Simon Varley

How 37 non-profits help build a $5 billion empire. A guide - in 20 tweets - to understanding how Facebook Fundraising has evolved since 2016. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

@brookeleblanc Die with Zero, You will own Nothing OR The Invisible Doctrine

What’s the best nonfiction book you’ve read this year?

I need to do an experiment and will give 0.01 Bitcoin (about $700) to 3 separate charities. Please comment with your favourite charity name below and I'll choose 3 at random.

With the exciting announcement this week @gofundme is partnering with @Meta to improve fundraising pages on Instagram (and Facebook) it's very cool that @givepanel is the FIRST company to drive a GoFundMe fundraiser through their new fundraising API... ...and it just so happens it was an Aussie customer Assistance Dogs Australia with the WIN! 🏆❤️ The connection between different social audiences combined with different established/trusted fundraising platforms is definitely a trend to watch for in 2025 👀 I grew up in Australia so this was a nice touch for me! 🦘🇦🇺

Very exciting to see our first @givepanel customers in Australia go live with @gofundme powered Social Challenges after only launching ou integrated forms last week… We’re lucky to work with some super fast and agile teams that can test/adopt innovations super quickly! 👀

⏰ 24 hours until our #BBCon talk on 'Lessons learned from raising over $1b on Facebook and how to apply them on @JustGiving' 👉 Do join myself and @SJVarley from @givepanel on Level 3, room 333, it will be great to meet you

By the looks of things, it’s going to be a lesson in hard knocks for kids in Seattle this Halloween… #BBCON

@nickburne @EmmaJonesGB @cafedenata Yep, @natacouk has me hooked on these. Defs worth a visit when you are down SW @EmmaJonesGB 😋

@EmmaJonesGB @cafedenata Soooo good! Right @SJVarley ?

Had my first ever Pastel de Nata today🤤😍😝 OMG where have these beeeeen all my life!!!! Slightly excitable that ALL of my team meetings for the rest of the year are right next door to @cafedenata 👌🏼

UK Digital Fundraising Benchmarks launching this Thursday... Get yourself registered

@EmmaJonesGB Thanks, Emma 😊

Brilliant advice from @SJVarley here👏🏼 Events must resonate with supporters to be truly effective. Insights and understanding your audience are key🎯

Great fun talking about social-first fundraising on behalf of @givepanel at last month's Marketing Push event in Leamington Spa 🍋

@businessbarista @MorningBrew Awesome post

I’ve long been a vocal critic of B2B events. They’re boring, stuffy, undifferentiated and unactionable. But the team at @MorningBrew has changed my mind. B2B events don’t suck. Execution by their organizers is what sucks. I just went to the Marketer’s (Early) Guide to AI event and it blew me away. As I reflect on it, here’s what the team did to make it truly special: 1) Guest selection is everything. - It’s the best built-in marketing for the event. - It sets the tone for everything. Picking guests whose personality matches your company’s brand is key. - Experts matter more than talking heads. Finding the balance of seniority & tactical experience is huge. 2) Play around with programming. - It’s good to learn from tried and true content formats, but pattern matching everything isn’t the answer. - At this event, we had @dhtoomey perform 5 minutes of stand-up about AI to welcome the crew back from networking. It was brilliant. 3) Omnichannel events are the future. - Similar to retail companies needing to exist everywhere for consumers, event companies need to exist everywhere for attendees. - For our event, in-person and live-stream were treated with equal care, which led to ultimate flexibility for attendees, and multiple high-margin revenue streams. 4) Niche down as much as possible. - General industry events are saturated as hell & oftentimes a worse user experience because they’re less actionable, and a broad attendee group makes networking less valuable. - We intentionally niched down this event to AI in Marketing, because it’s top of mind for every marketer, it’s clear the value you’ll get, and conversation starters become so much more natural. 5) Partnerships juice economics. - Events can be 70%+ margin businesses if you operate them skillfully. - Barter agreements and partnerships are also a perfect lever to pull to juice margin even more. Think barter for event space, food & bev, technology, etc. 6) Your team can stack the deck. - People match the energy and excitement of the loudest people in the room. If you have an up-front strategy for your team to set that level properly, it stacks the deck in your favor. - Make sure your team is prepped to start convos with attendees, ask speakers questions, clap really freakin loud, guide folks who look lost, etc. It’s not rocket science, but it fundamentally changed my view on events & their place on media. Huge shout out to the @MorningBrew events team & shoot me a DM if you’re interested in being a partner/sponsor for an upcoming event.

That Truss was even allowed a registration honours list is a disgrace, and a sign of Sunak weakness. That No 10 defend it by saying “every PM” did so is a straightforward lie. Neither TB nor GB had a resignation honours list. It is a Tory thing, all part of creeping Tory 2/4

In 2023 charities generated 4.4 MILLION donations on #socialfundraising fundraising using GivePanel 🤯 Facebook was still dominant but we saw donations from Instagram campaigns really increase and our integration with JustGiving starting to contribute too. Thanks to all our amazing nonprofit customers! Bring on 2024!!

@thatcharityman I think knowing specifically what you are not good at is an underrated skill

@damianchapmanuk @CIOFtweets @chipheath @givepanel @Karen_Australia @Morestrategic I’m so glad you enjoyed it! Interesting to see how different the people were behind such commonly adopted principles.

@SJVarley @CIOFtweets @chipheath @givepanel @Karen_Australia @Morestrategic Nearly finished vanishing point and it really is a fascinating book!

I cannot believe I didnt say #thankyou to @SJVarley for the #bookswap we arranged at @CIOFtweets #ioffc a month ago. I gave a copy of @chipheath's #powerofmoments and received #theundoingproject by Michael Lewis. Both new books to each other and a nice way to start a chat 🥰

Congratulations @BillBailey and thank you for your inspiring words. We should all bottle up what you shared. Yes “giving is good!” 💜 #JGAwards

@tonyleebanks Done 👍

Always a nice way to start off the week with some unexpected visitors in the Garden… ☕️🦌

@tonyleebanks We’ll be able to help with this :) Happy for me to shoot some details your way on Mon/Tuesday?