Nonprofit's Guide to Surviving a Covid-19 Ice Age
The extinction of the dinosaur has many theories. But one of the most accepted is that it was caused by a sudden change in the environment. Such as an asteroid striking Earth, forcing a “temporary” Ice Age. A change that caused some species like the dinosaur to go extinct, as they were unable to survive the temporary change in the environment.
COVID-19 - The Social Asteroid
Our current version of that asteroid is COVID-19. Not only does it pose a threat to human health. It has also forced changes in the way we live our lives such as physical distancing. And as a result, it is forcing Darwinian levels of rapid adaptation to survive in this new way of life for the short to medium term. A term that is causing survival plans to change quickly from a plan of days and weeks, to potentially months. With long term effects of rethinking how we live our lives going forward to avoid this situation again in the future.
The problem with a sudden change in the environment, even if temporary, is it requires resiliency or an equally sudden evolution of subjects in that environment to survive. We see this live as we watch the stock market. Some well established businesses have the ability to weather the storm for the time being, other cave to its crashing waves. But we also see a certain breed that seem to thrive in a sea of red tickers.
Physical Distancing - The Nonprofit’s Ice Age
The new norm of physical distancing and isolation has put a strain on many nonprofits. Witnessed both through drops in their volunteer programs and cancelled fundraising events. The latter being the most threatening, as many nonprofits rely heavily on their large fundraising events to drive a large portion of their annual revenue. When an entity relies that heavily on a single resource for its survival, what happens when that resource is no longer available? For some nonprofits that fail to adapt and evolve during these times of physical distancing, it may cause them to go extinct. But there are simple ways for a nonprofit to not only survive, but thrive in this new world.
Social Media - Adapt and Evolve
If physical distancing is the asteroid that crashed into Earth and set off an ice age, then Social Media is the fire that allows families, communities and organizations to weather the cold. Nonprofits that learn to harness the power of social media during these times will turn what seems to be a disruption in their strategy, into a strategic advantage.
On average people are online for 6 hours and 42 minutes a day. With 2 hours and 22 minutes of that time spent on social media. And it is guaranteed that these numbers would skyrocket even higher during these times of physical distancing, isolation, and work from home scenarios that have become the norm during this COVID-19 world crisis.
There are many guides out there on how nonprofits can take advantage of social media. But during this time, you are not only looking to promote or raise awareness to your cause, but also drive engagement and funds. The standard platforms are the big boys: Facebook, Twitter, etc… These platforms offer marketing solutions, as well as ways to drive funds directly from your posts. But not all social media platforms are created equal for nonprofits.
Flixxaid - Surviving... and Thriving in the New World
There are new social platforms however, dedicated to supporting nonprofits. Flixxaid is a TikTok-like mobile app, currently available on the Apple AppStore, that offers a mobile app where supporters can help raise awareness and funds through sharing videos. By creating a nonprofit profile on Flixxaid, users can select your nonprofit to support when uploading their video (called a Flixx) and sharing it directly with friends and family, and to other social medial platforms.
While a user views the video, they are offered a direct link that the nonprofit provides in their profile to the their official donation page (upon verification). This means Flixxaid does not take any portion of user donations. The user can also click on the nonprofit which takes them to your profile, to learn more about the nonprofit. Furthermore, ad revenue from ads viewed following the video also are donated to your nonprofit! Yes, that’s right, users can help raise money without even donating money, just their attention. Tools like Flixxaid, are designed specifically to maximize social mobile video for nonprofits. Most importantly, Flixxaid is free to all nonprofits.
Also for those nonprofits in regions where it is mandatory for students to earn community service hours for their diploma. Flixxaid offers volunteer receipts for their efforts in creating original posts in support of nonprofits. Not only does this encourage youth to get involved in supporting nonprofits, but it also provides them with real life experience in online marketing. We have consulted with officers at the Ontario Ministry of Education on this, and they are supportive of Flixxaid issuing one hour receipts per post with original content supporting a nonprofit.
Host “Virtual” Group Fundraising Events
One way to host large group events during this time is to go virtual. For example, if you use to host a Run for a Cause type event. Create the event online and ask supporters to raise funds as they would, but participate in the event virtually and share their experience online. Similar to work from home, this instead would be “Support from Home”.
Here’s how you can setup such an event using Flixxaid:
Temporarily set your profile’s website link to the event’s website, and default Donation URL to the event donation page. Alternatively, you can create a new profile dedicated to that event.
Flixxaid allows for the person posting to point to either your event donation page, or to point to their own personal or virtual team donation page. Do this by setting the profile’s Root Donation URL, which allows users to append to a root URL their personal or team page url. But forces the URL to start with your Root URL. Preventing people from pointing to malicious or inappropriate websites.
eg. if your team pages URLs look like “http://www.nonprofit.org/event/[team-specific-part-of-url]”. You would set your Root Donation URL to “http://www.nonprofit.org/event/” which allows users to safely append their team suffix to your root URL.Optional: If you have corporate sponsors, you can ask them to support your event by asking them to advertise on Flixxaid. This will increase the ad revenue donated back to the nonprofits.
Next create a video post yourself to kickoff the event, raising awareness around the event, and providing any instructions.
Share with them asking for their participation using the Share button on the post.
Your supporters will then signup to the challenge as an individual or setup a virtual team as they would for your in-person event
The participant would then perform the challenge, say a 5K walk or run, and take short video clips of their run with messages to their friends and family to support your cause.
When posting the video, the participant would append to the Root URL to point to their personal or team page, and share with their friends and family by using the Share button to email, text, or post on other social platforms
The participant can continue to append new video posts (called Scenes) to the original post (called a Flixx) to continue their story.
Friends and family members would view these video clips and can click Donate which points them to the participants donation page for the event.
Ads would be displayed randomly while watching videos. Ad revenue that is earned related to a video would also be donated to the nonprofit that the post is supporting!
You can imagine the benefits to hosting virtual events like this:
No massive upfront effort to plan and coordinate the event with suppliers, volunteers, etc.
No large expenses for setting up the “in real life” (IRL) event.
Once an event is complete, you can choose to start another challenge at any time with little effort!
Flixxaid is available on the Apple AppStore. If you have any questions or need help starting, feel free to reach out to Flixxaid.
Come Out Stronger
The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a critical moment in time for many reasons. Not only for its impact to human life, but also how humans worked together across the world for a single cause. Although there will be tragic losses, I believe this will make society evolve for the better. It will force an evolution of people an entities for a new world that will hopefully be more resilient.
Nonprofits need to also use this as an opportunity to evolve and become more resilient to changes in the environment. No longer can a nonprofit rely on a single resource to survive. But have access to multiple channels of engaging its current and future supporters.
Social media is also evolving to suit specific purposes. Flixxaid as one example, is specifically designed to maximizes the power of social media, mobile video, youth engagement and social advertising to benefit nonprofits. By constantly looking and evolving your strategy to adapt to upcoming known and unknown changes in the environment. Nonprofits can not only survive in the new world, but thrive to bring a new era of achievements in its efforts for its cause.