Can the Internet deliver donations to
Charitable causes more effectively than conventional media routes such as
direct mail and press advertisements?
Many fundraisers responsible for spending
advertising budgets believe so.
Many experts have their doubts.
Andrew Papworth writes a regular newsletter
called Harvest. His December issue has an article titled: Why you should not
rely too much on the Internet.
“According to the Office for National
Statistics, more than a third of women aged 65 to 74 and almost three-quarters
of those over 75 have never used the Internet”.
And
“Elderly women are often a key market
for fundraisers and they are particularly likely to be missed by online
communications”.
Drayton Bird says that Social networks can
lose fundraisers a lot of money. He quotes using a statistic from the 'causes' application from Facebook:
“Over the last 12 months for which figures
are available just $2.5 million has been solicited in the US by 19,445
charitable organisations. That’s an average of just $126 per organisation. They
would have done infinitely better using Direct mail, but that isn’t
fashionable”.
The problem is the sad fact that Internet
advertising is peopled by practitioners who have made jargon an art form and
who use it to make the practice very opaque. Transparency is absent for many
campaigns.
The initial start point was search, a
digital equivalent to Yellow pages where people looking for something specific
are nudged into choosing a brand or service using adwords. This market is
for people who are 'engaged'.
The digital version of mainstream offline
advertising such as Press or TV are leader boards, banners, skyscrapers and
MPU’s. When all this started they were priced in Cost per thousand impressions
or Cpm’s in the American vernacular. And initially they were expensive, as high
a £25 per thousand impressions. This was clearly unsustainable because it made
the cost of buying online impressions more expensive than on established
offline media. Digital publishers began to offer more flexibility in terms of
geographic selection, behavioural and contextual targeting but prices had
to fall. Advertisers were now more interested in the number of people who
clicked on to their landing page or website. The average click through rate was
0.06% or 60 clicks per 100,000 impressions, so if you were foolish enough to
buy impressions at £25 per thousand you would pay £42 per click. Horrendous.
The first to offer a low cost option were
the blind networks or exchanges, who took over the unsold inventory of
publishers and offered these for very little but at the expense of information about exactly where the ads appeared.
More recent is re-targeting where using
cookies implanted in your computer, advertisers can provide messages to people
who have previously shown an interest. Furthermore these messages can be
transmitted across all the devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops and
smart TV’s. This is known as householding.
Now the accent is on trading desks, real
time buying using algorithms and programmatic platforms. Some of the more
informed advertisers query the excessive jargon, are concerned about the lack
of transparency and are considering having their own trading desk.
The jury is still out about whether these
developments will make digital medium more effective.
