Opportunity Awaits the Nonprofit of Your Choice

If you attended our Third-Party Fundraising Academy session in March, you learned how difficult it can be to find that champion outside your organization who has the same level of passion and commitment to a cause that the people have internally. When you do find those champions, they can do wonders for helping to raise necessary funds, solicit other passionate individuals to join the cause and increase awareness about an organization’s work in the community.

If you’re involved with a nonprofit and have been searching for one of those passionate people, you’re in luck! The Ad Council staff just recently had one knocking on our door and we’d be glad to introduce you. Actually, you may already know him, Mike O’Brian, Rochester’s own “Getaway Guy”. What you may not know is that Mike has a real passion for the local nonprofit community and has been looking for a relevant way to give back.

So with the success of his New York State road trip handbook, Mike thought that nonprofits might benefit from using his book to help fundraise, grow awareness, or reward those who are supporters of their organization. Whether it be as a raffle prize, part of a volunteer appreciation package, or used to collect donations at your nonprofit’s reception desk, Mike wants to see a portion of the proceeds of his book sales to go to good use.

“The Getaway Guy” has sold thousands of copies and demand is still growing, so this may be a great opportunity for the nonprofit of your choice to delve into some third-party fundraising of its own. Mike will provide the first case free of charge and each additional case requires only a small financial commitment on the nonprofit’s end, (Less then $1 each at $75 case of 76). With recommended retail value of $14.95 per book, there is great potential to utilize this generous resource in a way that best suits the nonprofit’s needs.

Interested in taking advantage of this opportunity? Just send us an email at info@adcouncilroch.org telling us a little bit about the interested nonprofit and how this opportunity would benefit the organization’s fundraising efforts (in 75 words or less). Please be sure to include contact information (name, title and email address will suffice). Mike will personally deliver the books to your nonprofit once we have reviewed your submissions.

Also, feel free to check out Mike’s Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TheGetawayGuy.

www.TheGetawayGuy.com

-The AdRoc Team

Where’d my news feed go?

Facebook is changing… AGAIN… and it could very likely impact the way you interact and share information about your organization with users who have liked your page. According to an article by Josh Constine with Techcrunch.com, the powers that be within the Facebook universe are finally revamping an aspect of the service that has been pretty much stagnant since its introduction in 2006, the News Feed. Being that this is the most common way for organizations, advertisers and Facebook page administrators to get their valuable content in front of the masses it could have some interesting implications on nonprofits that rely on Facebook to interact with their most important fans.

What’s changing, you ask? Well, according to the folks at TechCrunch, at a recent press event Facebook “launched content-specific feeds for Photos, Music and more”. The service will now highlight its dedicated feeds more prominently and make them much more accessible when a user logs on.

What does this mean for organizations and administrators trying to interact with their fans? It means if users want to, it will be much easier to focus in on the exact content they wish to view and that your Page updates won’t necessarily be displayed to the users the way they have in the past. It also means that if you want your fans to view and interact with your content you may have to do more to provide the quality content needed to entice them to use the dedicated Page feed.

Luckily, according to TechCrunch, Facebook is adding some features that make it easier to provide rich and engrossing content on Pages and within the various News Feeds. Facebook is going to allow media and posts to be displayed in a “larger”, more “vivid” format that could do wonders to attract users to your content. We will see how it all plays out but it sounds like it will be easier to imbed higher quality images and video. Constine suggests, the key goal of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg’s changes is creating new opportunities for organizations and users to interact in a much more “immersive” way.

It’s hard to predict how users will react to this new format since we’ve seen them get pretty upset when Facebook altered other aspects of the service in the past. With these pending changes, it’s likely best to proceed with caution until it becomes more clear what the response and implications will be. As a general rule, quality over quantity is a best practice when interacting with people in their recreational setting. We’ll be interested to see if everybody can find a way to play nicely in this ever-changing social sandbox.

Aaron Lattanzio
Community Outreach and Sandbox Coordinator

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/05/facebook-news-feeds-launch/