Great blog post over at Futuristic Play which details an exchange between Andrew Chen, the blogger at Futuristic Play, and Ben Rattray of change.org. Actually, it’s more of a posting of an e-mail that Ben Rattray sent to Andrew Chen regarding the future of Facebook apps. It’s a good introduction to the problems faced by would-be Facebook developers. You can summarize the problems as:
- Too many apps for limited attention capacity of Facebook users
- Too many invites from other apps lower adoption rates for all apps (including your own) by Facebook users
- Useful apps have a tougher time getting users than social or “fun” apps
I’m not sure the useful vs. fun distinction makes much sense because it doesn’t really explain Causes. It’s very clear the head start that Causes had has been very difficult to erode. As of 5/7/2008, Causes is down to under seven million installations from a peak of ten million. The question is: Is Causes’ user base eroding because of this useful/fun distinction or is it simply eroding because of where we are in relation to the Giving Season? We can’t really say for sure.
I think change.org is an interesting case of a social network trying to use another social network to get more users. In that sense, I’m not sure if Ben’s experiences over at change.org haven’t colored his commentary regarding Facebook apps. There is certainly a lot of truth in what he says but just to get a second angle on what he was talking about I decided to do some quick look ups at Adonomics just to confirm the problem he stated. If it’s true that useful apps such as nonprofits apps will have a hard time getting viral on Facebook, then we should see mostly flat adoption rates for all nonprofit apps on Facebook. And for the most part, he’s right. change.org, Changing the Present and Razoo seem to have hit their plateaus when it comes to user adoption on Facebook.
However, that’s not the whole story. I decide to check out the Firstgiving app in Adonomics. The Firstgiving app was originally created by the US nonprofit Firstgiving which is a subsidiary of Justgiving in the UK. The app is no longer viewable on Adonomics so I decided to check out the Justgiving app. I guess the UK mothership at Justgiving has decided to rebrand the app as its own. That wasn’t the only surprise…
Lo, and behold, Justgiving has been taking on new users at a pretty nice clip since January:
Last August, I had noticed that the Justgiving app had a large amount of user interaction with the Justgiving app. That continues to this day with four percent of their installed base interacting with the app on any one day. What’s their secret? How did they break this trend? Could it be that the British have done what the Americans couldn’t do and loosen the binds that have held back cause-based apps growth in Facebook? I’ll try to follow up on this issue as it is VERY intriguing to me.
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Justgiving is the major site charity giving site for the London Marathon, which is run at the end of April every year. The ‘Giving Season’ is different in different places and events
On general Facebook apps, I think the issue of signal to noise is a critical one – it’s one reason we’re not putting a big premium on Causes as a vehicle for engagement.
Thanks for mentioning my post, Allan. Causes is an interesting case, in that it’s one of the only “useful” apps that have gained widespread distribution. The primary reason for this is that, unlike most useful apps, they were able to successfully build virality deeply into the structure of the app by making part of the purpose of using Causes to recruit one’s friends.
But virality is easier said than done, and for most useful apps in which inviting friends is not an inherent part of using the app, it’s very difficult to get a viral coefficient of greater than 1, which is the only real way to get distribution inside Facebook. (As I described in more detail in the post you referenced.)
The case of FirstGiving is interesting, but my guess is that their growth is not happening organically from inside Facebook but rather because users of their main site are being pushed to add the app inside Facebook. Actually, that is almost certainly the case, since it is mathematically impossible for them to be growing any other way inside Facebook unless they have a viral coefficient of greater than 1, and if they had that, they’d likely be growing much more rapidly.
Ben, if your thesis is correct, we should start to see steady erosion of active users of the Justgiving app fairly soon (a month perhaps?) as long as there are no additional external boosts provided to the app from Justgiving itself by additional cross-promotions.
Ultimately, if I were to boil down what you wrote into a rough rule of thumb, it would be:
You have to have enough site traffic to drive Facebook traffic to your app.
I’m really curious as to what the summer will bring for the Justgiving app.
Hi Allan,
Firstly, thanks for featuring us, it’s nice to be written about and great that the app has been noticed!
Growth has been steady since launch last summer (about a month or so after the FB app platform launched itself). Last time we checked the installs were at about 75,000 and the usage rate varies between 5-10%, which is pretty cool considering the app itself was designed to be purely functional and not sexy. It’s only got a donate button on it, after all.
We have had a very large userbase for years now, so when we launched it was merely a case of letting our fundraising users know, and within hours we had hundreds of installs. So you’re bang-on; having plenty of site traffic to send through to the app page has really helped grow those numbers.
We’re not as much interested in spread of the *app*, but more about spread of our brand within FB, and getting across the concept you can use it to fundraise for anything. Most of our referral traffic is coming from FB’s internal messaging system, wall-posts, groups and event pages. The app itself is responsible for about 10% of our FB referral traffic.
It’s also worth noting that now, unsurprisingly, FB is our single biggest referrer, knocking Google off its perch earlier this year. Each month the gap between the two widens.
My take on it is that our users are just looking for easier ways to ask their friends for donations, and Facebook is the least awkward way of doing so. The app plays a small part of that, but our focus is not only displaying which causes you support, but more about actually raising more money than thought possible. The dollar value of our Facebook referrals is huge.
The way Facebook has split an individual’s social graph wide open has real synergy with this concept, and has made much more of an impact than email and non-platform-specific flash widgets (which we have too).
I’m not expecting a *huge* summer dip in activity because the London Marathon is by no means our only big event of the year. However there is always a seasonal dip in P2P fundraising but we’re not forecasting it to tail off. I still don’t think it’s hit the full potential yet since many of our users of older demographics are only just discovering Facebook. Also, it’s wedding season and we get tons of wedding list pages asking for donations instead of shiny toasters.
We’re now focusing on the potential impact of the forthcoming profile changes. Apps are cool but they’re just part of our user’s arsenal and as Ben points out, it’s the viral efficiency within the whole system that counts.
Totally happy to answer any questions you might have, we’ve got tons of internal analytics data on this, as well as qual data on how people actually *want* this stuff to work.
Ahhh… Simon, you’ve got my rapt attention over here. I’ve got lots of questions:
Plenty more after those but I didn’t want to inundate you with an avalanche of questions.
Great discussion. Kudos to Ben for saying viral coefficient! It was impressive! We just got a graph from Facebook a week or so ago about the kinds and number of apps developed. Pressed for time, I just threw it out there to see what the NTEN community had to say at: http://nten.org/blog/2008/05/02/turns-out-everyone-just-wants-to-have-fun.
I think it backs up your argument that useful apps just aren’t as compelling for end users.
I’ve sent the questions to Simon via e-mail. He says he’ll get back to me after the weekend.
As for “viral coefficient”, I was meaning to comment on that. What is the main difference between the old-school “churn rate” and “viral coefficient”? I prefer the Old English churn versus the Latin viral. OK, that was an English nerd moment there.
@Will Nourse: Is the problem of Facebook a signal/noise problem or is the problem a lack of organic site traffic on an originating nonprofit’s site that leads to inactivity on Causes? I think we’re still in holding mode waiting for more data on this. My guess is that if Justgiving can target a Facebook app just for its users, it might just be possible for nonprofits with lots of online traffic to do the same thing. Looking at it so far, it seems that Team in Training-type campaigns could benefit from a Facebook app as that seems to fit the same kind of demographic that Justgiving targeted with its app.
[...] Allen Benamer’s Nonprofit Tech Blog… Do nonprofit Facebook apps fail because they’re too useful? Allen tries to suss out what’s responsible for the dip in users of the Facebook Causes [...]
[...] of people use the Causes app, it has largely failed as a means for NFP to fundraise. There is also growing evidence, at least for the NFP sector, that specific Facebook apps do not experience wide-scale take up or [...]