Interview with Shannon Raybold on Can the Web Save Lives? NothingButNets.net

Thank you for having me Suzanne. The United Nations Foundation’s Nothing But Nets Campaign has been more successful than we had ever hoped, having raised over $16 million in two and a half years. One of the keys to its success is that the message is simple. It’s a campaign about sending bed nets to children in Africa to protect them from malaria. And in all of our messaging you’ll see:

Malaria Kills. Send a Net. Save a Life.

Not only is it simple, it is easy to make real difference. Through www.NothingButNets.net anyone can go online and make a $10 donation that will literally send a bed net, teach the family how to properly use it, and cover a child in Africa. Online, we also make it easy to involve your friends and family to help fight the number 1 preventable killer of children in Africa by become a ‘Netraiser’ which allows you set a fundraising goal, email your own network about Nothing But Nets, solicit support and donations which you can keep track of. Want to know if your sister recruited more people than your brother? Or your uncle gave more than your mom? It’s right there.

Partnerships are the other key component to this campaign. We have partnered with what may seem an unlikely group: UN Foundation, Sports Illustrated, The People of the United Methodist Church, NBA Cares which has been a great experience to be able to work with their communities and tap into that inspiration also.

We hope to have as many people join the cause as possible, so we don’t set up agreements with individual fundraisers as we want them to go free with their own creativity. We do provide toolkits to jump-start those ideas and provide facts and a few other ways to help to at http://nothingbutnets.net/its-easy-to-help/

Having the blog be the main section of the homepage was something I was initially very concerned about as I wasn’t sure where we would get enough content to keep it fresh. But it seems I didn’t need to fret as we have plenty of content and it is so inspirational as most of it comes from our supporters.
It took a while at first to gather blogs and we still actively solicit them from supporters, so it is still a significant portion of someone’s staff time, though less and less and WELL worth it. I’m not the only one that loves to see other people are involved – and if it’s yours or your child’s story you can be sure that they send it around to all their friends and family to see, thereby greatly expanding the reach of the campaign. We couldn’t have come up with all of these great ideas, and by having people tell their own story, they spark ideas for others at the same time showing momentum for the campaign.

We actually handle the posting ourselves. I’ve found that even a simple blog tool such as what Drupal offers is something that tends to scare people away from doing the post. It is also another way to insure crazy things don’t get posted, and it is not terribly time-consuming.

If you have a few ‘super volunteers’ or experts, you may want to empower them to post on their own though for more timely content if you feel they would be comfortable learning how.

To date, no other email has been equally as fruitful so I am constantly trying to recapture that ‘lighting in a bottle’ – at the time of this email, our team had also just come back from the very first net-distribution trip in Nigeria so we were able to show children actually receiving what generous donors had sent.
I find it essential to report back to your community, donors and non-donors alike and our traffic is rarely better than when we first come back to from a net distribution campaign because people are so interested in the stories from staff, visitors and those receiving the nets. The momentum and excitement continues as we identify more and more ways to actually show how these campaigns work and the lives they touch.

The website is based on open-source Drupal and we take donations via a custom processor. For the Netraisers fundraising we use a software platform called Artez; we are essentially using a walk-a-thon type set up for a long-term campaign.

Netraisers identify themselves as wanting to be a champion for malaria – we just give them the tools to do it – software and information about malaria and what you can do to help. We have done a Netraiser contest where we gave away signed NBA and Major League Soccer gear to those who raised the most $ AND those who brought in the most new people to the cause. We also highlight a few MVPs on the homepage quite prominently which is a draw to many individual fundraisers

The software makes it easy to reach out and we are constantly trying to make it easier and encourage more of our supporters to become Netraisers.

I think the best way to tell them is to do so in every medium possible. Video, written, photos, and audio – and we do so whenever possible. Before each trip, we gather and brainstorm on what types of photos, blogs and footage we want this time. Each staff member that goes on the trip blogs about their personal experience and they also work with people on the ground in Africa to get their stories to share. www.NothingButNets.net is a central part of the campaign, and everyone on staff is consistently thinking about the website and contributes to make it what is. It is a group effort that not one or two people could ever pull off on their own.

We do in fact take donations from outside the U.S. and welcome them! Right now they do not as yet make up a large portion of donations, I believe because mainly our partners and distribution channels are U.S. focused.

We love video - and so do our supporters! We've done them in a few ways from super low tech/low budget to having a crew in Africa at the time.
One of my favorites to date was a report back from the emergency appeal we did around Chad www.NothingButNets.net/chadtrip - here, Kevin just took a hand-held with him, shot some footage on his own and set the camera up on a stool to interview himself. He did a great job and has no formal training, and when he got back our team cut it together (again, with no formal training). This best part of this is how it is so very obviously authentic and heart-felt. Video and media aren't his job, but he did a fantastic job of bringing the reality of a refugee camp outside Darfur's boarders to life for those of us who will never see it.

People are doing a great job with becoming Netraisers and spreading the cause electronically, but the page where we give more tools at is one of the most popular http://www.nothingbutnets.net/its-easy-to-help/

Another popular new feature is the interactive distribution map we created to show where the money is going http://www.nothingbutnets.net/nets-save-lives/net-distributions

We do have a presence on both MySpace and Facebook. We have an intern that frequently checks both and when we have a message to spread, such as the report about our emergency appeal for nets to Chad, we had two people spend hours each day posting banners on MySpace comments of our friends which was time consuming but the experiment paid off and MySpace was the #2 referrer to the site for quite some time afterwards.

We had a wonderful collaboration with a firm in Canada, Communicopia, that came up with the design and helped us simplify the information architecture to be as clear as possible. We had a few brainstorms and they came back to us with this great concept that we all tweaked to become what you see today.

Thank you for having me, I enjoyed hearing what other people are working on and what they are encountering in the online fundraising world also.