HelpAttack! and the Red Cross

Clara Barton Ties one on?

A great great post from Beth Kanter. Originally found here: http://www.bethkanter.org/mistakes-how2/

Lessons from Red Cross: Twitter Mistakes and How To Handle Them

Back over the summer, I wrote a post called “What was your worst social media mistake? What did you learn?“ If you read through the comments, misdirected tweets (tweets sent to an organizational account, not a personal account or private message sent out to all) were the most common. These ranged from tweeting about a favorite television show to much worse, tweeting the “c-word”

Back in November, someone in Senator Dowd’s office made this epic Twitter mistake. They apologized and moved on. In a discussion thread about this mistake, my colleague Wendy Harman from the Red Cross said she hoped that if her organization made this mistake, she could find humor and an honest discussion.

Well, late on the evening of February 16th, I got a DM from Wendy saying, “The dreaded tweet! We took care of it.” The Red Cross managed to turn a PR disaster into a fundraising opportunity. All because they’ve built relationships with their network over the past few years, swift action, and knowing how to deal with mistakes. Here’s a play by play of the Twitter Faux Pas

The Red Cross admitted on its blog that it accidentally tweeted something that was intended for a personal account, not the institutional account. That Tweet, out in the wild for about an hour, did not go unnoticed by Twitter followers, Beer bloggers, and, of course, Wendy Harman at the Red Cross who got awakened in the middle of the night with a call from a staff person in Chicago wanting to know about the Tweet.

Thinking quickly, they did disaster recovery on the rogue Tweet. Deleting the tweet, and replacing it with the one below.

While it was out in the wild, DogFish Beer (the subject of the original tweet) acknowledged the incident by asking fans to donate to the Red Cross on Twitter. Given the response from its network (and DogFish Beer), the Red Cross turned this mistake into fundraiser. They again thanked their fans for their understanding that a 130 year old humanitarian organization is made up of humans and helping them turn their faux pas into something good. Using humor again, here’s their fundraising pitch:

Please join Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in raising money for the American Red Cross.

If you’re interested in donating a pint, please click here to learn more about Red Cross blood drives. Note: Alcohol can often make you more dehydrated. Dogfish Head recommends not drinking immediately before or after donating!

The mistake turned into a fundraiser also attracted a lot of attention and traffic to their site according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The hashtag #gettingslizzerd, a reference to drinking too much, trended on Twitter.

Twitter mistakes are going t happen. What can learn and put into practice to mitigate the results?

• You can’t hide or not respond: The Red Cross is an organization that deals with life-changing disasters. While the errant tweet wasn’t one of them, it could have escalated into a disaster of PR kind if the Red Cross has simply deleted the tweet and ignored it.
• Act Quickly: The rogue tweet was only out in the wild for an hour before Wendy Harman got a call. Had the apology taken more time to set into action, this might little mistake might have been a big mistake. Here the Red Cross has affiliates who are obviously scanning their stream across different time zones and there is obviously a “in case of Twitter emergency call …” written down some place.

• Admit your mistake and humanness: The Red Cross openly admitted their mistake and asked forgiveness. Had the mistake been a lot of worse, it might have been a different story.

• Use Humor When Appropriate: The Red Cross dealt with the situation with humor. Both out on social channels as well as internally. A good laugh helps reduce embarrassment and avoids having people make fun of you because you’re doing it yourself.
• Build Your Network Before You Need It: The Red Cross has been a model of a Networked Nonprofit and building relationships, listening, and engaging. As a result, this mistake did not escalate into an angry crowd on Twitter.

• Employees Should Use Different Twitter Apps for Personal/Organizational: Many Twitter apps allow us to tweet from several accounts and if you’re using them on a mobile phone, sometimes it easy to mess up in this way. Perhaps employees who tweet personally and on behalf of the organization should use different apps for personal and organizational. Or maybe don’t drink and Tweet.

How would your nonprofit deal with a Twitter disaster? What is your takeaway from this mistake?

Facebook Check in’s for Charity? Do they work?

Back in November, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Deals, which offers customers special promotions when checking in to participating businesses through Facebook Places. REI is proud to have been one of the businesses to help launch the new service and to help local non-profits at the same time.

Through November and December, for every customer that checked-in at an REI store through Facebook Places, REI donated between $1 and $50 to a local non-profit partner. Nationwide, REI committed to give away $100,000 to select local non-profit groups through Facebook Deals. For the Austin and Round Rock market, the non-profit we selected was Hill Country Conservancy.

The program successfully wrapped up late in December and just last week REI announced the results. We are excited to announce that via the Facebook Deals program, the REI Austin and Round Rock market had over 1,400 customers who checked in and raised $8,191 for Hill Country Conservancy (HCC). “It was incredible to see the level of customer participation and engagement at our stores surrounding this promotion,” said Ky Harkey, Outreach Specialist for REI Downtown Austin.

This program was not only a success nationwide, but especially successful here in the Austin/Round Rock area.

The success of this campaign proves that nonprofits can turn relationships through social media into action and dollars,” said Harper Scott, director of communications for Hill Country Conservancy (HCC). “REI and HCC promoted this program to our local community through Facebook and Twitter and, in a month, our online fan base raised nearly $8,200 for Hill Country Conservancy, and they were excited to do it. We also secured several new fans of HCC through the campaign.”

Huge thanks goes out to both HCC for their great work and passion and each of our customers who checked-in at our local REI stores through Facebook Places to help support HCC! You can find and follow REI Round Rock on Facebook at facebook.com/REIRoundRock and on Twitter @REIRoundRock.

Thanks to Todd Callaway, REI Round Rock for the great guest post!

RT2 Give Technology Review

When I initially heard about TwitPay’s RT2Give I thought it was a cool concept that my nonprofit’s followers might dig….however…that quickly proved to not be the case.

I put off signing up for RT2Give for quite awhile for Lights. Camera. Help. (LCH) using the normal nonprofit excuses of time, thought and money. However LCH got our act together in Jan and met with the super friendly and helpful staff from RT2Give. A major plus here is their great customer service. Here is how the service works:

RT2Give is a simple, secure system enabling your supporters to make incremental donations to your cause. Even better, Twitpay makes it easy for your supporters to pass along your appeal to their network of friends and followers, potentially multiplying the impact of your initial message many times over.

So once we started our TwentyForTech campaign on Dec 9th of 2010, RT2Give was also kind enough to RT it for us a couple of times, however we sent this message out to our 8,000+ followers over 30 times between @daveiam and @NPFilm and got a total of 6 ReTweets for the month. Out of those 0 people actually paid on their donation. Here was the tweet we used:

The main reason this campaign failed? People ignored the DM they got after RTing it. And there was no other follow up for them to donate. Also the other downfall is the amount of info donors are required to give. More on that here. So not only is it hard to miss the payment info, it’s hard to register and pay on top of all that. All this comes together to make RT2Give just not a good way to fundraise on Twitter.

What do you think? Was our tweet worded wrong? Was our audience not big enough? Your thoughts?