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?
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.
We will get a thousand people, around the World, to pledge pictures of themselves holding a banner.
Any chance you could cast an eye over our 'strategy'?
Keep up the inspiration
Sunny... Hugh Jackman, has limited his announcement to a single update. I have seen no other explanation or expansion on the rules other than the one tweet...
--- "I will donate 100K to one individual's favorite non profit organization.Of course,you must convince me why by using 140 characters or less."
Part of me wants to dive into figuring out what Jackman's judging criteria might be. It looks like we won't get that from him through Twitter.
It looks like you have chosen to get as much attention as you can by challenging 1000 people to pledge a picture. My guess is that Jackman won't recognize that as a group effort unless the text of the tweet is also the same tweet, written the same way. Part of what I'm guessing is that he won't be clicking on a ton of links as he reviews all the different pitches that he has to sort through. Plus - you could make the case that it is a waste of some of your 140 characters to include a tiny url. The one rule "140 characters or less" might be violated by including a link!?
The picture holding a banner idea is great, but, I think that you might get more attention (in Jackman's feed) by having everyone change their profile picture for you, instead of including a link in your tweet. This way, you also avoid the possibility that a link is something he ignores.
-Suggest common wording in the actual @reply you ask people to send to Jackman -Suggest commonalities in the way the banner is made. 3x5 card with bright red marker. - Provide a suggested picture (if people don't want to make their own banner) so your respondents want to just use a picture that you provide. -Your request, to the people who might take you up on this, needs to be simple enough to consume and understand in 140 characters. But also be easily found in a place where the strategy, case statement and inspiration can be consumed in a long form (blog post) - Make the strategy easily forwardable, part of your 1000 will come from people who you will never meet. - Try to get the charity involved (even in a small way) for them to show legitimacy to your campaign.
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.
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.
My friend, Bob, first alerted me to Twestival and the local Dallas event that was being organized, just about two weeks prior to the date of the scheduled event.
In that time, Lauren Vargas answered the call that was publicized by London resident and events-minded entrepreneur, Amanda Rose. Hundreds of other volunteers answered the call to organize local events in over 200 cities around the world. The London group of twitters who organized a tweet up with a fund raising recipient (charity : Water) last year, shared their learning experience and merely announced that the event was "going global" when 50 cities had local volunteers sign on.
It was exciting to watch, and by the time I decided to observe the Dallas event as closely as I could, there were only 10 days remaining before the planned event. Several volunteer chair positions had been created and filled by people like Lauren who were simply looking for ways to share what expertise they might be able to lend. This is where I first failed you, Dallas Twestival, and I am sorry. I should have been looking for a way to share the professional knowledge and expertise that I had.
This is the essence of what I am learning about social media. What makes it really sing is the recognition of it as an emerging, open-source conversation. The most transparent, authentic voices participating in the conversation are generally the most appreciated voices...just like any conversation.
This is the professional strategy information that I wish I had humbly offered up to you, Dallas Twestival. It is late, I know, but I offer these bits of strategy in hopes that I might be a better participant the next time we meet. Perhaps
1. Order the schedule of events in a way to make a direct appeal for gifts. Many people who attend a fund raising event simply need to be asked to give. Most attenders are prepared to be challenged to give over and above the ticket paid for admission.
2. Tipjoy was a great tool we could have used, while at the event, to secure additional gifts and pledges. A group-led event of being guided through the donation process (tipjoy or whatever) would have possibly garnered attention and small donations from passer-bys.
3. When I saw the big screen at the event, I thought for sure we would use it to watch the #dallastwestival or #twestival feeds. It would have bee a clever way to corporately watch the community interact with those who weren't able to be with us in the flesh.
4. Use the event to coordinate a strategic appeal that leverages the networks of our assembled twitterati. Many people will give when they hear a specific, impassioned appeal from a friend. If we took a few minutes to do our own little twitter bomb on our own networks, guided by the emcee, it would be both a fun group activity and a great way to get a few additional gifts.
The fantastic event that was had all around the world raised a bunch of money for a great cause. My reflection on how it went is not a critique on the amazing efforts by people who stepped up and shared their expertise properly. This is simply me, ripping myself for not authentically bringing my best effort to the Twestival table. It is also my commitment to share all of my goodies the next time around.
Sorry, Twestival, I treated you too much like an interesting case study to observe instead of engaging what you really are.
The ironic admission is not lost on me -- Tech Hermit ought to come out of his observatory cave more often.
[Punching myself in the throat as gently and firmly as possible]
Here is the ongoing report of the worldwide Twestival 2009 coming together in Dallas.
If you listened to the conference call that I linked you to yesterday, you heard the reference to other metro areas organizing their own events. Los Angeles is one local event that is coming together with the help of some high profile web celebrities. ijustine put together this video to promote the worlwide and the local LA event.
If you look around at some of these other local tweet ups that are coming together, you'll realize that many of them have set local goals. I have read in several places that the worldwide goal is $500,000. Los Angeles alone has a goal of $250,000. London launched a little music station for all the bands that will be performing called twestival.fm which has it's own $20,000 goal. It will be an interesting number to track and count and see grow. Because it's fundrasing organized from the bottom up, I don't know that there is a central thermometer that we can watch the funds associated with twestival be accurately counted.
Here is the main lesson your organization can learn from Charity: Water and they way they are interacting as recipients of the twitter communities generosity and efforts.
They have let go of their need to control it. They are not running around enforcing branding standards or editorial platforms. Charity: Water, I suspect, is just barely riding the wave that will flood over them come Thursday...and they are letting it happen. Most nonprofits probably aren't engaged in this grass roots conversation enough for it to happen to them. And most would accidentally kill it by trying to control it (if it ever started to happen to them)
If the development cycle for you is...
Acquisition, Cultivation, Solicitation, and Stewardship.
You must have a good Acquisition and Cultivation strategy in order to get close to a good Solicitation strategy. If you are going to engage in social media conversations as part of your Cultivation tactics, you will kill the conversation by turning it into a Solicitation tactic. You will kill it fast.
Charity: Water controls it's Solicitation tactics and strategy. Here is an example of Cultivation naturally bubbling up into it's own kind of Solicitation. Charity: Water is an example to us all by just letting it happen.
Late last week I sat in on a public conference call for Dallas Twestival, the local version of ground swell volunteerism for Twestival 2009.
Lauren Vargas, local volunteer coordinator for the Dallas event led the call. I asked her in a tweet earlier in the day if it would be barging in for me to be a fly on the wall for the call. She tweeted me right back and assured that it wouldn't be barging at all.
I just love the transparency that shows up when sprinting to organize something within a couple of weeks. As I sat and listened to the stage of planning this group of volunteers was at, it was exciting to hear the excitement and nerves of an event that had a lot of work to do, but was obviously coming together nicely. Different people had stepped up to take on various aspects of the planning. You could hear that there was a level of expertise in various professions that was being tapped into to cover the details of the event. I missed the Sunday evening planning call, but if you'd like to hear the evolution of the event coming together, the Monday evening planning call was recorded and is available here under "clip one".
The group has been doing a good job of using twitter and a wiki site to communicate calls, announcements, and ongoing needs. There is still time for you to step up and figure out how you can fit in to the volunteer coordination.
A couple of observations at this point in the process...
1. These people are great and they mostly seemed to find each other through twitter, with no prior affinity to the charity.
2. Grass roots planning is exciting. It is great to watch a group sprint to finish without any time to get territorial or political.
3. Transparency is so refreshing. It is a great reflection of social media at it's best.
When this make news the morning after, just be aware that this "grass roots effort" had some active blades of grass who do a lot of work for the rest of the lawn. The world wide community was ripe to do something, ANYTHING productive with the community energy. Tapping into that community would demand that you participate in the conversation. Until your organization is authentically willing to participate in the emerging conversation, social media will continue to be a foreign language for you to interpret in vain.
I have mentioned I work for a technology company. It is actually an agency that assists nonprofit organizations in their online communication and fund raising efforts. So about a year ago, the hermit stuck his foot out of his shell and dipped his big toe in to the wide, facebook ocean.
The abuse your psyche takes while adopting facebook behavior is subject matter for another post. I just want to mention one of the transitional states that happened for me, and what propelled me into an advocate for the tool.
I joined facebook about a week before the video application was added. As soon as I saw that you could send private and public video messages to your friends walls and inboxes, facebook felt much better to me. I can't tell you the number of facebook friends who were so excited to get video messages. Especially in those early days, it was the only thing that kept me using the tool.
Then I was asked to pledge a dollar amount for this non profit group that I really cared about. In the process of figuring out how I would meet my pledge, I decided to use my facebook network. At the time I sent out this video, I had about 330 "facebook friends."
I reached my stated pledge goal within four days. By the time the day of the event came, we had raised 180% of my pledge, just using facebook.
There are dozens of little observations that can be made and applied to fund raising strategies that I could share with you from that little experience. However, at the end of the day, I really just applied sound fund raising principles and applied them to the facebook distribution channel. I owned facebook on this one. I honestly was able to do this without facebook owning me.
So the hermit comes late to the party, flirts with technology from a distance, and then is able to use the tool (without my facebook friends being used I didn't get punched in the throat one time!) and not be owned by the technology.
