New connect2cause widgets – this changes everything!

Read this, it's worth it.  Promise.

Starting over the next week or so we're rolling out our second generation connect2cause widgets to our existing partners and this is a huge change for everyone.  Huge. 

• Deploying the new widgets makes working with good2gether far easier for our media partners.
• In most cases we'll have connect2cause widgets in more places at our partner sites.
• The widgets -through 'widget math' - drive nonprofit aggregation (significantly).  I'll explain that in a bit.
• The new widgets allows us and our partners to respond to problems nearly instantly.
• And, finally, we can begin optimizing the links in the widgets.

 

Incidentally, if you'd like to see an example of a 2^nd gen widget, take a look at Sharing at USA Today.

So here's the back-story - this will help you understand why this is such a big change.  To program the links in the connect2cause widgets this is what we have to do today:

• Allison looks through the new events, volunteering opportunities, and in-kind donation needs in the local Do Good channel.
• She takes the interesting stuff that she finds, grabs the URL for the item and writes a short title and drops both in a spreadsheet.
• She has to do this for a bunch of items - we always try to have unique content in each connect2cause widget.  With five widgets at, for instance, Boston.com, that means 15 items.
• Then she sends the spreadsheet off to the newspaper partner.
• They then need to update the widgets by hand to incorporate our recommendations and update the links.  And this effort needs to be done by people who already have way, way too many items on their 'to do' list.

 

The result of this painful process?  The widgets aren't updated, at most partners, nearly as often as they should be.  And here's why that is bad - stale links don't work.  If people see the same links in the widget over and over and over they stop clicking on them.  Also, because it was such a pain to do the updates for our partners, we couldn't do any optimization.  We would love to say, '…now try this phrase for the first three days for this volunteering opportunity and then try this one for the same item for the next three days and let's see if we get better click-through rates …' but given the bandwidth issues that couldn't happen.

So there we are - with great partners and great pieces of real estate for connect2cause widgets at our partners' sites that are, all too often, sitting fallow.

All that changes now.

Here's how the new widgets work:

1. is Sharing at USA Today.com

2. is the connect2cause widget

3. is the control for the widget within the channel console.

Now here's the new process:

• Allison looks through the new events, volunteering opportunities, and in-kind donation needs in the Do Good channel.
• She takes the interesting stuff that she finds, comes up with a clever tag line, and features it within the widget (each widget is controlled separately) using the 'c2c Section' functionality in our content management system.
• The widget looks to the server three times per day - when it finds new links, bang, they're in the widget.

 

It's that easy.  Easy for us.  Easy for our media partners.  Easy for our nonprofit partners.

For our media partners, once they've 'installed' the widgets, they're done.  We do all the management.  Fresh content all the time.  We'll also begin optimizing stuff - what content drives click-thru's?  What words work better?  It's all easy to control and test.  And we'll start to editorially control the widgets - it's heart month, earth day, volunteering week…all the widgets and the featured links marching in lockstep. 

For our nonprofit partners, it's fantastic!  Have an issue, an event, a volunteering opportunity that needs to be addressed right now?  Let us know and we can 'push' it into the widget nearly instantly.

And widget math pulls in more content.  What's widget math?  If a newspaper partner has widgets in 5 sections and each widgets has, on average, 3 featured links and we plan on updating the widgets twice per week to start (Mondays & Thursdays) that means 5 sections X 3 links X 2 updates/week = 30 nonprofit engagement items featured per week.  And 120 per month.  And over 1,400 per year!  At any given partner.  That's widget math.  We now have a calculus for our nonprofit partners - get your stuff in, keep it updated, we're going to be cycling through lots of nonprofit content quickly and as we've demonstrated, if you're featured in a widget, you'll get results.

And it turns out - some (Most? All?) of our partners will be putting the new widgets in more places.  Among the first two existing partners converting are San Antonio and Chicago.

At MySanAntonio.com  the new widgets will be in nine sections:

1. Homepage
2. Health
3. Life, lifestyle, food
4. Education
5. SA Paws
6. Living Green
7. Entertainment
8. News
9. Sports

 

So here's the widget math in San Antonio for nonprofits - 9 sections X 3 links X 2 updates/week = 54 nonprofit engagement items featured per week and over 200 per month and over 2,400 per year.

And at ChicagoTribune.com - we'll be in eight sections:

1. Home Page (in a rotational mode)
2. Living
3. Health
4. Green Living
5. Entertainment
6. Triage blog (health)
7. Julie's health
8. The seeker blog

 

Widget math - 8 sections X 3 links X 2 updates/week = 48 nonprofit engagement items featured per week and over 190 per month and over 2,300 per year.

Easier and better for our media partners.  Easier and better for our nonprofit partners.  Easier and better for good2gether.  And we'll be delivering better and more frequently updated links for all those Do Gooders in the world.

The new connect2cause widgets are a win for everyone.