Big news here at Causes HQ: Facebook’s new Open Graph API is here and that means Causes, and its nonprofit partners, can do much more within Facebook.
What’s happening?
- You will be able to post bulletins to your members’ News Feeds, the first page they see when they sign into Facebook.
- Your causes will be searchable in Facebook. Before, your cause was searchable in the Causes application but not the main Facebook search. Not anymore!
- Your causes will be featured in the Likes and Interests section of your members’ Facebook profiles.
How is this different?
For the first time, you will be able to publish stories directly to your cause members’ News Feeds on Facebook. Your updates will be viewed by your members right next to stories published by their friends. Facebook is quickly becoming the primary way that hundreds of millions of people communicate online. Now your cause can be part of that conversation.
Plus, individual causes gaining a place in Facebook profiles and search will make it much easier for potential supporters to find your cause and keep coming back to it.
What does this mean for nonprofits?
Many nonprofits have been using their Fan Pages to interact with supporters through Facebook. Their Fan Pages have a great way to send updates out to many peoples’ News Feeds but they don’t have built-in tools for fundraising, advocacy, and other non-profit specific needs. Now, Causes has both.
Visit the Nonprofit Resource Center at http://exchange.causes.com/resources/nonprofits/ for more information and to get started making the most of these exciting improvements for your nonprofit!
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27 Responses to Causes + Open Graph = Huge Win for Nonprofits
Good to hear! These are solid improvements to Causes!!
I’m really excited about these changes; this is going to make Causes completely integrated with all of the Facebook functionality nonprofits use.
Great point Pablo! This really cements Causes as the go-to place for social media savvy nonprofits.
Finally we will be able to share our viral shopping stores
to be used as fundraisers for any cause, club, organization.
We’ve added 400,000 shopping sites with income generating
software and weekly pay checks when used by your supporters
who needed to make purchases anyway and are happy to save
money while they support our causes. Too Cool_Al Boek
Will we now be able to invite ppl to our cause too? I can’t find the cause icon on anyone’s wall anymore!
What about Canadian charities? Has FB been able to include “us” in this new initiative?
This is great! We’ve been struggling with not being able to post status updates or pieces of information in news feeds and were thinking about going to a fan page. This solves our problem! Thank you!
I’m really excited about the upcoming changes! This paricular change is going to make every Cause integrated with all of Facebook functionality!
Thanks for the changes!
Not sure how this will all work with a UK-based non-profit [www.holidays4heroes.org] but anything that helps me get the message out there on the Internet is OK with me.
I assume that this means that cause members don’t need to opt into receiving bulletins in this way (in contrast to receiving emailed bulletins). Yes?
Good news and thanks to Facebook. When will people be able to donate directly to Australian NGOs through Facebook Causes?
Thank you Facebook! Wonderful news, very helpful tools! Keep up the great work!
This sounds very useful. When will these new features be available? I don’t see any way to post to members’ feeds yet.
Lovely to hear. Im hoping that outside of my friends list, all of FB users will be able to view and join my open cause (Adopt an Old age Person (OAP))
and if its on ppls home pages, then do they have the option to “delete or dislike” ? If so, itll mean it wont get the message through.
thanks FB, for giving me the opportunity to get ppl aware of elderly ppl.
I dream of the youth giving back to the aged in many special ways :)
I invite you all with opening your heart to help needy children througt my cause.What they need is food, clothings,shelter,school and most of all love and peace.I welcome you all to join and help my cause througt World Peace Evangelism&Education ministries . Jean-marie Nkusi #1,10630-110street,Edmonton,Alberta T5H 3C8 Canada, E-mail :jmnkusi@yahoo.com
Tel.780-424-6089,
Your kind help will be very much appreciated.
Thank you and may Love and Peace be always with you,
Jean-Marie Nkusi,
help earthquake survive in Haiti. because , the need me and you , as many as possible to help them.
That’s wonderful, I use to send individual updates to members to get them to read the bulletins from their cause profile, which, I find only a handful do. With the new improvement, updating wont be a problem anymore… Thanks!
I think it’s a great achievement and waiting for the start of such activity. It will be very useful and thanksFB.
great idea!! it will certainly give exposure to the activities of non profit organisations. our org. is from india. we will certainly get exposure but won’t be able to get financial support for our cause. it will be great if the members can support their cause financially also.
thanks.
I heard you can change the name of your cause until the end of today, but that if you do that all your members will have to re-join your cause. Does anyone know if that’s true?
How do we move our fans to our cause. I have three pages for our non profit, a group, fan and cause page…they all have different people linked to them!
It seem that the upgrades will be very help to get the casuses to the right people to make it happen…
Of course, my cause is ( Haiti the Forgotten Land ) I have outlined a plan to give immediate housing to at least 30,000 families in less than 60 days…with Surplus Hurricane Trailer in the USA…to date I only got one response…this is shamefull…
Let’s see what happens this time.
Just what the Dr. ordered. I was putting up a post yesterday in my cause and wanted it to be published at the same time in the news section of FB. couldn’t do it… now I will be able to send it to everyone and get them more interested in it.
Thanks a million FB
Any chance that causes outside the US can now generate donations?
I also welcome the changes announced, and at the same time strongly endorse the view that, as far as non-profits outside the USA are concerned, the single most important change we need, is the ability to receive funding from cause supporters.
OK. The original post was 8/24 and it’s been better than a couple of weeks. What is the meaning of “soon”? When does this happen? This is certainly welcome news but without a roll out date, there is little planning that can be done on our end. I went to the link and read the same text as here.
Woo Hoo! That’s great news. I really like the Causes page but was starting to get tired of it because of its lack of “in your faceness” in comparison with individual pages and even Fan and Group pages. Thank you.