Causes
Your nonprofit now has the ability to invite causes to become affiliates, which establishes a two-way relationship between the cause and your organization. As affiliates, causes give you permission to directly message and push out content to their administrators and members. Therefore, one of your organizational goals should be to build as large of a network of affiliate causes as possible. Far from spreading your staff thin, we’ll ensure that the Nonprofit Center is a centralized hub for managing all of these causes in an efficient, targeted, and coordinated manner. You can use the affiliate cause model to:
• Post bulletins to affiliate causes
• Message (i.e. email and Facebook notification) affiliate cause administrators and members
• Request that affiliate causes feature petitions, fundraising goals, and other campaigns
• View activity data for affiliate causes
• Directly co-administer each affiliate cause
This is a mutually beneficial relationship, as your nonprofit will be able to engage the supporters in affiliate causes and their administrators of the causes will have your help in keeping the cause content fresh and the impact clear.
Recruiting Affiliates
It’s time to start managing your relationship with causes that are relevant to your mission. Independent causes are causes that have selected your organization as a beneficiary of the cause but that are not in your affiliate network. You will not have the same access to their cause, but these independent causes are still valuable partners. Click “Send Affiliate Request” next to any independent cause’s name in if you would like to ask them to become an affiliate. At any time you can also “Disassociate” from an affiliate cause, thereby breaking the relationship between your organization and the cause.
Organizing Affiliates
Now that you’ve begun building a network of affiliate causes, it’s time to organize them. Click on “edit categories” (left side of the “Affiliate Cause” sub-tab) in order to create categories and assign affiliate causes to them. You’ll have to determine what works best for your organization. Some nonprofits create geographic categories (e.g. California, Montana, Georgia, International), others reflect programmatic areas (e.g. Malaria, AIDS, Clean Water), and yet more create other distinctions between causes. Categories are a useful organization tool that becomes incredibly valuable when you begin messaging your supporters.
Co-administering Affiliates
Your organization is automatically added as an administrator of your affiliate causes. To gain access to the administrator tools, you’ll need to associate your personal Facebook account with your Nonprofit account. To do this, click “Account” in the upper right corner in the Partner Center and select “Facebook Accounts.” You will be prompted to log into Facebook or, if you are already logged into Facebook, your account will be automatically added. Once an account is added, the owner will be recognized as an administrator from your nonprofit on all affiliate causes, and any actions taken will be credited to the nonprofit. You can access the administrative tools on any cause by either 1) clicking
Premium Functionality
After November 6th, you will need to upgrade to a premium account to create categories and to add more than 15 affiliate causes (don’t worry—we won’t take away any that you secure between now and then).
