments of September’s Wired cover story, I learned of Shai Agassi’s phenomenal start-up Better Place. An admirable mission as Green is my number one current cause. And social causes have rapidly become critical professional matters for those of us writing on the Buzz Bin.

Shai (see his blog here) abandoned a promising career at software giant SAP to fulfill his quest to end oil dependence. His vision of all electric cars is so ambitious it makes your mouth drop. Forget GM’s broken Volt model. Instead, envision battery power readily accessible through a networked grid everywhere. And the cost? One third of the gas-guzzling fuel costs the average American spends.

Impossible you say? Yet he has Renault, Daimler, the Israeli and Danish governments, powerful investors, and talented individuals across the globe getting in line behind him. He is attracting the world’s most incredible minds, and breaking so called rules left and right. And he is likely to break current paradigms for hybrid and electric cars.

Why? Because he was tasked by fellow entrepreneurs to change the world, to make a difference for the environment. In his relentless passion to achieve what he sees as the world’s biggest environmental challenge — oil addiction - he has turned the heads of many, and may become one of our generation’s greatest heros. I hope so.

Many times on my personal blog (this piece is cross-posted there), I’ve stated a definitive intent to use my communication “powers” for good.

At Gnomedex this weekend, I will have the great pleasure of meeting Beth Kanter, one of the leading change bloggers out there. Beth’s work is so prolific we felt compelled to interview her yesterday. Voices like hers, like la Marguerite, like EcoGeek, speak to me every time I open my reader. It’s dedicated, 110% committed people like these change bloggers, like Agassi, that let you know the impossible can be achieved.

Inevitably my mind returns to our internal mission: Building a significant social cause practice, and using our social media skills for good. In the past week, we’ve made several steps that have put us in position to kick some real butt on behalf of organizations trying to relieve poverty, end genocide, educate America, and more.

We live once. No one will remember us for marketing body armor, wireless networks, cars, software, etc., etc. What will your legacy be?

Yes, we have to pay the bills. Not everyone can direct corporate strategy in this way. Or maybe you can just quit like Agassi — like me — and start your own company. But all of us, every single one of us can do more. As communicators we have the ability to help in ways most people cannot. We can use social media and traditional channels to heighten public awareness, help fundraise, and build better companies. And it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t some cause that every person holds dear to their heart.

2008 is 66% over. What are you doing to make Earth a better place this year?