Marketing Gurus, please help!

December 18, 2009 11:23 AM

How would you promote a web site for a charity fundraiser?

I am involved with a small group promoting a charity fundraiser website that is running from now until April 30th. We have a very limited budget. The charity is a good one that is fairly well known among the gamer set. We are looking for good ways to involve online communities and groups that have a lot of people that check them out. Thoughts on how to do this? I don't want to self link, so if you want specific details please feel free to memail me.

posted by skewedoracle to computers & internet (3 answers total)

This is a very specific request; I think we need a link here.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:25 AM on December 18, 2009

Ha. Skewedoracle sent me a link and it is indeed very very specific.

OK so a few thoughts:

1. Your site is very much about Chris.
2. The audience you're trying to reach doesn't know or really care about Chris.
3. Child's Play is a great charity widely embraced in your community.

Therefore, on your website (which I hate to say is not particularly well thought out and very hard to read) you need to reverse the order of the pitch. You're doing "Make Chris grown an afro!" and you need to do "Raise money for Child's Play!"

Second of all, I don't want to give you money via PayPal. I don't know who it's going to. You need to find a way to get the donation to go directly to Child's Play's PayPal account with a callback to your website or go through a... something. (There are a billion ways to solve this in Ireland, there must be a way to do this in the US.)

All of that is about improving your conversion rate - that is, getting people to donate once they reach your site.

In order to get people to donate, I would do the following:

1/ Get a Twitter account

2/ Set it up so that after someone has donated, the donor can tweet that they've donated

3/ Get a counter people can display in their forum sigs. Gamers like forums, that's where your audience is, and gamers like to display gaming stats in the sigs. Start displaying donation stats in you sigs instead.

4/ This is probably funny, so make a video for YouTube.

5/ When you have it set up so that donations are going to Child's Play or some trusted 3rd party and not you, and your website is a little more slick, talk to some gaming forums. See if you can:

- Get them to run a free ad for you with any dead inventory
- Get any of their blogs involved

6/ 25K is not a small amount. You need to get many, many more people involved. I would re-position this campaign along the lines of Movember - set it up so that many people can pledge to grow an afro if their friends and family help them reach a donation goal they themselves can set. It's more reach and it's more viral that way.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:13 PM on December 18, 2009

Since when I search for something on both yahoo and google a lot of Flickr pages come up - I would take a lot of behind the scenes photos of events and volunteers and upload them to a Flickr account with a well filled out profile and lots of relevant tags (keywords). Etsy also comes up well in search engines. Can you sell something on Etsy and have the money go to the charity?
posted by cda at 1:37 PM on December 18, 2009