Web 2.0 Fundraising

Looking for this month's giving carnival results?

Here they are:

http://tinyurl.com/67v2v3

If you have been following my blog for the last two weeks, you have heard me comment on the Web 2.0 vibe at this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference.

I'll end my coverage of the NTC with a link to an article I wrote that just came out in the Giving 2.0 e-Newsletter by FundRaising Success magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

I have volunteered to host the Giving Carnival for the month of April.

The Giving Carnival is a monthly event that gathers the best blog posts on various topics related to Giving (philanthropy, charity, etc). In March 2008, Roger Carr of the Everyday Giving Blog requested Tips for Successful Fundraising Events. In February 2008, Jason Dick of the As Small Change Fundraising Blog asked the question, What Motivates Giving?.

I am asking bloggers, nonprofit tech professionals, and the founders and staff of social action platforms to respond to the question, “Is person-to-person fundraising dead, or just getting started?”

By "person-to-person fundraising," I am referring to the social media tools that permit individuals to raise money on behalf of nonprofits, independent projects, or specific outcomes. These tools include "fundraising pages" (see FirstGiving) "fundraising widgets" (see ChipIn or SixDegrees) and "fundraising applications for social networks" (see Causes or Change.org on Facebook).

I came up with this topic following last month's Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans. Many of the session presenters cautioned nonprofits on the utility of person-to-person fundraising, no doubt led by the failure of Facebook Causes to translate into large aggregate donations for nonprofits.

And yet, other platforms and strategies for putting constituents in charge of raising money for organizations seem to be working. The Guardian recently ran a favorable article about JustGiving, a U.K. based person-to-person fundraising website. The article, entitled Charities go online to stay in the running and reach the next generation of givers, reported that JustGiving has handled more than £250m in donations since 2001.

FirstGiving, the U.S.-based sister company of JustGiving, reported in a recent webinar that they have raised more than $300 million in donations since 1999.

For additional background, please refer to NetworkforGood's white paper on Wired Fundraising and a number of articles/webinars I have produced on the subject: Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Gets a Bad Rap; Sharing the Message: How to Work Effectively with Your Organizatoin's Wired Fundraisers; Group Fundraising 101: Form Benchmarks to Success Stories

The deadline for submissions is April 24, 2008 at 6pm EST. I will publish a collection of all responses on Friday April 25th.

Please email me a link to your response, along with your full name and the name of your blog. If you don’t have a blog but want to participate, please use the comment form below.

For advocates of peer-to-peer fundraising, the mood at this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans came as a bit of a shock.

At least three sessions focused on the role of social networks in fundraising. All of them were aimed at lowering expectations.

Change.org founder Ben Rattray emphasized "exponential decay" instead of "exponential growth" in how person-to-person fundraising campaigns pan out.

Care2's Justin Perkins said the word viral should be dropped altogether. He also devoted several minutes to explaining why Seth Godin's notion of Flipping th Funnel may be a "pipe dream."

As someone who has written about person-to-person fundraising for the last year and a half, I am committed to identifying the sources of this pessimism. I have a few ideas on where it's coming from. Stay tuned for feature blog entries on the subject.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you the slides from "Group Fundraising: How Does It Work and What's Out There" by Change.org's Ben Rattray and "Turning Your Social Network into Donations" by Care2's Justin Perkins and Heather Holdridge.

For notes on "The Web 2.0 ROI: Are All These New Tools Really Delivering Value to the Sector," see these notes by Nancy Schwartz of the Getting Attention Blog.

Group Fundraising: How Does It Work and What's Out There

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Turning Your Social Networks Into Donations

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Tom Watson, author of the upcoming book CauseWired: Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the World, has recently published a reflection (not quite a case study) of the Sharing Foundation's success during last month's America's Giving Challenge.

Here's an excerpt:

For background on America's Giving Challenge, see this December 2007 article from Forbes Magazine, Giving Like an Entrepreneur.

Earlier this year, fundraising blogger Paolo Ferrara asked eighteen nonprofit tech professionals to write up predictions for online fundraising in 2008. Below is the slideshare version of his findings.

For even more techy insights, see ReadWriteWeb's presentation on web technology trends.

Note: The slides are in English but Ferrara's blog is mostly in Italian.

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Last month, a friend from Montreal wrote to me for suggestions on how to raise money for an organization she had come across several years ago in Peru. She was about to return to the country and wanted to bring good news in the form of a micro-philanthropy campaign that would support the organization's community projects.

The only problem: she didn’t know anything about micro-philanthropy.

Below are my suggestions to her. I’m posting them here as a resources to anyone thinking of raising money and support for an inspiring organization they meet while traveling...

FIRST, you will need materials:

• Digital pictures of the group at work, preferably from this trip
• Video footage of your trip
• An interview with the founder and a few interviews with the people involved. You can translate and put subtitles on these materials later in the campaign.
• Footage of the group’s workspace and the community where they are based.
• Ask the people you're visiting to state their needs in their own words. If you can get the group to write a “fundraising letter/solicitation” explaining their situation, then you’ll be in good shape. If you can get them to read it to you (and record it), then you're micro-philanthropy campaign will be smoking.
• Facts and figures about the region/issue you’re focusing on

All of these materials will help give your micro-philanthropy campaign its proper voice -- in the end, the campaign will appear created by and for the organization in question. You will be the messenger and nothing more.

SECOND, you need to think about what the fundraiser will accomplish:

• How much are you trying to raise?
• Who are you trying to get involved?
• How will you deliver the funds?
• Where will the money go once it’s collected?
• What will the donations make possible?

These are questions that potential donors will want answers to. If you can anticipate as many questions as possible, and provide comprehensive answers, then you're more likely to gain the trust needed to get more people to donate. Posting an FAQ will help in soliciting donations from the extended network of your friends and family, and from the people who come across your campaign by chance.

THIRD, you need to pick the right combination of social action platforms and tools.

For now, all you need to know is that you're going to use a combination of 'social action platforms and tools' to spread word about the fundraiser and receive donations. You can explain to the staff at the nonprofit that you're going to use new online tools to make the micro-philanthropy campaign spread to people who have never heard of the organization.

Also, you can assure them that you'll provide the exact names of the tools and platforms that you plan to use before the campaign is launched. Some of these platforms will be commercial. Some will be strictly nonprofit. It's important that the staff members at the organization know how their message is getting out. This will keep them in the loop and also give them the possibility of using these tools on their own to reach donors at some point in the future.

Raising money for an international organization is not easy. Most social action platforms are geared to U.S.-based nonprofits. As a result, you have two main options:

1. GiveMeaning is a social action platform based in Canada that can help you find an official organization through which to pass the funds. This will help produce the tax-receipts for 'donors' who want them.
2. ChipIn is a tool that will permit you to raise money with a specific fundraising goal in mind and receive donations through a PayPal account. In other words, you wouldn't have to worry about finding an organization to distribute the funds. If you use ChipIn, you can simply transfer the money from PayPal to a bank account or make periodic distributions from PayPal to the organization via PayPal. A third payment method would be to transfer the money from PayPal to yourself and then write a check and mail it.

GiveMeaning and ChipIn on their own won't produce the desired result. You'll want to enlist a range of social media tools and social networking sites to fully disseminate the message. Basically, there are a few things you'll want to do:

• Create a Flickr account with photos of the group and your trip
• Invite your friends to donate by email
• Invite your friends to invite their friends
• Thank people who contribute as soon as they donate
• List the campaign on Change.org as a “change”
• Perhaps start a blog for your fundraiser
• Perhaps create a Facebook group for the organization.
• Definitely compile the video footage into an actual online video that people can send around through YouTube
• Update the website of the organization (if they have one).
• And the list goes on.

CNN also has suggestions on launching a successful micro-philanthropy campaign.

I hope these suggestions provide you with enough information to get started.

All the best, Peter

Last week, The Case Foundation published official statistics and a message about America’s Giving Challenge and The Causes Giving Challenge.

Here's an excerpt from the message:

While the overall numbers are impressive, the detailed statistics are perhaps the most useful to nonprofits. (Note: The numbers below represent The Case Foundation's findings as of 26 February 2008. Changes may be published in the coming weeks).

In June 2007, I compiled benchmark figures for group fundraising based on the statistics from five social action platforms: SixDegrees, GiveMeaning, JustGive.org, ChipIn, and Firstgiving. The chart below presents the figures from America's Giving Challenge and The Causes Giving Challenge in comparison to those benchmark figures.

Here's a quick round-up of blog entries discussing strategies for succeeding in The Case Foundation's Giving Challenge. If anyone knows of additional blog entries with tips for success in this contest, please post them in the comments section.

From Christine Egger's blog Good All Around:

From Scott Beale of AtlasCorps via NTEN (The Nonprofit Technology Network)

Paolo Ferrara, the Italian blogger from FundraisingNow, asked me to write-up five predictions for fundraising in 2008.

Below is my response:

5) By the end of 2008, internet users will carry to each social network a single set of friends – perhaps divided into subsets for work, personal, and family. When individuals find a cool nonprofit’s donate now page or an intriguing person-to-person fundraising campaign, they will be able to share it immediately with their set of friends regardless of those friends’ preferred social network.

4) The mainstreaming of fundraising widgets and fundraising applications will result in more individuals choosing to raise money for a nonprofit or independent project.

3) The success of the Case Foundation’s Giving Challenges and Kevin Bacon’s matching grants will encourage more foundations and philanthropists to invest in social media. Foundations and philanthropists will realize that social media – and the user-generated social change campaigns that social media gives rise to – are powerful tools for realizing their long-term missions. There is nothing quite like drawing on the resources and passions of real people to get something done.

2) Fundraising consultants will find new ways to collaborate and offer services to nonprofits. This trend will result in something called open-source consulting, in which the knowledge-base that consultants draw on to advice clients will be stored in the public domain and made freely available to other consultants. Tools will emerge that facilitate this knowledge-sharing. As consultants start to use social media tools to combine and refine their collective knowledge-base, they’ll find that nonprofits and foundations learn more and that demand for their services grows.

1) Nonprofits and foundations using social media for fundraising will find a crowded market-place for attention and donations. The coming year will see a boon in the number of do-it-yourself independent social change projects. Organizations will have to compete (or collaborate – see ZaZengo) with these projects to reach new supporters. Since the fundraiser and project implementer of an independent project is one and the same, DIY social change projects will get priority from friends and family who want to support their loved ones.