Happy Birthday, Causes! Causes just celebrated its second birthday and, in honor of the occasion, we are thrilled to tell you more about our most exciting new feature – Birthday Wish. Birthday Wish allows anyone on Facebook to use their birthday to raise money for their favorite cause by asking friends to donate instead of giving them presents. It’s not only incredibly easy to make a birthday wish, but we also give cause members great tools to get the word out through email, Facebook status messages, and more.

Birthdays have always been central to the Facebook experience. It has become standard to receive messages on your Facebook Wall from all your friends on your birthday. Birthday Wish leverages that dynamic, which is why people have been so successful at using it and part of why they have had such positive experiences. Take Eric Yaverbaum. Eric said he “cannot speak highly enough” about the experience after he was able to raise $1,104 for Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis in honor of his wife who has secondary progressive MS. Our top birthday wish fundraiser raised $7,690 for a nonprofit called Cancer Shmancer and over $882,000 has been donated through birthday wishes already.

If you are an individual, consider starting a birthday wish for your June birthday and turn all those unneeded gifts into something meaningful. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/causes/birthdays/new to create your birthday wish. If you work for a nonprofit, consider starting a campaign to get your supporters to start birthday wishes in June. On average, an active Birthday Wish raises over $100, an amount that has been increasing each week.  That means that if you can get 150 of your cause members and supporters to make a June Birthday Wish, you could raise more than $15,000 this month with only a small time investment on your part.  From small nonprofits on limited budgets to large nonprofits with active supporters looking for other ways to contribute, Birthday Wish can bring in needed fundraising dollars while encouraging your supporters to contribute in a new way.

If you’re a cause administrator, we encourage you to make June a Birthday Wish push (with all those summer babies). Post an announcement, hold a contest for the top birthday wish creator, and have fun with this great new feature! Send out a link to create a birthday wish specifically for your cause by clicking on your Admin Center then the “Birthday Wish” tab, or using this link (with your cause ID): http://apps.facebook.com/causes/causes/[YOUR CAUSE ID HERE]/birthday_promotion

For more resources and tips, go to our Birthday Wish Resource Page.