I love a good presentation...

Great looking visual aid, Great information on charitable giving in the US.


budget planner – Mint.com

Campaign to Ban "Online Gifts"

This study has been stuck in my craw for weeks now. Not only does this write up not point to or give us access to the data, but the analysis seems to generalize all activity that happens online to fall under the general category of "Online Fundraising." The term seems to be used interchangeably with "Online Gifts" throughout the piece. No other communication channel has this misunderstanding. I think it is a problem.
I heard it first through Allison Fine and her blog, but I don't think it's original with her. It seems the the idea of the internet was original sold to development officers as a walk up ATM. Insert "Donate Button" here. We are still trying to live that down.
As we try to live it down, I suggest a move toward a small terminology change. There is a difference between Online Gifts, Online Giving and Online Fundraising. Please tell me what you think. Can we make movement towards this fundamental understanding?

Online Giving is NOT Online Fundraising

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Newspapers are Ineffective: A Response to the Washington Post Facebook Cause Article

The Washington Post article, To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn't So Green, published online Wednesday, April 22 by Washington Post Staff Writers, Kim Hart and Megan Greenwell.

I wrote a response and had conversation emerge from it. I felt my own sense of correction in the way I responded from folks like...
a kind email exchange from Amy Sample Ward
a fantastic post by Allison Fine
from my post
fromLateef and others on twitter and blogs all over the web.

I told Amy I'd have to apologize to the Cause App by redeeming my criticism of it. I begrudgingly thanked Amy for the extra work she assigned me. (that I didn't need!) Grrr...thanks again, Amy.

In my attempt to gather some research for my revision/apology, I decided to reach out to the writers of the original Washington Post story. There is no place to leave comments on articles anywhere on the Washington Post's site (not even a newsvine seed link) so I clicked on the link that let me send them an email. I wrote...

Kim/Megan,

On twitter and in the blog world that deals with development and social media, you guys are getting hammered on a couple of points.

1. Old information rehashed. Nothing new here, what prompted you re stirring this year old conversation?

2. You focused on wrong stats. Network for good only works with a 8000 causes that have used causes to also ask for donations. 242,000 causes aren't asking for money, aren't registered with network for good in order to ask for money. You evaluation is off because you confuse causes with intentional fundraising.

3. You blanket sweep the word "ineffective" with donations being your only metric. The development cycle measures effectiveness in very different ways. Some causes are about advocacy, not donations. Some cause are about both, but don't use the cause app to ask for money.

Either way, you are getting dismissed.
If you are having trouble finding where the conversation is dismissing you, let me know, I'll steer you to the most influential of the bloggers who are leading the charge against your analysis.

Michael

An hour later, I got a response...

Hi Michael,

We're well aware of the blog chatter out there. We stand by the reporting, obviously, and dispute the alleged factual inaccuracies. While it's true that only 8,000 nonprofts with Causes pages have signed up with Network for Good, it is incorrect to say that those are the only ones who can raise money through the site -- just by having a Causes page, a nonprofit can receive donations through Network for Good without signing up or doing anything special While not all of those nonprofits got into Causes with the goal of raising money (a point we made in the article, quoting the Nature Conservancy), those who DO hope to fundraise through the application have not raised much -- thus our point that it's ineffective as a fundraising mechanism. That doesn't mean it's a worthless operation, just that it hasn't shown a ton of progress on the fundraising part of its mission.

As for the point about it being old news, I don't think that's true except among a small number of social media types. I know similar topics have been undertaken on a number of nonprofit/social media blogs for as long as Causes has existed (we quoted the author of one of those blog posts), but the vast majority of our readers don't follow those blogs, and we thought it was important to bring an analysis to the general readership. Others are free to disagree on that point, but that was my perspective when I decided to crunch some of those numbers.

I hope this is a useful explanation, and I'll say the same thing to anyone who contacts me. We're not in the business of responding to criticism on blogs, but if people are interested enough to contact me directly I am more than willing to have a conversation with them. So thanks for writing!

I put this here to publish their answers, but I'd like to say more about what's going on from a macro level. No wonder newspapers are dying! The discussion is the story! How can they not participate in this!

I wrote back...

Really, you don’t respond or interact with the subsequent conversation that happens around your articles?

Is that an organizational standard or do some journalists make a practice of participating in the ongoing discussion?

I only point this out to you because I suspected you would have answers to the three main points that are being thrown around.
The points you make to me are great, but I don’t think I am a big enough fan of yours to advocate or defend you (not naturally, I might now)
If you knew this is the standard answer you would give. Wouldn’t you want it to be voiced in the place that the conversation is taking place?

Thanks for your time,

mikeyames

No response yet...email is slow...they may have realized that I blog and decided to no longer respond to me?!? :)

So, feel free to keep the discussion going.
What do you think about their response?
And, on an entirely different point, what do you think of their standard operating procedures regarding blogs?

UPDATE:
Megan, From the Post, wrote me back Monday afternoon.
She has written an exhaustive response to Allison Fine that I hope she chooses to share. In her response to me, she notes that...

...there is no Post policy against reporters participating on blogs.
...she has a few reasons, she explains to Allison, as to why she doesn't typically practice it.
...she is up for changing her mind.

Either way, I admit that I took this conversation off topic. I do think there is more to discuss on the initial issue that was brought up by the Post. We ought to continue to draw out that discussion, even if it is drawn from email, and leave the other points to a different discussion thread.

Additional insight on Facebook causes and the Post's perspective from Lauren Miller, Beth Kanter, and Lateef.

Washington Post Rehashes Year-Old Facebook Fundraising News

Facebook Cause app is not getting any love from the Washington Post. The article, dated this morning, makes the same points that have been made for more than a year by social web consultants who know their business. I put together a short slideshow on it myself, just last week, after writing this blog post the previous week.

The Post is quoted...

Trouble is, there is no new information in terms of strategy and understanding the way the medium is working. A little bit of new information came out of the interview.
He said Causes raises almost $40,000 a day across its groups, up from $3,000 a day a year ago. "The biggest successes have been tiny nonprofits who don't have the name recognition of the big guys."

But in the majority of cases, that theory hasn't translated into significant dollars. Fewer than 50 of the 179,000 groups on Causes have raised $10,000, and just two -- the Nature Conservancy and Students for a Free Tibet -- have cracked the $100,000 mark.

This is great information, however, there is some buzz around the stats not being completely acurate. I would love to know if there is a public report out there that gives us access to the raw numbers related to this topic. It sounds like Allison Fine might have something for us later in the day. Either way, at the end of the day, those numbers are nothing new.

UPDATE...
Allison Fine put together a great response on her blog. here's an excerpt that will make you want to go read the rest...

There are around 250 thousand causes on the Causes platform. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. That leaves about 46,000 nonprofits that are connected to a cause. But, of these only 8,000 are using Network for Good, meaning they’ve created an official profile, can use their npo dashboard, and can raise money. Therefore in trying to determine the average size of donations, it is more accurate to use the 8,000 active fundraising efforts for nonprofits rather than the 176,000 used in the Post article. When the universe of causes that includes the Green on Sundays groups is included in the overall cause number, divided by the total amount of dollars given resulting in an itty bitty average gift. This is enormously skewed by the number of inactive causes on FB or the number of causes who never intended to raise money using Causes. So, according to Network for Good’s data, 8,000 causes have actively raised money using Causes for a total of $7.5 million — or an average total of donations to each cause of over $930.

Comments coming out of twitter around this discussion include...

@tactphil...maybe fundraising isn't the point?
@SMacLaughlin...Facebook Causes isn't raising a lot. Really? Duh. Social networking is friend raising not fundraising.
@weinrichc...My $.02: this enhances not replaces other efforts
@iChrisJones...Facebook app does not replace hard work, direct mail., etc... in fundraising(washpost)
@kanter...they just rehashed all the stuff that was written about this last year
@Afine...I'll be using the N4G stats in my blog piece and you'll be able to see them there.
@jeffshuck...(in response to facebook being best used for awareness building)Yes! Agree on both points! My main contention is that too often "awareness" is used after the fact to justify poor fundraising.

The point is, fundraising is hard work. Every aspect of the development cycle is hard work. Technology can build in some efficiencies, but beware building in too many. Automating your communication and solicitation strategy, and giving it over to the cause app (or any automated application)is counter productive to your cultivation and affinity building. In the case of facebook causes, it just comes across (and is ignored)like spam.

Facebook Fundraising Tips...the visual version

A couple of posts back I posted some tips and best practices for facebook fundraising. I figure that part of the population would prefer a visual presentation of that information. This slideshare is the result. Feel free to download, remix and use in whatever way it might benefit you.

How facebook is both horrible and ninja for fundraising

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Does anyone know the standards that facebook operates by to suspend or expel a user's profile?

Comprehensive Facebook Fundraising Tips Almost Anyone Can Do

I conducted a little experiment last October that was combined with a passion and fund raising cause that I was challenged with. I obviously set the goals on my experiment too low, as you will read.

Community Hunger Day is a yearly event, started by Central Dallas Ministries to raise awareness about the hunger problem in Dallas and raise funds for their food pantry. On a day in October, each year, CDM challenges people to go without food for a day and donate the money they would have spent on food to their food pantry. CDM, in coordination with several partnering food programs, can feed a family of four, for an entire week, for $28.

CDM, three weeks prior to Community Hunger Day, sent me an invitation to become a fundraiser for this day. I said, "yes," and pledged a goal of $1000 dollars. The experiment part came in when I decided I was going to focus my efforts using only the profile page that I set up on the Community Hunger Day website and facebook. No email channel, no face to face asks, no telephone calls...just facebook and a link to a secure, online donation page. I wish I could should you the microsite and profile page I set up for myself on the site, but the site is under construction and redesign in anticipation for the 2009 day in October

Here is the appeal I crafted.


If you are a professional fundraiser, try these numbers on for size.

List size - 334
Historic Open rate - unknown
Average Donor Profile - Nondonor
Gift rate - 19.5%
Total Gifts - 65
Total Donations - $1850
Average Gift - $28.46 (right at the requested appeal)

Here's the thing, Non Profit officer, what if you could get 100 of me to do the following simple things. That's nothing to sneeze at. That best way for you to leverage facebook could be to AVOID THE CAUSE APP! If you are active on facebook, you know how many causes and invitations you ignore on a weekly basis. It has become spammy. By the way, you, non profit, cannot leverage facebook. You may only leverage the relationships you have, that is (almost) all that matters in the world of social media.

The following things I did while avoiding the spam channels that most facebook users ignore.

1. Create a video appeal that addresses your facebook network specifically. Use the voice that your facebook friends know. Don't "put on" a fundraiser voice. Be yourself, that's who people will give to.

2. Group your list of friends into groups that facebook calls "friend lists." This might take you a little while, but it will help you manage your follow up much better. So do it prior to uploading your video message. If you have over 300 friends, it might feel difficult to sort through the list.
- Export your friend list with this handy app so you can use excel easily group them into commonalities
- group them into friend lists where those friends know each other. When comments start to spread about your asset, it is easier for community to be built in that comment thread when the commenters already know each other.
- friend lists can only contain 20 people, so you might be titling these lists things like "workfriends1", "workfriends2", "collegebuds1", "randomfacebookies1", "highschool1", etc.
- it is OK to leave some space to grow in each friend group, but keep track in your CSV export who is in what group. Facebook doesn't help you manage your group size at all.

3. Upload your video multiple times. You are able to tag as many as 50 of your friends in each video. You can't tag a video asset with a friend list (that would be great!) but you do want to follow the pattern that you set when you established your friend lists and group the 50 that you tag in any video with the same groups of people who know each other. Tagging your friends in the video not only causes the video to appear in their own notifications, but also sends it to the feeds of all their friends.

4. Place a link to your giving page in both the description of the video and in the first comment under the video. The URL in the comment will be hyperlinked text. The URL in the description will not be hyperlinked text, unfortunately. This is an important part of the donor funnel. If your non profit you are raising money for doesn't have a precise giving form or donor destination, consider opening yourself up a chipin widget or something like it. Community Hunger Day had a very slick, custom sponsorship microsite that was built for them by Pursuant.

5. Cultivate others comments by replying to and engaging with each comment.

6. Do a daily, stewardship, thank you and update. Here is what ours looked like.

These thank you videos should be tagged with the donors names. I had one friend who told me that he gave just so he could hear my kids say his name.

7. Half way through your campaign, and just before the end of your campaign, craft messages (video or note) that gives an update of progress. These updates should be created, uploaded and then "shared" with your friends. You don't need to upload multiple updates as you did with your initial video. Instead, you can send the one asset out using this share button several times. You friends lists show up as you begin typing them into the sent line of the share function. Facebook currently has a limit of sharing an asset with 25 friends at a time. This asset will show up in your friends inboxes instead of their notifications.

8. If you are an active facebook user, I am confident that these tips will help you reach your fundraising goals. If you are a passive facebook user I would recommend you spend three months commenting on friends photos, commenting on friends videos, uploading your own quality photos and videos, involving yourself in conversation around your friends notes and status updates. Without effectively developed relationships on the site, it will not be a quality channel for you to make a solicitation. If you are a non user of facebook...that is a discussion for another post.

Disclaimer -- Having used this precise method several times, I have never run into facebook suspending my account. I know of others who have deviated from this distribution plan and have been temporarily suspended. I don't know what triggers a suspension. Anyone who does know the current, specific triggers for suspension, I'd love to know.