Blog: Facebook

How We Advertised a Job on Facebook

When we needed to post a new job ad online, we started going through the list of usual suspects: Idealist, Craigslist, various DC tech job boards, and advertising on sites where we knew people might be. Then we thought, "What about Facebook?" We couldn’t remember ever seeing a good job ad on Facebook, but we figured we'd try it out. Here's what we found.

First, Facebook's combination of price, targeting options, and ease of use made it just about unparalleled from the perspective of the ad placement itself. But those of us who use Facebook are used to these ads being nightlife promotions, surveys to make quick cash online, or corporate ads. I even remember once seeing an ad for a plastic surgeon in the Midwest (they weren't making the best use of the targeting feature, unless they expect a 26-year-old male from Colorado to fly to Wisconsin for Botox ;). Would a reputable job ad work? We created one in order to find out.

We guessed that our best chances would be to target it to people who live in the Washington DC metro area and have interests in things we might look for in a job candidate. We used Facebook's ad placement tool to target people in DC, VA, and MD, and then listed out keywords that we thought the ideal candidates may have. Some of the keywords we thought of didn't hit any users' profiles, but others did. When they hit, the Facebook ad placement interface told us how many people used this keyword in their profile. In the end, here's what our list looked like – there are a couple odd ones, but it was what we had to work with:

Speaking Up to End Poverty Using a Drupal Website

Today is your day to speak up and do something to help end poverty. The United Nations Millennium Campaign is gathering people around the world today to stand up against poverty and in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The campaign – called Stand up Speak Out – takes place over just 24 hours, and last year 23 million people stood up against poverty, setting the world record for the most people standing up for a cause. The event is more than halfway over now and looks like it is well on its way to beating its own record.

For the last two months we’ve been working with Jason Wojciechowski and his team at the UN Millennium Campaign on the Stand Up Speak Out website. StandAgainstPoverty.org is a Drupal site that Jason built last year on 4.7 and that we helped him redesign and improve for this year's event (it now runs 5.2). We had a blast coming up with ways to make it easier for people to participate in the campaign online and for the UN Millennium Campaign to really show off the huge numbers of people that are standing up against poverty.

For months now organizers around the world have been mobilizing to set up events where people could join together in person to stand up, and for the past month they’ve been registering these events at StandAgainstPoverty.org. Organizers are now returning to the site to log the number of people that participated in local events and upload their photos. So far 2,018 photos have been uploaded to Flickr showing people from around the world – from school children in India to office workers in Portland – standing up against poverty. We had a lot of fun working on the site’s Flickr implementation – users submit the photos on their event page on the Drupal site, and then the images are tagged with the event title and uploaded into the campaign's Flickr account. It makes for a great Flickr feed and should save the UN Millennium Campaign a ton of time.

For the first time this year users who can't attend a physical event can “stand up” online and join in the attempt to break the world record.  This is a great option to offer users, especially considering the increasing number of people the UN Millennium Campaign has been able to engage online in recent months. They're working with Change.org to facilitate online actions for English-speaking users.  They also built a Facebook app. 

Since Change.org doesn't yet have multilingual support and Stand Up Speak Out is collecting information in five languages, they chose to collect information for other languages by using the combined toolsets of Drupal and Democracy in Action, a powerful CRM tool for non-profits. Drupal's robust internationalization support and ease of use for translators (the Stand Up Speak Out campaign helped fund recent UI work on the l10n_client module) made it simple for users to stand up in any language, and Democracy in Action's great API allowed us to pass all the information into that system for easy reporting later on.

With less than 4 hours remaining in the campaign, everything seems to be running very smoothly. We're excited to see what happens with it! A big congrats to Jason and everyone else involved in organizing this for a successful event and a great Drupal site.

If you haven't yet, join in the activity and be part of a world record! Stand up online against poverty now at http://www.standagainstpoverty.org. You can only participate until 5 pm EDT, so please take action soon. We did this morning : )

UN Millennium Campaign Reaches Out to Facebook Community

Facebook became one of the most talked about social networks in the United States when they opened up their API this summer, and new Facebook applications have been popping up like crazy ever since. In addition to all the super poke and zombie applications, some interesting organizations and causes have entered the mix like the UN Millennium Campaign, who launched a Facebook application a couple weeks ago. (Disclaimer: They’re a client of ours and we recently built two websites for them, although we didn’t do any work on this application.)

This is how the application appears in my Facebook profile. As you can see, it’s a big old clock counting down to the campaign’s deadline to end global poverty. I picked this image because I think it’s powerful, but there are two other options you can choice from as well – a countdown clock to the next Stand Up Against Poverty event and a photo of the day, which is pictured below.

I particularly like the share button that’s on all of the profile widgets, which lets your friends add this application to their profile with just a click. This is a great feature to help spread the application virally, and one that I haven’t seen on too many other Facebook applications. Also there are links to the application’s main page and some of its main features, like blog, events, and friends hall of fame, which are good to get people interacting with the application.