The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off has harnessed the power of the blogosphere as Breadline Africa and the BBO are currently featured on Bloggers Unite. Bloggers all over the world are encouraged to blog about this worthy online initiative TODAY. The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off allows people to improve the lives of poor communities from the comfort of their own home. The Breadline Africa Blogger Bake Off is a campaign that aims to raise funds to alleviate poverty in Africa.
People worldwide are being encouraged to join the Blogger Bake Off, submit their baking recipes and photos, tag other bloggers to do the same and donate online to this amazing cause. The public has the power to contribute online to Breadline Africa’s projects of converting containers into soup kitchens, classrooms and clinics.
The Breadline Africa team raises money from various parts of the world via the internet to support community projects and promote hope and sustainability in Africa. We are hoping that by partnering with Bloggers Unite we will create the much needed awareness that will serve as a catalyst in the large scale promotion of Breadline Africa and the Blogger Bake Off.
Well we all here at Breadline Africa think our Blogger Bake Off website is pretty awesome. But we are quite biased. So imagine our surprise and pleasure when we read this Smashing Magazine article.
The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off website was chosen as one of the top 20 examples of great non profit websites in terms of website design. We are in very good company as some of the other websites that were chosen are charity:water, Oxfam America and Amnesty international. We were rated as one of the more Web 2.0-ish non profit sites with an easy to navigate homepage.
Congrats to everyone involved in creating this amazing website for a great and worthy cause.
Gareth Cliff has joined Twitter. Yes, South Africa’s most famous radio dj is now tweeting daily. Frankly I am not surprised. After the Larry King vs Ashton Kutcher debacle, I highly doubt there are few people who are not tweeting regularly. Even my dad asked me if I have heard of Twitter…unfortunately he was under the impression that Ashton Kutcher had invented Twitter (hmmm someone should tell Evan Williams that).
As we at Breadline Africa are always up to date with the latest online trends, we have been part of the Twitter world since last year. Primarily we have been tweeting about the Blogger Bake Off, the food bloggers’ world, and the various projects that we help. We love to hear from our community, so join Twitter, follow us and start communicating with us as we want to hear your ideas (and read the latest blog recipes).
The lucky winner of our April Fools Day competition was Neil Pursey. He was kind enough to send us a photo of himself cooking while wearing his prize…a specially designed Blogger Bake Off apron. Looking good Neil!
Easter is just around the corner and so is the second stage of the Worldwide Blogger Bake Off. This brilliant blogger initiative is all about baking and donating…my two favourite things! To get into the spirit of Easter, I decided to bake my famous, well loved, traditional SA hot cross buns. As I know many of you will be wanting to bake these, here is a link to the recipe (and here are some photos of my baking efforts).
There have been some interesting January breads baked for the Blogger Bake Off, and even some cakes! It’s amazing to see how such a simple food – bread – can be adapted so much.
“…and a little bit more…” (Anu’s blog) was tagged seven times! It looks like lots of people wanted to see what Anu would bake, and she didn’t disappoint. The No-Knead Garbanzo and Fava Bean Bread looks amazing, and is certainly unusual.
Sanghi baked an Eggless Vanilla Butter Cake that does not get cooked in the microwave, which is tasty looking take on bread.
Ann, who is A Delighted Foodie baked Fruited Brioche Buns. The buns look so cute – I’ve pasted one of her pictures onto this post.
At last check, the Blogger Bake Off has raised $5186. So much of that is directly thanks to Quirk eMarketing (who is also Breadline Africa’s agency), and their very generous Christmas gift. Quirk donated to the campaign on behalf of their clients at Christmas. What an inspirational take on Christmas giving.
Here is to a great 2009!
The Blogger Bake Off truly is a Worldwide event. Here are some of the blogposts from around the world over the past two weeks:
Crank’s Breaden Espanol from Mallorca.
No Knead Cheddar Batter Bread for Breadline Africa from Canada.
Spicy Sweet Potato Rolls from the USA.
Vegan Hot Cross Buns from India.
And some more support from Spain.
Just a little taste (excuse the pun) of the tasty recipes from the Worldwide Blogger Bake Off. Yum.
As I have mentioned before, the Blogger Bake Off website has been featured on a few “Best of Web” sites for its great looking, CSS and W3C standards compliant design. But, what does that really mean for a website, and in particular for this campaign?
I was looking at the Google Analytics results for the past month, and I thought I would share. It’s amazing to note that the top referrers to the campaign website have been the design galleries, although I am pleased to see StumbleUpon has also been sending us a lot of traffic.
However, of course, it’s not only about the numbers. These sorts of accolades have been sending plenty of traffic, but as you would guess, it’s not very targeted traffic. After all, they’re coming through to look at a well designed website, and not for any philanthropical reasons. This traffic means plenty of new visitors, with an above site average bounce rate, and below site average length of visit and page views. However, there have been some conversions tracked to these referrers, so all is not lost!
What does this mean for the campaign (or for anyone planning something similar)? Well, great design certainly helps in giving your visitors a better experience, and great design can clearly be used to attract more visitors to the website. It’s almost like a PR exercise, where you cannot predict the sort of coverage that you’ll get from these sorts of efforts. Although it is difficult to plan for traffic from those sources, in retrospect it would have been good to have a call to action more likely to convert visitors from these sources.
So, good design for a good cause? We hope so, but there is still a very long way to go before this campaign is successful!
I love this recipe and I cook it nearly every Sunday with my family.
Vetkoek (pronounced “fet-koek” and literally meaning “fat-cake”) is a traditional South African recipe. The dough is deep-fried in cooking oil and to make a complete meal it can be filled with a meat and vegetable filling. Though, I prefer mine served plain and still warm with jam or golden syrup.
You may remember in my last post I wrote about Shirley, one of our long time Breadline Africa supporters. Shirley cooked vetkoek with Nonhi for the children of Nonhi’s Pre-school. They certainly were a hit!
You can view my recipe under the Breadlne Africa team on the Blogger Bake Off website.
Please do try making it and let me know what you think.
Enjoy!
Launching an online campaign is both exhilarating and daunting. It is wonderful seeing people getting involved day by day. But it is also only once you launch that you find out what works and what doesn’t. And when the desired outcome is raising money to help people who desperately need it, making sure that everything works takes on an even greater importance.
We’ve been fortunate to have several people send us well thought out, constructive feedback. We’re going through it, and making sure we can use it to make the campaign successful.
For example, we have decided to use dollars to communicate the progress of the fundraising. We want the campaign to be global, and thought that this would be the easiest way of communicating the funds raised. However, it does mean that some people have thought that we are not a South Africa organisation. And it also means that some people have thought that they have to donate in dollars (whereas you can donate in rands, euros, pounds and more!). It means that we have to be clearer in saying why we’ve chosen to go with dollars, so we will be updating the website with that information.
Another example is the widget. We were hoping for a one size fits all solution, but have found out that it seldom does! Widgets present an ideal platform for spreading a message, but to be honest, I think we need to work harder on ours. In fact, Mike from Living in Jozi has a great post about this (go read it here).
Plenty of people have also been asking for more pictures of the containers (and pointing out the nifty animation we have on the Breadline Africa homepage). More pictures will be coming soon!
So, what does that mean for us? All the fanfare on launch day is great, but it takes persistence, determination and perseverance to make online campaigns like this successful. We’ve reached some fantastic bloggers so far, we need to keep on reaching out.
Do you have suggestions for us? Let us know – we’d love to hear from you.
All, Blogger Bake Off, Online Giving, People | admin June 1, 2009 | 
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