Holy Shit!

Congratulations to the "Stand For Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU" team on their Emmy nomination!

— ACLU National (@ACLU) July 14, 2017

Some details here.

A bit more here.

The full story here.

Facebook's 2016 in review video...

Not any more joyous than Google's tbh.

Facebook won't make you any money...

That's the graph showing what happened to online voter registrations by age group on the day Facebook decided to promote voter registration to its users in advance of the UK EU referendum. More here.

Of course, as all the talking heads say, it's impossible to get anyone to engage in anything important on Facebook. It's all pictures of cats and what you had for dinner.

I mean getting young people to register to vote is so much easier than getting them to show interest in and take actions for the causes we believe in right?

MobileMagic: the Baklavakoma edition

A photo posted by Paul de Gregorio (@degregoriopaul) on Apr 2, 2016 at 7:31am PDT

The Messages That Hold Refugee Families Together. An incredible film once you get past the really annoying ad.

Text Messaging May Solve One Major Problem In The Refugee Crisis. A hackathon came up with this neat idea.  

Google to expand Android Pay digital wallet to UK. Yes. This is exciting.

Why Mobile First is No Longer Enough; It’s Time To Think About Mobile Only Design. Baffles me that this is a thing.

Unused mobile data can be turned into monetary donations. Erm. Who the flip has left over data at the end of the month!

British Vogue tests breaking fashion news alerts on WhatsApp. As you know, I’m dead fashionable me. So I will be signing up instantly. 

Businesses Get Their Chatbots Ready For Facebook Messenger. More messaging stuff. I know I go on about it. But it’s coming.

New Jersey Proposes Bill to Outlaw Texting While Walking. If I was London Mayor, chunter, mumble, expletive, mumble, chunter, chunter, mumble, expletive…

Facebook 2015 (a year in review)...

2015 Year in Review from Facebook on Vimeo.

I'm a sucker for all of the year in review videos. This one is good.

A year in review from Facebook...

2014 Year in Review from Facebook on Vimeo.

This one is a lot better. Than this one.

Rapid response from Breakthrough

Pancreatic Cancer Action have launched a campaign with the headline 'I wish I had breast cancer'.

I'm not going to comment on that.

What I am going to comment on is the fantastic response from Breakthrough Breast Cancer that I came across this evening on their Facebook page.

I love it. 

Clear, measured and passionately put.

The image and quote make it very very shareable. Which is of course what you want when you need to get your response out quickly.

More here.

It's end of year video time...

Facebook have made one.

2013 - A Year in Review from Facebook Stories on Vimeo.

So have YouTube.



And Save the Children...



Greenpeace's is the best...



I haven't made one. Happy New Year.

Likes don't save lives (II)

A while ago I blogged on UNICEF Sweden's 'Likes don't save lives' campaign.

I missed this film.



I like it.

A 2013 internet trend geek fest from Mary Meeker

I've just spent far too much time looking at this.

A wonderful collection of digital/mobile/social stats pulled together by Mary Meeker. A full 117 slides of statistic fun.

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

One of my my favourite stats. Mobile traffic made up 15% of all internet traffic in the whole world in May 2013. And it is obviously only going one way.

The adoption of smartphones in China is extraordinary as is the fact that mobile search surpassed desktop search in South Korea at the end of 2012.

Enjoy comrades.

Likes don't save lives...

I 'like' this.

I 'like' it because it makes the point very clearly - that it's money that saves lives.




I 'like' it even though I don't necessarily agree that 'Slacktivism' is a bad thing...

'Like', geddit!

And there is this...

UNICEF USA Tap project

This campaign film from UNICEF USA is awesome.

It makes the connection brilliantly between a social network (in this case Facebook) and how many people coming together to do small things can have a massive impact. I love it so much.



But I didn't sign up. I got as far as this screen...

Awesome, love the design, I can see that others have done it already, I can see that money is being raised and water is being provided. All good so far, then this one...

At this point I stopped. I thought to myself, do I really want to grant access to another App in Facebook. I very quickly realised that I didn't, so I didn't convert.

I talk about frictionless payment and action all the time in my day job. If we make things difficult we lose response. If we make people think too much in the digital space we don't get as many people as we could have. If we're going to really harness the power of social networks we really need to find a way to make it frictionless.

Disclosure: Yes I am geek, I know that I'm over simplifying the issue and I get that not everyone interacts with Facebook like I do. But it was a timely reminder of how fantastic creative and proposition can be wasted with a clunky response mechanism.

The social media revolution

A totally brilliant video/animation packed full of stats and insights about social media trends and usage.

Updated for 2013.



And I don't even like Fat Boy Slim that much.

Text to inspire the next generation

I've loved every minute of the Olympics & Paralympics.

I love the C4 Paralympic ad and I love the fact Public Enemy have recut the video with footage from the games.

I love that Scope are using text to donate to harness the positivity around the games in order to fundraise.

Text DREAM to 70007 to give £3 to Scope to help young disabled people follow their dream. 

You could copy and paste that last sentence right into your Facebook status or a tweet!

That Public Enemy video...

Mobile is social.

It's a phrase I'm using a lot at the moment. Maybe it's a bit cliched but it feels right.

If you have a well run, engaging, and interesting Facebook presence. Where better to serve content to your mobile donors. We love mobile because if fuses payment and communication into one device. But that doesn't mean we need to create a new way of telling our stories and interacting with donors when it might already exist right under our noses.

This great infographic from socialbakers gives some intertesting data on Facebook and mobile. e.g 20.5 million Facebook mobile users in the UK!

This Moo-ves me....

I love cows. I follow Send a Cow with great interest on Facebook. For two key reasons.

1. Cows, as mentioned I love them.
2. Somerset, they are based in Somerset, I love Somerset.

I now have a third reason.

I saw an amazing thing on their Facebook page this morning.

They had donated their Facebook page profile to be a personalised thank you to one of their supporters.

So I tweeted about it and sent it to my wife who is equally impressed by such things.

They contacted me on Twitter and shared this link, it's to a video, again saying thank you to Joe.

Thank you Joe from Send a Cow on Vimeo.

I am a professional fundraiser, who to be blunt can sometimes be very hard to impress.  This really impressed me.

So much, that I'm going to support them with real cash rather than praise. I hope the rest of my experiences are as brilliant as this one.