All but one of the nine interviews were conducted face-to-face and audio recorded. They varied in length from 40 minutes to 1 hour 17 minutes, with the average (for the eight face-to-face interviews) being 54 minutes. Once the eight interviews were fully transcribed verbatim, thematic content analysis was used to examine the transcripts. This involved “discovering themes in the interview transcripts and attempting to verify, confirm and qualify them by searching through the data and repeating the process to identify further themes and categories” (Burnard et al., 2008, p. 430). Tables 6.1 – 6.4 offer examples of the use of an initial coding framework in the data generated from the interviews.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT INITIAL CODES
Question (Evie Lucas): What are the main reasons that motivated Marie Curie Cancer Care to join Facebook?
Answer (Stuart Witts): It was already set up when I joined, but that was about three years ago so it was still early days…
Basically we joined it, and we still use it effectively, to keep in communication with our supporters and to strengthen that relationship over the long term. So it’s really about supporting them, whether they’re using our services or raising money for us, and it’s about giving something back to them. We show them where the money is being spent and reflect back to them what other supporters are doing. So we’ll often share stories of our supporters out on treks; or if they’ve got a particularly good story or they send us things they have done, we’ll share them. It’s really about them. Front of mind is always what is of interest to them rather than what is of interest to us.
• Social interaction • Strengthening relationships • Support • Transparency & trust • Human interest stories • Public recognition
Question (Evie Lucas): “I don’t have any other questions, but is there anything else you’d like to add?”
Answer (Stuart Witts): From my perspective, as I’ve said all the way through, I think it is about being ethical, being moral, being human; it’s about building a longer term relationship with supporters and making sure that they see you as a charity which they can feel comfortable supporting and believing in. And because we’re an end-of-life care charity, the vast majority of our supporters are people who have lost a loved one who we took care of, and so our presence on social is also to some degree… I’m not saying it’s therapy or counselling, but people have shared things to our Facebook page the very next day
• Humanising the
brand
when someone passed away and said, “thank you for being there”. So those people see the Facebook page and the Twitter account as Marie Curie, as that nurse who came in to care for their loved one, so social is the face of all that. So I think when they’re talking to us, that’s what they’re feeling. So that account has a huge responsibility to ensure that it represents the charity as a decent human being.
• Support &
gratitude
Table 6.1: An example of initial coding of the Stuart Witts (Marie Curie Cancer Care) interview transcript. Source: author.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT INITIAL CODES
Question (Evie Lucas): “What are your objectives in using Facebook now?”
Answer (Amanda Neylon): “We mainly use Facebook for support. Unlike many of the UK charities, we’re a charity that isn’t just about fundraising. We deliver services, so we use all of our social media channels mainly for support, although without a doubt we also use them for engagement, promotion and
fundraising. So we have nurses who answer our Facebook questions, we have chats on there, there is a lot of that support mechanism, but then of course we use it for fundraising, awareness building and engagement, so that kind of thing, too.”
• Support • Engagement • Social interaction
Question (Evie Lucas): “Please explain how you work out the return to your Facebook investment and how you predict this figure when planning your fundraising campaigns.”
Answer (Amanda Neylon): “It’s really hard – it depends on whether we’re being really strict about ROI in terms of donations vs. time, which we are not. What we’ve seen is that, with the right audiences, great engagement on Facebook means an increased number of people that register for an event and an increased quantity of money raised. People who engage with our Facebook pages tend to raise more money with their events, so there’s that kind of correlation. So even though we don’t track it to the nth degree with ROI, we do try and ensure that the echo of Facebook is the rewards in terms of either people signing up for something or the amount of money they raise.”
• Return on investment • Increased fundraising activity • Increased fundraised income
Table 6.2: An example of initial coding of the Amanda Neylon (Macmillan Cancer Support) interview transcript. Source: author.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT INITIAL CODES
Question (Evie Lucas): “What are your objectives in using Facebook now?”
Answer (Aaron Eccles): “It’s almost entirely engagement. It’s something we want to always look at as a brand channel for us, so we want to be able to reach people first of all with our brand messages, with our stories, with our research news; and we want people to then be engaged with us as a brand, we want them to share that information, to almost own it themselves, to say ‘this is important to me, I want to share it with my friends and family’. So we want to give them really engaging content and allow us to have that one-to-one contact with them. We want an engaged community that understands and loves our brand, and that wants to help.”
• Engagement
• Sharing &
shareability
Question (Evie Lucas): “How do you feel about your Facebook page today?”
Answer (Aaron Eccles): “I think we’re quite proud of it. We feel like we’re getting more and more of an understanding of what the community responds to, we feel like it’s a place where we can share really inspiring stories from patients, from researchers – people who can show the impact of the work that the public has funded. So often patients who have been on clinical trials that have been funded by the public can tell their stories in their own words on our Facebook page. We find those sort of stories inspiring, and we hope other people do, as well.”
• Inspiration • Human-interest
stories
• Transparency and
trust
Table 6.3: An example of initial coding of the Aaron Eccles (CRUK) interview transcript. Source: author.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT INITIAL CODES
Question (Evie Lucas): “We see charities trying different things on social media to raise money – from hijacking memes to direct marketing to community fundraising. Where should they focus their attention, in your opinion, and why?”
Answer (Jonathan Waddingham): Hijacking memes is not something you can plan to do. The Cancer Research example [no make-up selfie campaign] is great – they are the biggest charity brand, they are obviously front of mind of people when they think, “I’ll raise money for charity”, but they were also monitoring that space, so they could react quickly. And that’s something I definitely say to charities: that they should have a presence, be able to be part of the conversation, so if a chance like that comes up, they can react quickly.
But I think social has got a really important role in donor stewardship and supporting journeys, in bringing people closer to a cause. So by sharing the impact of what a charity does on social media, you can help people understand not necessarily why they should give, but why they should feel good about the fact they’ve given beforehand. It’s not about overtly asking for money, which every charity says. It’s not a platform for you to go, “Give me money, give me money”, but I think it is a platform to say, “this is the work we’re doing, this is how we’re helping people”, and every so often, “hey, this is how you can get involved if you feel so inclined”. So I think that aspect of community, not necessarily traditional community fundraising but building community and making people aware of the impact and outcomes that you are having as a charity, is great because that gives people something that they can share with their friends. And that’s ultimately the amazing benefit of social media: that you can reach the friends of the people you speak to. I think that’s how we look at social from JustGiving’s point of view. • Memejacking • Agility • Stewardship • Support • Transparency & trust • Building community • Sharing & shareability
Question (Evie Lucas): “JustGiving currently dominates the charitable giving space. Briefly, what’s the idea behind it and why does the model work so well?”
Answer (Jonathan Waddingham): “There’s been a long
do events like the London Marathon, which is a classic example, and they would go round their office with a piece of paper and say to their friends, “will you sponsor me?” and get people to sign their name and promise to give if they did that event. And basically we just took that idea online. And that’s what really kicked us off in the mid-2000s, when ecommerce was just taking off – allowing people to have that webpage and then email their friends for sponsorship. And their friends could give securely, and obviously they didn’t have to be geographically close to them, so they raised more money and it was a lot easier for them. They didn’t have to handle any cash, we took care of all that, transacting the money, adding Gift Aid, and so it just made that process really easy for people.”
established fundraising practices
• Making giving
easy
Table 6.4: An example of initial coding of the Jonathan Waddingham (JustGiving) interview transcript. Source: author.
After the initial coding of all the interviews, the codes were reviewed and new codes (or categories) were created by combining multiple codes (Burnard et al., 2008). For example, ‘humanising the brand’, ‘support & gratitude’, public recognition’, ‘human-interest stories’, ‘transparency & trust’, ‘engagement’, ‘stewardship’, ‘social interaction’, ‘strengthening relationships’, ‘building community’ and ‘physical reality’ were all combined into the category
‘investing in social capital’ because they all describe conditions that assist in the accumulation of social capital (see Table 6.5 below).
INITIAL CODING FRAMEWORK FINAL CODING FRAMEWORK
• Humanising the brand • Support & gratitude • Public recognition • Human-interest stories • Transparency & trust • Engagement • Stewardship • Social interaction • Strengthening relationships • Building community • Physical reality
Investing in social capital
• No make-up selfie campaign • Peer-to-peer/community/event
fundraising
• Boosting established fundraising
practices
• Peer pressure • Social currency • Inspiration
• Strong vs weak network ties • Fundraising and fun
• Memejacking • Agility
• Intelligent use of data &
personalisation of the fundraising ask
Mobilising social capital
• Sharing & shareability • Increased fundraised income • Increased fundraising activity • Hyperlinking
Outcome realisation
• Mobile text to donate codes • Making giving easy
• Optimisation of web experiences for
mobile devices
• Wearables
• Return on investment (ROI)
Table 6.5: An example of the final coding framework for the semi-structured interviews. Source: author.