In my last post I mentioned that part of my job is to run an annual Auction. I have no event planning experience, so it's been quite a learning curve. It's a bit high pressure too, as it's a significant fundraiser for a small school like us – in years past we have raised as much as $200,000. The task I set for myself last week was to create and launch a digital Communications plan for the event and I thought I would share what I did, and ask you for some additional feedback and ideas.
Here's what I made:
Facebook Event Page: This is why I love Facebook. In 5 minutes I had an event page with the date, location, logo and as soon as I pushed it live I had about 20 parents RSVP to it, and more will come as the early adopters share it on their own pages. Now when items to be donated come in I can post about them in minutes. We're running a raffle for the event and we're using the page to promote that, as well. One thing I'm doing that I wonder about is cross posting on our main Facebook page. Is this overkill? Here's our event and here's our page – I'd love your feedback.
Online Donation Form. By this I mean ” items to donate to be auctioned” and not “cash donations” as our regular online giving form is the only resource I have for taking cash donations. Still, I figured a form that people could use to donate a gift certificate, service, trip, holiday house or whathave you would make it easier for them to contribute. I made a Google Docs form before I realized that our Silverpoint CMS had a forms option – so I used theirs instead so that I stayed inside the stylesheet. It's here.
Dedicated Auction Web Page. For this the concept was a substantive overview that I can link back to from our other channels. I am limited by my lack of graphic design skills so the best I could do was drop a logo in and try to provide clean copy. I have to say though that it took more than an hour to write and edit the page and I predict that the traffic to it will not be anything like the traffic to the Facebook page. It's here. Any insights about the ROI on developing short run web pages for school websites?
Production Schedule for e-blasts. We send a weekly e-note so I set up one of our volunteers to write one blurb for week. She'll feature donated items, update folks on the raffle, remind people to RSVP, and do some educating about the on-line component of the event, our Bidding for Good site. I also allotted the Auction two dedicated emails (We are trying to keep our emails down to 6/month – which is still high, but better than it was). We'll use those to promote the Bidding for Good event and our high dollar live auction items.
But then, like any digital media effort I ran into a challenge. When I started linking from my website to my Facebook page I discovered that the meta tags were pulling the promotional information from Silverpoint instead of our own message. It looks terrible. So my task for THIS week is to get our meta tags sorted out. Any advice? Cool tags? I'd love some ideas.
Next up – revising our online donation form to educate, facilitate and appreciate. I'll keep you posted!
Postscript
It only took a little bit more research to figure out why my links were pulling the SilverPoint metadata into my Facebook posts! I contacted the rep from the company as it's a new site and I had a hunch it was an oversight and not a glitch. It turns out I was right. Silverpoint hadn't completed SEO components that were part of the original redesign package. They quickly fixed the tags, and it was a great learning experience for me as they walked me through the process for managing my own. What I learned was don't blindly trust your web provider – ask questions, train yourself, keep learning! Speaking of learning, does anyone have suggestions for good self-tutorials on SEO for schools?
