Causes Exchange

Fundraising on Causes just got much more powerful.  Starting today, all nonprofit partners can create custom fundraising campaigns, highlighting and raising money for specific projects, programs, or goals.  Need to raise $10,000 for a rally in Washington DC?  $500,000 for an orphanage in Malawi?  $2,000 by January 1st to start the New Year off on the right foot?  Once you’ve created a fundraising campaign you can display it on all of your affiliate causes (unlike our former fundraising goals, which could only be displayed on one cause).  The new Bulletin feature allows you to send targeted emails to the members of your affiliate causes.  You can utilize Fundraising Campaigns and targeted Bulletins to run a coordinated fundraising effort across any number of affiliate causes.  If there are 25 causes benefiting one nonprofit, they can all feature the same campaign and each encourage their membership to donate toward a common goal.

Fundraising campaigns allow nonprofits to identify specific projects or amounts of impact that their supporters can help them achieve. We’ve repeatedly found that your cause members are more likely to donate when they know where their dollars are going.  These campaigns make the impact of their donation clear and your cause members will be motivated by the goal, the timeline, and the description of your specific fundraising campaign. Notably, the new customized fundraising campaigns allow cause members not only to donate, but also to promote the fundraising campaign by asking their friends to donate and posting the campaign to their profile.

Ready to start?  Log into your Nonprofit Partner Center at nonprofits.causes.com and click on the “Fundraising” tab.  From there, you can create a new fundraising campaign, feature it on affiliate causes, ask independent causes to adopt it, view the donations made to that campaign and start talking about it with your supporters.  You can also go to the “Communications” tab to send messages to everyone who donates to your campaign as well as everyone who promotes it to their friends.

Vaughn Hester, nonprofit fundraiser and blogger, takes a deeper look into the new Nonprofit Partner Center on Causes from the nonprofit perspective in this post from Inside Facebook.

Social activism application developer Causes released a number of tools as part of its new nonprofit partner center, earlier this month, and we recently had the opportunity to take a closer look at it.

The new functionality is specifically tailored towards nonprofit organizations with multiple chapters (or multiple Causes that support the same nonprofit beneficiary). As Causes put it:

We’re adding to our nonprofit-specific tools because nonprofits 1) play a critical role in the Causes ecosystem and 2) have unique needs and goals that can’t be addressed solely by the current cause-based model we’ve pioneered through our application.

The new partner center allows Cause administrators to access more sophisticated communication, fundraising and metrics for one or more Causes.

Read the full post here:  http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/10/30/a-look-at-causes%E2%80%99-new-nonprofit-partner-center/

Last week, we released Shop for a Cause, the best way to raise money for your cause this holiday season.  Just download the Causes toolbar and a percentage of all your purchases will go straight to your cause if you shop at over 1600 online stores including Best Buy, Expedia, and Target.  For more information, go to shopping.causes.com.

If you are the administrator of a cause, you can get the word out about Shop for a Cause easily.  Now, your cause has its own customized link that will add the Causes toolbar with your cause already selected as the recipient of the donations.  Just click “Admin Center” on your cause and then the “Shopping” tab.  There you’ll find your cause’s customized link to take advantage of Shop for a Cause.  Send that link in bulletins, emails, or put it on your website.  Everyone who uses it can start generating donations to your cause just by doing their holiday shopping!