On Wednesday, August 5th at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT, Causes will be hosting a webinar to discuss how nonprofits can better use the Causes application and Facebook, in general. This week’s topic will be:
Growing your Cause: How to recruit more members from inside and outside Facebook
Description: Whether you are just getting started on Causes or you have a cause with a few thousand people, you probably want to spread awareness to more people and increase the size your community of supporters on Facebook. In this informative webinar, Sarah Koch, Causes Nonprofit Coordinator, will give best practices, tips, and success stories about how to recruit more people to your cause. She’ll discuss how to recruit from within Facebook and off-line, how to motivate your existing members to recruit their friends, and how to leverage our donor match feature, banner ad inventory, and sponsorships to really get the cause growing. If you have been wondering about how to grow your cause or you have other questions about using Facebook for your nonprofit, Sarah will be able to answer questions and provide great insight into this exciting platform.
Go to: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/197156154 to reserve your seat at the webinar. Space is limited.
You started a cause. You recruited a good crew of people. Now, you’re starting to ask the question: How do I get those people to donate? The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is asking the same question and brought Microsoft in to match all donations made to their cause at www.causes.com/gimmeshelter. They did a lot of things right – they sequenced the campaign well by focusing on recruiting and increasing their membership before they started fundraising and they provided a compelling reason why their members should donate now instead of later (by making a matching donation with a deadline). The campaign has brought in just over $1,000 so far and they have 44 days left to raise the other $9,000. So, here are the 4 pieces of advice I gave to UNHCR, which are also useful for any other nonprofit or cause working on fundraising:
1) Focus on Birthday Wish. The Birthday Wish feature has been an increasingly effective fundraising tool. 121,000 members of a cause means 121,000 birthdays this year. The average Birthday Wish is raising about $100, so if even 10% of the cause members donate their birthday to the cause, they could raise $1,210,000 this year. That’s more than one million dollars from Birthday Wishes! One idea for a Birthday Wish campaign is to have your Executive Director, a celebrity who works with you, or your star volunteer create a Birthday Wish. Then send an announcement asking everyone in the cause to either create their own Birthday Wish if their birthday is in the next 30 days, or donate to the one you are featuring! If you are the administrator of a cause, go to the Birthday Wish tab in your Admin Center for a customized link to create a Birthday Wish for your cause.
2) Post great announcements (and don’t be shy about posting them). Post an announcement when the fundraising goal begins detailing why your members should give now and what impact their money will have. Follow up with announcements at least once a week to: update your members on progress toward your goal, recognize donors and fundraisers, focus more on the impact of donations, or focus on how much time is left before the deadline. Don’t forget to post another announcement when the fundraising goal is complete to close the loop—congratulate the cause and thank everyone who donated. If you didn’t reach your goal, be transparent with the cause members, ask for their input, and thank the people who did donate. Remember, long-term success is all about building a relationship and trust with the community.
3) Offer a prize or incentive for the top donors or fundraisers. You could structure the competition to reward those who donate or fundraise the most, those who donates over a certain dollar threshold, or anyone who donates through a raffle or sweepstakes model. You could do this on a daily basis or overall over the course of a campaign. We’ve seen contests and prizes work very well within the Causes application.
4) Get the Hall of Fame involved. Write a message to your top recruiters, top donors, and top fundraisers. In the case of this matching donation, many of them may not know about the exciting matching campaign, and even if they do, getting a personal note asking them to donate and fundraise can spur them to action. Do you think they need help fundraising? Be sure to let them know about their Action Center, which can be found under the “How You Are Helping” section of the cause. There is a “Raise Money” tab with lots of useful fundraising tools including a fundraising link that even non-Facebook members can donate through.
Do you represent a nonprofit outside of the US or Canada? One of the most common requests we receive here at Causes is for donation processing for beneficiaries outside of the US and Canada. Unfortunately because of some complicated red tape, adding this feature will take time but many international organizations are already using Causes to raise awareness and create communities of supporters around the work they do. Although we cannot process donations, any international nonprofit can fundraise by placing a link to its donation page or website in the positions section of its cause. For example, earlier this year an Australian activist created a cause to raise awareness and funds for victims of the wildfires that killed dozens of people in the state of Victoria. The cause grew to over 800,000 members in under six months and was able to raise money for the Red Cross Australia through a link in the positions section. Another option is to partner with a US or Canadian nonprofit who can process and transfer donations to your organization.
Just like Facebook as a whole, the Causes application is used by people all over the world and people from almost every country can donate. Outside of the US, we are most popular in the UK, Italy, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, and Greece. In fact, one of our biggest animal rights causes is Italian and has close to 500,000 members. So if you want to support a cause outside of the US or Canada, go ahead and create one now – you may be surprised at the response!
Today, Causes broke $10,000,000 raised through the application in just over two years. Half of this, $5,000,000, was donated in just the past 6 months. It is through the hard work of activists and nonprofits on Causes that we have been able to reach this milestone. We are constantly awestruck by the drive, commitment and passion poured into a cause, petition or birthday wish. In an effort to share what $10,000,000 raised means, we thought we’d show how that breaks down and how you have all contributed to this success.
Here’s how it all breaks down:
- $10,000,000 donated
- $5,000,000 donated so far in 2009
- $25 median donation
- 192,000 unique donors
- 26,000 causes have received donations
- $1.4 million raised through Birthday Wish feature
Some real All-Stars have stood out along the way:
- Brad Sugars, Largest Birthday Wish — $7,690 raised
- Camfed, Largest Completed Matching Grant — $100,000 raised
- Nature Conservancy, Top Fundraising Cause — $300,000 raised
So, what does that $10 million dollars mean? $10,000,000 is…
- Clean drinking water for 50,000 people for 20 years
- 1 million bed nets to stop the spread of malaria
- Safe, private shelter for 10,000 refugee families of five
- First-time internet access for 100,000 low-income households
- 50,000 baskets of baby chickens for families in Cameroon
It is through the incredible dedication and commitment of all of our users and activists that we have gotten this far. We want to take this opportunity to thank you for working with us to pursue the goal of creating lasting social and political movements around the world. This is only the beginning!
Thank you,
Joe Green
This month, we’ve highlighted:
- Exciting work being done with petitions on Causes
- The story behind our largest cause — The Race to End Cancer
- What’s next with the UNHCR-Microsoft Campaign
Read the July newsletter and subscribe if you want to hear what’s new each month. You can also check out some of our previous newsletters on the Causes Exchange Nonprofit Resources page.
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