Technology and communication

Consider this situation: your flight has been delayed by two hours because of a snowstorm, and you are getting tired of listening to the same songs over and over again on your iPod. You are trying to sample people around you to find a decent match: someone with whom you can start a reasonable conversation. How do you know whether or not a person, in fact, is a good match? You usually look for a signal that helps you separate one person from the rest of the crowd, which includes physical appearance, speech, and virtually everything else that your senses can capture. Even though they say that eyes are the window to the soul, it fails miserably in the current situation! Books can help unravel some mystery in these circumstances: it seems there is some evidence that you can form a rough idea of someone's mental state by looking at what he or she is reading. I think this is also true at the subconscious level: the signal that you want to send out probably has some influence on your book selection for an upcoming air travel. I wonder how this is going to change with the advent of ebooks and readers. Until now, figuring out what someone is reading was relatively easy: you just had to look at the cover of the book. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case with these new gadgets out there. Are these shutting off an interesting channel of communication between complete strangers? Who knows!!

Engaging Supporters Between Fundraising Campaigns

Setting the Scene:
You've completed your crowdfunding campaign, and your nonprofit has new donors and supporters.
Now you want to cultivate your relationships with these new (and old) supporters, and keep them hooked on your awesome organization. It's time to give them opportunities to interact with your nonprofit in ways that DON'T involve donating money.
Good news: there are many fun, easy ways to engage your supporters that spread your message and keep them coming back for more. For this week's Ask Me Hour, I focused on a very specific method to engage social media followers: by using social media contests and sweepstakes.
Benefits to running a contest or sweepstakes:
- Training: Get your supporters accustomed to taking an action on your request. This time it is entering an email address to participate in a prize drawing, another time it could be clicking to vote on a name for a new rescued animal, and eventually it will be to donate to your cause.
- Interactive: It's a fun, interactive event that will make people more interested in checking your page in the future.
- Converting followers to email subscribers: Email performs much better than social media at leading people to donate. This is a way to position yourself more favorably for your next online fundraiser.
I reviewed seven different apps specifically for their sweepstakes tool, focusing on ease of use, look, function, and price/quality of free trial.
Benefits to using an app to run a contest or sweepstakes:
- Easy to create, easy to collect names and emails.
- Helps you navigate Facebook's promotion guidelines. Check out the guidelines here.

HANDY LABLED SCREENSHOT OF A FACEBOOK SWEEPSTAKES



APP COMPARISON TABLE

Service	Pricing	Ease of Use	Look*	Special Functions
Heyo**	7-day free trial, then $25/month, $300/yr	Extremely! Drag and drop options make the sweepstakes easy to build and customize.	One of the most attractive looks. Also features a prominent countdown.	The ability to automatically upload leads to services like Constant Contact, or MailChimp, which makes it easy for you to set up an autoresponder for new entries!
ShortStack	Unlimited time, limited function free version, then plans start at $29/month. By limited function I mean: the app will only store 25 entries for you, which they also email you individually. You may only use the free version if you have fewer than 25,000 fans on your FB page.	Middle of the road. I returned to the app several times to make changes, but it was not intuitive to get everything I wanted in the sweepstakes.	The sweepstakes page is simple, but attractive. The facebook share was empty of text and showed my profile picture rather than the pictures I uploaded for the sweepstakes.
AgoraPulse	15 day renewable, but limited free version. Only 20 participants per campaign. They determine cost by number of fans on your FB page. Cost with the LoveAnimals.org page (18,400 fans) was $49/month. Minimum cost was $29/month with $10/month savings for paying annually rather than monthly.	Not very	The sweepstakes that showed up on my FB page didn't show the pictures I uploaded, or the text, and looked very generic. Admittedly, I went through the creation process very quickly on each of these services, but this one didn't turn out correctly, even with an attempted tweak. Sharing the link on my wall resulted in a share of my FB profile picture, not my sweepstakes images. Also, it was blurry.
Wishpond	14 day free trial, then plans start at $45/month	Very easy	Looks great! I was able to put both my horizontal and vertical pictures in the promotion, which was unique to this app.	Sent automated message to the entrant; included optional "Like" prompt. Options to upload entries to different email services as well as simple spreadsheet.
Offerpop	The free version does not let you actually post a sweepstakes, only create one. Pricing was not easily available and may be assigned on a case-by-case basis.	Easy	I was able to look at the sweepstakes page using the preview function. It looked similar, but not quite as good as the other options, but seemed like it would do the job.
WooBox	Free for your, and your facebook admin's, eyes only. $29/month to post on a page with up to 20,000 fans.	Easy It was a bit easier to modify the appearance of the TAB on this service.	The sweepstakes page was simple, functional, and looked fine. It was simple to add a photo for the tab section of my FB page. Less simple to add a share image. FB share appeared with a "special offer" default image.
Easy Promos	$15 per promotion, and the first is free.	Extremely! Even the promotion dashboard was simple and easy to use.	Looking good!	Pop-up "like" option Attractive "thank you, now share!" page. Can download entires