In the wake of the TweetsGiving campaign I have been thinking a lot about the factors that contributed to our success and how we can learn and take things even further. I’ve already shared some basic stats from the campaign, but I agree with Beth that numbers can’t come close to telling a complete story. Thanks for the nudge to reflect further Beth! Here’s some of my thinking at this point and a bit more data. Stacey has also reflected further and offered insight into the donation stats.

What Happened?

Once Stacey and I realized we were on to something we got Matt and Vince to work immediately on a site and logo without knowing exact details on what actions we would be asking people to take or the exact shape the campaign would take. I reached out to Carrie and Dave and they were psyched and really helpful in getting the exact structure of the campaign crystallized and getting that focus reflected in the site content. The whole team did a lot of reaching out to spead the word a bit in advance. I spoke with Beth, Deborah, Joe, Tom, and Tamar who each had some ideas and agreed to tweet about it. On Tuesday we set a ChipIn Widget live for donations and settled in to wait until noon to ping our networks and release our idea to the wild.

Then a funny thing happened. Chris Brogan tweeted a link to the site. He likely found it in his ego feed since his name is on the site in the story section because of the inspiration we got from his TrickOrTweet Halloween campaign. I was on the phone with Dave when he saw Chris’s tweet and we all got really excited. “Everybody go now!”

Just like that Tweetsgiving was on. Tweets, donations, and blog posts came rolling in. We hit $1,500 in the first 2 hours. It was tough for the 4 of us to stay responsive between twitter, the gmail account we had set up, and keeping the site up to date with new Top Turkeys and blog posts. From the numbers alone we felt it was a resounding success and we’ve come away energized and grateful to the twitter community.

Factors Contributing to Tweetsgiving’s Success

Simplicity
Clarity and simplicity were key to this. We were asking for something very simple – share your gratitude and give a brick ($10). This nugget was easily remashed and retweeted making it attractive for people to express themselves creatively and feel like they were part of something larger. Tweets like “have you given your brick yet?” “just donated X dollars to #tweetsgiving” became pretty common and we started to retweet some of the inspiring and unique ones from the account.

Timeliness
The tie in of gratitude and giving to the Thanksgiving holiday was a natural sell. In the days leading up to the holiday and our campaign we noticed that people were already using twitter to reflect outloud about the blessings in their lives. Gratitude was already at the forefront and themes like health, education, wealth, jobs, and family were prompting people to share. Tweetsgiving tapped into that, encouraged it by making that reflection a communal activity, and presented donation to a worthy cause as a relevant action.

Having read Nancy Schwartz’s nonprofit tagline report (so worthwhile- thanks Nancy!) I insisted that we be super thoughtful about our tagline to cement the connection further and we came up with “Put the giving back in Thanksgiving.”

Our timing also helped us to avoid the issue of Donor fatigue which is always something to be concerned about in social giving campaigns. I think we stayed on the right side of this for a few reasons.

• it was only 2 days and people had that expectation we’d quiet down soon
• it was during a time that I suspect is quieter on twitter generally since a lot of people who normally tweet from work are traveling already

Integration with Twitter
Tweetsgiving was very rooted within twitter itself and I think that definitely was important to the campaign’s success.

In all there were 9,456 visits from 7,563 unique visitors resulting in 15,830 total pageviews. Here’s a basic breakdown of where that traffic came from including the five biggest traffic sources to the site.

twitter.com (referral) 3,700     39.13%
(direct) ((none)) 2,993     31.65%
search (organic) 608     6.43%
facebook.com (referral) 378     4.00%
google.com (referral) 172     1.82%

StumbleUpon only got us 169 visits and the combined traffic from Facebook and StumbleUpon accounted for less than 6% of total traffic. That surprises me and I think it’s worth considering whether including those social buttons on the site actually detracted from the twitter focus of the site and diluted our main calls to action (share gratitude and give).

In rough terms our traffic was
40% from twitter + 30% direct visits + 9% search + 6% Facebook and StumbleUpon = 85% of all visits

This means that only 15% of visits came from blog posts and articles. The press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers. I also suspect that a large percentage of direct visits were from repeat visitors checking up on the site again, though I have to look into the analytics further to confirm that.

Evangelists
Individuals tweeting gratitude, sharing the link, and talking about our progress played a huge role. We did some outreach in advance, but largely I found that the individuals who went all out to champion the campaign emerged from the crowd organically.  We recognized some of them as Top Tweeters, but eventually we fell behind in listing them there. Mari Smith, Tori, and Brian Colman stand out in my mind. We considered giving some of them the password to the tweetsgiving twitter account itself, but decided that it was more authentic for people to share their enthusiasm as their own non-turkey selves.

Ego
Another aspect that played into the financial success of the campaign was the recognition we gave to our Top Turkeys who donated $100. Peter Kim has some thoughts on the value of ego traps like this and we had considered that thinking in advance. The On The Wires section showcasing blog press also incentivized people to share the story with audiences in other forums.

Wish List for the Future and Things to Consider and Improve

Disclaimer
I am very pleased with the way Tweetsgiving turned out. Though we set the goal for $10,000, it was an experiment that Stacey and I would have been proud of and considered a success even if we raised less money. We also felt strongly that the amount of reflection and gratitude we inspired people to share would be central to success as well, though we didn’t set a specific target for a number of gratitude tweets.

If we had thought of the idea a month before the holiday I am positive there are things we would have done differently and better. But with only six days, many ideas didn’t get implemented in time.

Aggregation
I would have liked to have a live aggregation of gratitude tweets on the site similar to the implementation on votereport (Alison Fine and Andy Carvin I’m looking at you! How did you do that and can we talk?) We did link to the twitter search results on the site, but I strongly suspect that if people knew their tweets would be displayed immediately on the sight it would encourage even more people to share thoughtful gratitude tweets and retweet. It’s already in the works, though Matt and I would love to talk to anyone who has suggestions on this implementation for the future.

Automation
We did have the Tweetsgiving account set up with Tweetlater to autofollow those who followed us. Interestingly we did get one complaint from someone who followed us and didn’t like being auto-followed back. I also wonder if there was more potential there. For example, I used the Tweetsgiving twitter account to follow people speaking about thanksgiving who I found with twitter search. I noticed many of these people tweeting that they had donated and some direct messaged us to thank us for connecting with them. These people were easily convinced to explore the site and learn more. I did try to set up Twollow to automate this process, but found that it didn’t function properly.

There is definitely the potential to use search keywords to identify twitter users to whom your campaign is relevant. Since manual twitter search isn’t easily scalable, I expect this kind of automation to be taken further in future campaigns. What are your thoughts on automation? I wonder if auto following with keywords the way twollow is intended to work removes the connection from the human level too much in a large campaign. I’d love your feedback on that. Good idea, or creepy?

Recognition
Especially after seeing the effect of the Top Turkeys, in the future I’d like to recognize all donors by name, twitter name, and amount given. There could be an opt-out option in the donation form for people who want to give anonymously. I’m curious to see the effect that would have on the size and number of donations as people identify a social norm in the level of giving and possibly try to one up each other.

Recognition for all donors has the advantage of enabling enthusiasts to tweet thanks to all recent donors not just Top Turkeys since they’d be able to see all donations coming in. Inspired by the recognition Peter Deitz is giving donors to his $20,09 campaign for Social Actions (Help them out! – they are seriously awesome over there) Stacey has added a donors page to the site recognizing everyone who gave. We’re happy to take your name down if you’d rather not be listed. I would have liked that information to be automated for immediate display upon donation and possibly a few different giving levels with explanation of what change you will be making possible with each new level of giving.

Data Collection
While Epic Change did get a lot of new donors through the campaign in hindsight I realize that we should have collected more information about them while we had their attention at the donation stage. The advantage of the ChipIn widget was the graphical display of progress and the fact that it was fast to implement. Similar campaigns should definitely invest time to thinking carefully on this. Craft a clear well flowing form that collects essential information, but isn’t so long people tune out.

For Tweetsgiving I’d have liked to collect name, twitter username, url, email, address, recopied gratitude tweet if the donation was $10 or more, what you want displayed in the Top Turkey section as your name if you are giving $100 or more, and a checkbox for Epic Change newsletter subscription.

Team Building
In the future in a campaign like this I would gather a swarm of committed people to organize and brainstorm together in advance. This group could reflect together on who they each knew individually to ask directly to donate, share gratitude, retweet, blog and offer feedback. I’d set up a google doc where this group could share ideas and a list of people to reach out to. I’d have a conference call to build team rapport and plan a second call in advance for the first night of the campaign that would be open to the public.
Connecting voices to twitter names and avatars goes a long way to building teamwork and can lend a valuable grassroots feeling to any social campaign.

Measurement

One issue I’ve found trying to analyze the way the word spread is that search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages (anyone know a way to dig further there?) I have an RSS feed from the whole campaign of “#tweetsgiving” but I know many tweets didn’t include the # and that doesn’t encompass all the ways the message changed- alternate links people used and phrases that caught on and were retweeted.

Stacey has a post up with her reflections and some details about donations. Most notable is the fact that all but six gifts to Tweetsgiving were new donors. The median gift size was $10 and over half the money came from Top Turkeys who gave $100 or more. Be sure to check out her more detailed breakdown.

What’s Your Take?

For me this thinking raised more questions than closure. I think this is just the start and we can all expect to see twitter and other social networks used for social causes more frequently and on a larger scale in the future. Several people have already reached out to us to collaborate and brainstorm with them about their plans. That’s great!

What does this all jar for you? What’s the biggest question in your mind now? What else was central in your mind to Tweetsgiving’s success and what avenues remain to be explored to take things further and improve? Please share and dissect with us so we can learn together!

Speaking with Joe Solomon (@EngageJoe on twitter) yesterday about an awesome project, he reflected on the difficulty of keeping up with email and we realized that we both use Gmail as our default email client.

If you’re anything like me, getting to inbox zero is a pipe-dream. Joe, this post I won’t stop the email from coming in, but it will trick your inbox out and maybe make it prettier as well.

Google settings

Gmail’s normal settings already allows a surpring number of options for tricking out your Gmail. I like that you can cull together your other email accounts in one inbox and respond from whatever address you prefer. You can also compose a signature to go out with all your sent messages and include html if you want to.

The next source of Gmail customization comes from the google labs section of Gmail settings. Here are some of my favorites.

Superstars – If the default yellow stars don’t seem like enough for you, enable superstars and you can have even more icon options that starring an item will let you rotate through. If that’s still not enough you can add the Superstars Turbo script.
Keyboard Shortcuts – If you hate using a mouse in your inbox, or miss the old days when you used to se pine, enable shortcuts in labs and you can set a ton of actions to simple keystrokes.

Pictures in Chat – see your friends’ pictures when you chat with them in gchat – makes it that much closer to a normal chat client.

Forgotten Attachment Detector -With this activated, Gmail will prompt you if you fail to attach a file while your message contains phrases like “check out the attached Godzilla cartoon,” or my favorite, “my resume is attached.”

Custom Label Colors – Now we’re getting to the money stuff. I’ve actually had people make me show them on the spot why my inbox was so colorful when they noticed the effects of this feature. Not for everyone, but if you label often it can help things stand out.

Gadgets – These can really move your Gmail window towards being a one stop shop. Gadgets appear in your Gmail sidebar ad Google calendar and google docs are built in options, but you can add any gadget you enjoy on your iGoogle homepage to your Gmail sidebar, like the weather, a calculator, your favorite news site or the remember the milk task manager.

Greasemonkey

The key to a lot of the deeper Gmail customizations is the GreaseMonkey Firefox Addon. If you don’t have that installed yet, now’s the time. That said, the remainder of the customizations will only work in FireFox because they depend on Greasemonkey.

Better Gmail 2

The Better Gmail 2 add on is a collection of a ton of Gmail Greasemonkey scripts into one FireFox addon. Here are my favorite features from the options menu.

Force encrypted connection – You can force Gmail to engage the google server using the more secure https protocol. Nice added security for working at coffee shops and in public.

Macros ? shortcuts – Enables a ton of shortcuts and you can always hit ? to bring them up if you forget.

Show CC Automatically – You can have the BCC box display as well if you like, but I find I use that one less frequently. There are other composition defaults you can change as well.

Collapsible Calendar and Reader – With this option these applications will appear in panes just below your inbox within the main Gmail window. Useful so you don’t have to open another tab each time you want to add an event to your calendar or find something quickly in your feed reader.

Attachment Icons – pretty!

Skins! – I use the Gmail blue skin. Skins are essentially custom theming for your Gmail display – It’s really like night and day when you first see your inbox using a skin. I use the Gmail Blue skin, but check out Gmail Redesigned if you want something more radical.

update: gmail has just released a themes tab within settings that will be rolling out to all users in the next weeks.

Those are all the changes I have made using Better Gmail 2 though there are more options to explore. After you’re done configuring the addon just refresh the page to see the changes.

Phew! That’s a lot of customization. Which of these do you use and find helpful and what have I left out? Also feel free to share general email management tips and link

Friends, election day has finally arrived and I love it. For one thing the threshold for talking to strangers has dropped out of the floor. “Nice sticker man!” to the guy passing you in the crosswalk will win you a big smile from just about anyone today. The elevator ride down from my office, normally a silent affair had everyone chatting about where they were heading out to, or what their experience was like in the morning. I got cheers when I shared that I had sent my absentee ballot off to Florida last week.

An Election of WE

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Seth Godin’s lessons from the election. He write about the centrality of stories. Here’s the section that resonates with me down at the bottom.

“So why didn’t the ads work this time?

The tribe that Obama built identified with him. Attacking him was like attacking them. They took it personally, and their outrage led to more donations and bigger turnout. This is the lucky situation Apple finds itself in as well. Attacking an Apple product is like attacking an Apple user.”

Over over again this election season people speak about how “we’ve have to win” and how “we’re going to pull through”. My grandfather has been using the same WE with me since June and I enjoyed reading about Seth and Jackie’s voting stories from across the pond too.

Track Results

There are a ton of places to track election results tonight. I was also happy to find that MSNBC is streaming their coverage live- the quality is pretty good, so if you find yourself without a tv – never fear! You can get a nice bird’s eye view of coverage at Alltop too and Read Write Web has a nifty Election Day Web Tool Kit.

Also, if you’re into the wisdom of crowds you can check out Daily Kos’ predictions contest though that I’d bet that demographic is skewed enough to negate the theory in this case.

Election Day Schwag

There’s a ton of free stuff around town this election day.
(I’m writing this post from Starbucks across from my office as I enjoy my free coffee.)

Happy Election day everyone!

Remember when you were little and your parents told you not to talk to strangers?

Well recently I have been going out of my way to forget all of that and it has paid off in interesting ways.

What prompted this?

Part of the reason I’ve been having more random conversations is that I have been taking the advice of Lindsey Pollack whose career search book I’m reading. Lindsey suggests getting speaking about your search with whoever you meet and also getting in the habit of introducing yourself more. I also had a great conversation yesterday with Jocelyn Harmon and we reflected that we are trying to have more faith in strangers. We observed that the web savvy crowd is generally less suspicious of the intentions of strangers and willing to learn and accept resources from them.

Things better and funnier than candy that I’ve gotten from talking to strangers

I had a nice conversation with a woman on the subway who is in business school. She had some good advice for me and when we got off together she gave me her card and wished me luck.

On the street in Manhattan a man dressed in a full batman costume walked by me on the street and gave me a full pat on the back as he passed by saying “Laila tov” (goodnight in Hebrew). Not something I was expecting! (ok this one’s just funny)

Meeting with Jocelyn Harmon yesterday. Jocelyn isn’t really a stranger since I have been reading her blog for a while and I read about her work on Beth Kanter’s blog, but I did call her out of the blue. I found her cell phone number posted on one of her online outposts and decided to connect. A less web oriented person might have been thrown by someone reaching out on the spur of the moment like that. Meanwhile, we had a great discussion and I really enjoyed talking with her.

Sitting in Starbucks the other evening I joined a conversation that three guys were having at a neighboring table about class and race. Turns out they are participating in a summer service internship program I had never heard of. Joel gave me his card and has since connected me with someone at a prominent DC nonprofit focused PR agency.

Traipsing around DC with a friend looking for a restaurant yesterday we were about to use google text to get directions, but then I though better of it and asked a person passing on the street if they knew the area well. DC Stranger beats Google text FTW!

Anyone else have great stories of people you’ve just up and introduced yourself to or struck up a conversation with? Have you found it as worthwhile as I have?

photo by dariuszka

If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s last lecture on achieving your childhood dreams that has been floating around the Internet yet, watch it now. I’ll wait.

What an awesome and insightful human being. Seriously if you haven’t seen it it is worth the hour long investment if only to see hear his wry jokes and see him pull off those one-handed push ups.

One of the most insightful things I learned from Randy is the role of brick walls.

“Brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

What a great attitude. I talked about something similar in my first MeshugAvi Blog post ever. There is no doubt in my mind that Tal Ben-Shahar would have shown a clip of Randy talking about this idea in class for that session. He’s just nailed the right attitude to achieving your dreams on the head and for me it ties in nicely to my earlier thoughts on massive action.

Another quote of Randy’s that gets at the idea of embracing the suck during those times when the needed work isn’t to your liking:

“Don’t bail; the best gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap.”

So what are the brick walls in your life? How are you going to throw yourself over them or tear them down? What helps aside from massive action?

photo by viZZZual.com

I’ve been walking around for a few days now with the phrase “massive action” in my head. I knew that I had read it somewhere as a productivity and motivation hack/mantra, but couldn’t place it. Finally, I turned to google, well the search bar of all my feeds in google reader to be precise, and found that I had come across it in an awesome post on Rock Your Day, a productivity blog from Dave Navarro. I have started to think of this idea of taking massive action to accomplish a goal with the word “hustle”.

Dave’s Pillow Test

One of Dave’s central points is that Massive Action is the proper response to the question

How do I want to feel when I put my head on my pillow tonight?

After a day when I have really worked my butt off I feel accomplished, energized, and confident that my goals are in reach. That’s what massive action can offer.

Consistency

The hardest thing about hustling for massive action is staying consistent. It helps to take things one step at time. Chunking work into smaller pieces can make a project a lot less scary. A good tip for chunking is too tell yourself that you are going to spend a set amount of time doing consistent work- 5 to 10 minutes at most. Set a timer if you want, but force yourself to focus for the time you alot. The idea of this habit is to stretch the length of time you can focus with practice. Eventually you’ll find you want to work longer and, shock of shocks, that you are actually engrossed in the work.

If the work required to move towards your goal is unpleasant, boring, or as a good friend of mine would say, “isn’t to your taste”, then embrace the suck! Dig in, build a rhythm, and get your hands dirty, whatever you do don’t stop and don’t sit idle.

Get YOUR Hustle On!

My main goal right now and the project that I’ve been hustling for the most is networking and searching for my first job. I want to work in marketing, public relations, or community management and apply my hustle and experience at an awesome company or nonprofit organization.

On Monday explore the advantages of baby steps and small actions. Until then…

What are you doing with your hustle? What’s your biggest project or goal right now, or if it’s intimidating to specify the most important, then identify any goal. Share what your hustling for along with a tip or trick you use to stay on target in the comments!