Yesterday, I noticed that Stephen Fry shared the link to Mel Cupper’s JustGiving fundraising page on his Twitter account, saying “He just needs a tiny-winy bit more cash and he's there... http://www.justgiving.com/melcupper”

I immediately saw a few people ‘re-tweet’ this (i.e. send the same message from their own Twitter account) and wondered whether a flurry of donations would appear as a result. At the time of writing, 651,945 people follow Stephen Fry on Twitter, so I wanted to know what affect his promotion of Mel’s fundraising page would have on the stats for her page for the Big Issue Foundation. They are quite impressive, and here they are…

On Sunday 12 July, the page was seen by two unique users. On the 13th, after the ‘fry tweet’, it was seen by 13,979. And these people, from over 30 different countries, spent four minutes and 18 seconds on the page on average. That is a huge amount of time – compare it to your own website stats – most sites would be happy with two or three minutes, depending on how much content you have.

However, whilst people spent a lot of time reading about the charity, the challenge Mel was taking and all the previous comments donors had left, very few went on to make a donation - 95 per cent of people who came to the fundraising page left without going to another page – that’s a very high bounce rate (the average on the whole of the JustGiving site is about 50 per cent).

In fact, only 39 people actually made a donation that day, a total of £470 for the day, at an average of just over £12 (including Stephen’s own generous donation). So this didn’t raise a huge amount of money, but it did raise awareness – almost 14,000 people spending over four minutes on the page is quite amazing just from one tweet.

It’s also safe to say that all of this traffic was generated from this one tweet, based on Twitter being the top referrer to the page and that many donor comments referred to Mr Fry’s tweet, for example: “The power of Stephen Fry and Twitter made me do it!”

So what are the lessons to this, if indeed there are any? Well, if you look at the reach of this tweet and measure the donation conversion rate, it is tiny and would make any marketer weep.

However, if the potential audience of a Fry tweet is 651,945 (assuming they are all real individual accounts and online at all times) then his message prompted 2 per cent of his followers to click through to the fundraising page. Is that a good percentage? I’d say so, although there’s nothing to benchmark it against. Either way, it’s certainly a lot of people who would otherwise not have gone to the fundraising page spending a lot of time on that page.

From this example, reaching out to celebrities asking them to share your message on Twitter isn’t an especially effective fundraising method, but it could certainly be said to be useful for getting a message out to a large audience.

However, again, this assumes that the celebrities actually re-tweet you when you ask them to. And from monitoring mentions of JustGiving on Twitter, I can say that this rarely happens. But it does sometimes – so people will keep trying – this isn’t the first time Mr Fry has shared a link and prompted a flurry of donations.

The only risk in doing this is to alienate your existing followers on Twitter by constantly messaging celebrities - I’ve seen a lot of individual fundraisers set up Twitter accounts just to ask celebrities to spread the word about their fundraising page – if it works, great. If it doesn’t, they’ve not lost anything. But I imagine that if a charity account constantly asked different celebrities to re-tweet them all the time they would soon lose a lot of followers.

At its most successful, person-to-person fundraising normally relies on a personal connection between the fundraiser and donor. It’s natural to be less motivated to support someone you don’t know, as opposed to someone you do – so you would expect higher bounce rates for a celebrity tweet to a fundraising activity than from an email sent by a fundraiser to a lot of their friends. 

It’s a question of degrees of separation. The closer you are to someone, the more likely you are to support them right? Unless, that is, Stephen Fry asks you to help…