Social networks driving sponsorship fundraising

I spotted a very interesting blog post earlier this week by Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, reporting on the rapidly growing importance of online social networks, like Facebook, for sponsored event fundraising.

He was prompted to investigate the subject after his cousin sent him an invitation via Facebook to sponsor her through Justgiving.com. As shown in the chart above, on researching how people are requesting sponsorship through Justgiving he found a very clear trend - with social networks clearly taking over from email.

Macmillan Cancer Support offers virtual coffee in support of fundraising event

Macmillan Cancer Support, the charity behind one of the UK’s largest fundraising events - The World’s Biggest Coffee Morning - is really getting into the Community Fundraising 2.0 spirit this year, with “virtual” coffees being shared through email, Facebook, and even in Second Life.

The email approach is a fun way to spread the word about the event, enabling you to send your friend a virtual coffee which is then drunk at an animated microsite - complete with slurping. Requests for small donations are made throughout, including extras if you want to send a virtual biscuit or muffin with the coffee. Having dispatched the virtual beverage you then get the opportunity to share the whole virtual coffee experience through a link on your Facebook profile.

If that’s not virtual enough for you, then on the day of the event - this Friday 28th September - you can drop-in to the charity’s new Second Life Macmillan cancer information centre to take part in a Second Life fundraising auction or just to throw a few Linden Dollars (the SL currency) into the giant coffee cups around the place. After the event Macmillan intends to continue using the centre as a source of information and support for any Second Life users affected by cancer, as well as offering a retail area where visitors can purchase real life Macmillan merchandise.

All-in-all, a great example of a charity using a mix of online channels in an innovative, fun and engaging way to help involve more people with their event. Apparently nearly two million people took part last year, raising over £6.7m ($13.5m) - so here’s hoping all of this virtual activity pays-off in real income growth terms after Friday.

Latest Facebook fundraising app comes from GlobalGiving

I just noticed under the ‘newest’ tab in the Facebook application directory that GlobalGiving, the US nonprofit which connects donors to grassroots charity projects around the world, is the latest fundraising organisation to launch a Facebook supporter app.

Similar to Kiva.org and DonorsChoose.org, GlobalGiving also uses the social networking power of the internet to enable potential donors anywhere in the world to find and fund projects of specific interest to them - offering previously unknown levels of donor choice and involvement.

And as with Kiva and DonorsChoose, there’s lots to be learned from a visit to the GlobalGiving site for any organisation looking to develop its online fundraising.

Oxfam launches online charity shop - for everyone else there’s eBay for Charity

Last week Oxfam UK announced the launch of Britain’s first online charity shop at oxfam.org.uk/shop.

The shop apparently features an initial 50,000 donated items selected from Oxfam’s chain of highstreet charity shops, all having their details documented and uploaded by volunteers.

With various searchable categories (Clothes & Accessories, Music & Movies, etc.), ‘volunteer’s faves’ and a ‘donated this week’ list for regular shoppers, the site has a great feel and is very easy to navigate and browse. The charity plans to increase the number of donated items on sale to 120,000 by next spring, which it says should raise around £2 million per year.

If you’re a fundraiser without Oxfam-level resources but still keen to capitalise on the opportunity offered by such online charity shopping then you should take a look at eBay for Charity - which provides a range of ways to use the eBay ecommerce platform to raise money for organisations of all shapes and sizes.

In need of online fundraising inspiration?

If so, it’s worth taking a look at the Smartest Orgs online listing.

Compiled by Squidoo, NetSquared, and GetActive, the list comprises 59 different organisations (not sure why it’s 59 - nor why it’s an almost exclusively US list) selected for the way they’re using Web 2.0 approaches to engage with their supporters.

Several of my favourites are there including kiva.org (ranked 2nd) and donorschoose.org (27th) - but there are also a range of interesting sites that I’d never come across before.

The list has been added-to in the comments section and hopefully there’ll be a 2007 update - perhaps with more of a WORLD Wide Web viewpoint.

Jeans for Genes goes for Google Maps mashup to support its annual fundraising appeal

Jeans for Genes, who organise the annual fundraising day when you get to wear your jeans at work or school in exchange for a donation in support of seven of the UK’s medical charities, has unveiled a Google Maps mashup at the site denimisethenation.com to show who across the country is taking part.

For anyone new to the term, a ‘mashup’ is a hybrid web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source. The Google Maps API is one of the most popular mashup interfaces, as it enables data from any source (so long as it has a geographic reference) to be displayed as an interactive map.

In the case of Jeans for Genes, as well as adding your location - shown by a denim patch - you can also leave a comment saying what you’ll be doing. The site can be searched by city, postcode, organisation or name to see who else is getting involved and there are plenty of clear links to the main fundraising site. Overall, it’s a really effective way to illustrate the breadth of the campaign and make individuals participating really feel that they’re part of something on a national scale.

Other UK nonprofit organisations using a Google Maps mashup include the NSPCC with its Be the Full Stop site and The Museum of London with Map my London.

While in the US, Lucy Bernholtz reports on her Philanthropy 2173 blog that there is also a Guidestar Google Maps mashup and another from volunteering organisation VolunteerMatch showing locations of opportunities to volunteer.

Anyone know of any other nonprofit mashups? Let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

DonorsChoose.org - it does what it says on the tin (and it’s fantastic!)

I’ve been meaning to add a post about DonorsChoose.org for a while now, as it is another excellent example of how we can use online fundraising to give donors what they are increasingly looking for - real choice in terms of how their donations are used and a real connection with the impact they are making.

Then I was reminded of it when I heard of the site being mentioned in a recent Doonesbury comic strip - which is great product placement for the folks at DonorsChoose.org!

DonorsChoose.org was originally set-up in 2000 by teachers at a Bronx public high school as a means to help overcome the shortage of quality learning materials available for their pupils. From the outset, they recognised the “untapped potential in people who were frustrated by their lack of influence over the use of their charitable donations” and set-out to address this by offering specific project funding opportunities at levels affordable to all donors.

Since then DonorsChoose.org has grown to involve schools right across the USA, with teachers submitting project proposals that range from “Where did all the pencils go?” at $60 to “Geological Field Trip” at $2,000 - and the site has advanced search functionality to help donors find just the right project for them.

This alone would make DonorsChoose.org a fantastic example of online fundraising - but they don’t stop there. The subsequent feedback donors receive sounds second to none, with all $100+ donors receiving specific feedback from students participating in their project - keeping the whole experience incredibly real and personal.

The impact of this fantastic individual donor fundraising approach is plain to see with $13,717,312 so far raised to fund 29,574 projects right across the USA.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about Kiva.org, this is what the future of individual donor fundraising is all about - doing all we can to make donating an increasingly real experience, far beyond what we’ve become used to offering donors through mass mail campaigns and ‘thank you’ letters which amount to little more than receipts.

Organisations like DonorsChoose and Kiva are wonderful examples of how the Internet can enable us to do just this - transforming the relationships we develop with donors and thereby the income we receive from them.

Yet still such initiatives remain as rare as chickens teeth - and where I see them they are almost never being developed by large established charities.

Is it perhaps that the established organisations are simply trapped by the way they have always fundraised and so can’t break-out to offer donors a ‘DonorsChoose-type’ experience even if they want to?

If so then in the future we could be in for some very interesting developments as the big, established, fundraising dinosaurs lumber-along as always while the new, smaller, faster-moving fundraising mammals evolve the way they do business to better fit the developing consumer world.

And we all know what happened to the dinosaurs (if not then best ask some kids on a DonorsChoose project - they’re bound to know).

Changes to Facebook measurement cast new light on fundraising apps

At the end of last month, Facebook announced a significant change in the way it measures and ranks applications – shifting from simply reporting the total number of installations to measuring what it describes as ‘user engagement’.

In its announcement on the Facebook developers blog, ‘engagement’ is defined as “the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day)”. This is now displayed alongside each app in the application directory as the number of ‘Daily Active Users’, together with a percentage showing what proportion of that app’s total number of installations that represents.

This is undoubtedly a real step forward for anyone interested in the marketing and fundraising potential of Facebook apps – in particular because it enables the clear differentiation of apps which are installed and then forgotten from those with the sort of lasting appeal which results in regular use.

To illustrate this, I checked-out today’s engagement scores for the seven fundraising apps I reviewed last month - and the results make for interesting reading:

Causes: 255,396 daily active users = 6% of total installed base (c4.256m)

Change.org: 233 daily active users = 3% of total installed base (c7.7k)

Justgiving: 549 daily active users = 8% of total installed base (c6.8k)

Chipin:34 daily active users = 1% of total installed base (c3.4k)

NSPCC: 54 daily active users = 4% of total installed base (c1.3k)

UNICEF UK: 5 daily active users = 1% of total installed base (c500)

Sponsor me: 77 daily active users = 12% of total installed base (c600)

It’s clear from this list how the new metrics enable us to see just how active the users of each app are (albeit based on a daily snapshot), rather than simply judging the success of an app based on how many people have installed it.

Interestingly, today’s two most ‘actively used’ fundraising apps turn-out to be Justgiving and Sponsor me - both directly supporting Facebook users in the promotion of individual sponsored events and so inherently likely to drive more daily engagement as their users work to drum-up support from their Facebook friends.

As more organisations look to develop their own branded apps, hopefully this new form of measurement will encourage them to shy-away from the simple (and sadly forgettable) ‘badge app’ linked to a donation website and to think more creatively about just what functionality might make their app keep users coming back and engaging with it long-term.