Two not-for-profit campaigns have caught my attention this week and I wanted to take a minute to highlight what makes them so great.

WSPA’s “Dollars for Collars”

The idea
Donate to support action against dog cruelty in targeted countries.

The execution
Simple but stunning imagery with a clear call to action:
“Love dogs? Help save one. Buy a collar”.

Why it works
There are some great concepts at work to pull this together. For a start, the entry-level donation is brilliant. $10 per collar, buy as few or as many as you like. I am a strong advocate of not setting your entry level too high, as it can be off-putting. By allowing people to buy multiple collars, they can very simply tweak their donation and will probably be more likely to give $20 than $15 if you let them decide on their own.

Then there is the imagery…seriously. The eyes have it.

Instant gratification
When delivering a campaign to rally support or donations, you are selling a “feel-good” factor. There’s no tangible element that people are receiving for their time or money, so you want to find another way to give them instant satisfaction and pride for what they have done.

The WSPA campaign uses a visualisation of the collar to do this. When purchasing your collar, you can add your name, colour, suburb and photo to the collar at the bottom. This gives you an instant confirmation that you have made a contribution.

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Google is unquestionably the biggest player on the internet, yet the “search giant” has never quite cracked the lucrative social market. After the failure of Google Buzz, they are making another attempt with the launch of Google+.

At the moment, Google+ looks like a bleak version of Facebook, causing a lot of speculation and online chatter about whether or not Google can take on the social network.

For a moment though, I want to consider Google+ not as a potential Facebook killer, but rather a LinkedIn killer.

One of my initial thoughts before using Google+ was that if it integrated in nicely with the services I already use (Gmail, docs, calendar) then there’s a chance I would use it, but if I had to log into yet another social service, it probably wouldn’t happen.

That is one of the things that stops me from using LinkedIn very often. I have my profile, my resume, my professional contacts and occasionally chime into group discussion. However with a small network, I have little incentive to log in on there regularly and don’t have the need to share with that particular network often. It’s a great resource, but it is a little on the clunky side.

Google on the other hand, is something I can’t live without at work. Search aside, I run Gmail for my personal account and work is run off Google Apps. I share documents with Google Docs and all of my calendars and contacts are synced with Google. Using ‘Circles’ (the Google+ grouping of contacts), I can now also set up work contacts and split up my PR networks from my Digital networks – sharing different information with each.

Suddenly, Google+ is looking very appealing.

Do I want to replicate all of my Facebook info over there? Nope. Do I necessarily want to worry about splitting everything up and double posting while people migrate? Not at all. At this stage, I much prefer Facebook but could happily walk away from LinkedIn if I could have easy access to my professional networks along with my documents and appointments. LinkedIn has a great audience but has always failed to impress me as a platform. I’ll be watching with keen interest to see how this plays out!

One more note on how this competes with Facebook – I think web comic xkcd has summed it up nicely; “on one hand, you’ll never convince your parents to switch. On the other hands, you’ll never convince your parents to switch!”.

If your organisation or union had the opportunity to contact almost every professional working within the industry and hold open discussions with them, would you use it?

LinkedIn Groups provides just that. With over 100 million members and counting, LinkedIn is a big player within the social media realm and Groups is the place to tap in.

Think of it as the ‘Facebook Pages’ of the professional world. A few years ago only a handful of leading businesses were creating Pages – now they are becoming almost secondary to a company web site. Unlike Pages, your discussions on LinkedIn Groups will not disrupt someone’s personal time catching up on gossip and holiday photos.

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The initial Better State site (betterstate.org.au) was built in October 2009 on a drupal platform.

We found that the site was too complex for people to take action, find content and created high barriers for revisitation and engagement.

We had a community of people who were linked to one or two services and were interested in how the umbrella campaign was running, but also wanted specific news and events from their delegates, union leaders and activists. They wanted to know about the service area they were involved with, not necessarily updates from all arms of the campaign.

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