Sharing with your audience on multiple levels is key

Post by Teddy Hunt

Target audience:  Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketers, managers, general public.

Nonprofit organizations have to reach their audiences effectively in order to find supporters and donors for the cause at hand. Social media offers nonprofits the very platform they need to get their voices heard, but going the social media route doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. In order for your nonprofit to extend their social reach, here are a few pointers that’ll help turn your nonprofit into a social media darling.

Get your story out there

As a nonprofit organization, you’re always working on telling your nonprofit’s story to your social media audience in the best way you can. You need to let your followers know what you’re trying to accomplish in a straightforward way while also giving your mission a personal touch.

There are many ways to go about telling your nonprofit’s story, but no matter how detailed you get with your mission, always remember the three w’s: who, what, and why. Who is it your nonprofit is helping, what is your nonprofit doing to accomplish its goals, and why has your nonprofit chosen its charitable field on a personal level?

Say, for instance, your nonprofit is trying to end world hunger. When campaigning on sites like Facebook and Twitter, your nonprofit should introduce itself socially by:

• Describe who it’s helping — Is your non-profit trying to end hunger in a specific region, country, or on a local level? The sooner your nonprofit describes who it’s trying to help, the faster followers will respond to your efforts.
• Explain what it’s doing — Is your nonprofit involved in local food drives or money-raising events? How will those funds reach those in need? By describing your nonprofit’s process, your organization will look more professional and responsible, which helps build trust and makes followers more likely to respond.
• Explain why your nonprofit  is doing what it’s doing — Is your organization trying to end hunger because it’s affecting a specific community, or is it trying to help the hunger cause in general? Do you have beneficiary stories you can share with your audience? Giving your nonprofit’s story a personal touch will help others relate to your cause.

Keep your followers in the loop

Whether it’s a social media follower or a longtime donor, the secret that every socially successful brand will tell you is to keep your audience in the loop. This means not only keeping followers updated on your nonprofit’s charitable efforts, it also means sharing everything from your donation goals, to volunteer opportunities, to upcoming fundraising events.

Above all else, staying social with your followers means answering any and all questions that come your way through the social pipeline. Answering your followers’ questions helps keep your audience informed, involved, and feeling like part of the cause. So, reply to all questions and all comments thoughtfully, respectfully, and in a timely manner.

Don’t be afraid to ask

Your nonprofit’s social presence is there to help you reach out to your followers and part of reaching out is asking people to donate. That’s ultimately why you use social media and your followers are well aware of it, so never be afraid to ask for donations via social media come fundraising time.

If you follow all the pointers above and make your cause as engaging as possible, your followers will be more than happy to donate to your NPO. So, the next time you’re need of online donations, call-in donations, or volunteers, ask your social media audience for help and support — you’ll be surprised with the positive response you receive.

Link to your victories

Whether your organization reached a personal goal of signing on a handful of new volunteers or it reached its quarterly fundraising goal early, it’s important to link to all your nonprofit’s victories. Linking to large and small successes could inspire others to get involved, by highlighting how no win is ever too small.

By keeping in mind some of these social media tips , an organization can help build a greater sense of community on their social channels and ultimately grow their following.

The post How nonprofits can extend their reach & build community appeared first on Socialbrite.

Leverage the power of #GivingTuesday to raise awareness & funds

Today charities, families, businesses and folks like you will come together to help create #GivingTuesday. This creates an opportunity to join a massive trending conversation on social media that will surely create more awareness for your cause.

How can your nonprofit join #GivingTuesday? After you become a #GivingTuesday partner, create a Partner Page to be featured on the GivingTuesday website.

Then use your existing social channels to tell your people about #GivingTuesday:

• Encourage your supporters to join the #GivingTuesday community.
• Email your people with sample tweets and Facebook updates they can use to talk about your cause. (Make sure you keep these short and sweet, and include the hashtag #GivingTuesday.)
• Tweet with the hashtag #GivingTuesday to drive people to your #GivingTuesday page.
• Create a few #GivingTuesday pictures you can post on your page with conditional sharing.
• Share these ideas with your sponsors and other local businesses.

Get more ideas on #GivingTuesday

Check out these ideas for local businesses and families, and see what other nonprofits are doing today. Share your ideas for #GivingTuesday below!

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Leverage the power of your social network to raise donations

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, fund-raisers, cause supporters.

Facebook recently recommended four fundraising applications that keep fundraising inside of Facebook.

What’s great about these applications is that they leverage the strength of Facebook by encouraging donors to share your fundraiser with others, see friends who have also donated, and make fundraising transactions more frictionless.

Justgiving: Share your donation

1justgiving is a UK-based fundraising platform where individuals can share their charitable giving actions on Facebook. This app gives people a way to share when they make a donation and support a friend or charity. Last year, people raised more than $40 million for charities through the justgiving app on Facebook. Their U.S. offshoot, FirstGiving, also has apps for Facebook.

WeTopia: Gamified giving

2WeTopia is a social game lets allows players build villages and earn points that turn into charitable donations. To date, players have provided more than 1.6 million gallons of drinking water and over 760,000 hot meals for children in Haiti, 45,000 meals for U.S. children living in poverty, and more than 3,000 warm coats to children in Afghanistan and the United States.

FundRazr: Crowdfund your idea
3FundRazr (a personal fav of mine) is a social fundraising app that helps people raise money. Fundrazr launched its open graph website integration with comment, donation and milestone actions.

Causes: Organize, advocate and fundraise

4The venerable Causes provides online tools for organizing, advocacy and fundraising campaigns. Not For Sale launched a campaign that raised $154,000 in two months and funded the launch of a beverage company working to fight human slavery.

Tools come last

Keep in mind that while these tools are useful, what makes online fundraising work is storytelling and planning.

Without a story that speaks directly and emotionally to a potential donor, and without the integration of email, direct mail, blogging, etc., you won’t get the full effect from these applications.

Have you used any of these applications? If so, share your experience in the comments below!

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Code for America from Inkerman Road on Vimeo.

Code for America: 5 tips on upping your video game

Code for America, a nonprofit that uses technology to transform local governments, boasts a creative, compelling promotional video that not only clearly describes its message but also engages its viewers to get involved. In just five simple steps, any nonprofit can follow its example.

Be human and personal

1Be sure to make a personal connection early in the video. Many organizations and causes have a cohort of motivated, smiling people behind it. Bring these people to the forefront and show how upbeat and promising working for the cause is! Code for America illustrates its work environment by interviewing employees about what part of the job and cause they like. People are human and social creatures and are more inclined to stick with a video if they can relate to the on-screen subjects.

Use captivating visuals

2Watching a talking head is no fun for anyone. But listening to someone speak while looking at colorful flowers or a fun work environment is far more interesting. The supplemental footage in a video that does not capture a talking head is called b-roll. For example, Code for America’s video displays a shot of the office while founder Jennifer Pahlka speaks over it.

Get creative with light

3The video’s lighting is bright and vibrant throughout. This, quite literally, illustrates Code for America’s cause in a positive light. For example, founder Jennifer Pahlka is interviewed outside, allowing her to be shot with the warmth of natural lighting. The creative use of silhouettes, close-ups and angles, by video producers Inkerman Road, provides a nice break from the traditional head and shoulders frame.

Keep it short — under 2 minutes

4The ideal length of a web video is under 2 minutes. People love video, but attention spans today are dreadfully short. This Code for America piece clocks in at 2 minutes 30 seconds. Wistia, a popular Web video hosting service, found that the completion rate for a 30 second video is close to 90 percent, but it drops to barely more than 50 percent if the video is 2 minutes. Of course, completion rate might not be critical, as long as viewers get the important bits of your message and are happy with your video. But if the call to action is in the last 10 seconds and no one watches that far, you have a problem.  Which is why it’s a really good idea to front-load the video with the call to action and other critical message elements. Whatever you want the targeted audience to walk away knowing should be at the start of the video.

Instill optimism and hope

5Code for America does not focus on what the government is doing wrong, or why its services are necessary. That would lower the mood of viewers. Instead, the organization encourages people to take action by focusing on the future and how the combination of technology and government can improve lives, ending with a positive message: “Try helping your government work better for you and see what happens.”

Did you improve your video to make it more successful? Are you interested in learning how you could? Let us know if you’d like us to analyze your video.

The post An engaging, uplifting nonprofit promo video appeared first on Socialbrite.

PopVox: Get through to Congress from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Online service offers easy way to contact members of Congress on behalf of a cause

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations, businesses, Web publishers, educators, journalists, general public.

One of our matras here at Socialbrite is that online actions only matter if they make a difference in the real world. So we spend a lot of time working with online advocacy organizations to assess the impact they make with their legislative or fundraising campaigns.

One of the most effective tools to come along in recent years is PopVox, an online service that individuals and advocacy organizations can use to contact members of Congress on behalf of a cause.

With Congress returning from spring break today — with votes planned on the Buffett rule, gun bills and cybersecurity — it’s a good time to focus on what works, and doesn’t work, on Capitol Hill.

Marci Harris, founder and CEO of PopVox, founded the nonpartisan service based on her knowledge of how Congressional staffers interact with the public. As a former Congressional staffer, Marci said, “I was really frusteated with the way that information was coming into Congress.” She began keeping a long list of the ways that public input into legislation could be improved — and finally decided to do something about it herself.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

The most effective way to contact Congress

Being on the receiving end of the funnel, Marci said, “I have to tell you it’s too much. No staffer can possibly read every line that comes into a Congressional office.”

Professional advocates are good at mobilizing support for or against a particular bill. On the other hand, Marci said, “Grassroots advocacy is genuine and heartfelt and reflects the needs of real people across the country, but the asks that come in from people who are self-organizing are really unfocused — you know, save the environment, balance the budget, save the whales.” Congresspeople and their staffs can do little with such overtures.

“PopVox funnels these voices into very specific asks,” she said. On the site, a visitor has to choose a bill on a certain topic and support or oppose it as a first step. The site then works each day to make sure voters’ messages are delivered through something called Congressional Web forms. (There are about 541 different Congressional Web forms — a pipeline directly into Congress members’ offices.)

While an in-person visit or phone call from a constituent is still the best way to influence a member of Congress, that’s not always practicable. “Personalized messages are much better received than form letters or emails. Lowest on the list are form faxes — you might as well just throw those away.” Staffers don’t read those, she said.

Transparency is part of the PopVox formula. When you use the service, the public and news media can see the comments you send to members, “so it’s not just disappearing into the black box of a Congressional office,” she said. Citizens and advocates also have the option to share their cause, plea or rant via Facebook, Twitter and across the social Web.

A subscription-based version of PopVox gives advocacy organizations access to analytics and a rich dashboard. But for most social cause groups, the free version will do just fine.

A production note: Glitch in Adobe Premiere Elements 10

A production note: I recently bought Adobe Premiere Elements 10 and spent several weeks trying to produce this video. What I liked:

• The easy-to-use interface made it easy to add image stabilization (I didn’t bring a tripod), color correction and a brighter hue.

• But: the audio was out of sync, and a bug in Elements 10 on my Mac Pro prevented me from fixing this. So while it looked better, the out-of-sync audio ultimately forced me to scrap it after weeks of trying. And back to Final Cut Express I went.

Related

• Gov 2.0 resources: A directory from Socialbrite

The post PopVox: How to advocate your cause in Congress appeared first on Socialbrite.

During the holiday break, Socialbrite is updating and republishing some of our most popular posts. We noticed that Jolkona is prominently featured in Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s new book, “Giving 2.0.” Our regular publication schedule resumes Monday.

Imet Adnan Mahmud, co-founder and CEO of Jolkona, during Beth Kanter’s book signing party for “The Networked Nonprofit” at TechSoup Global — and was immediately impressed by his seriousness and dedication to helping great causes through one-to-one philanthropy.

Jolkona is at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon, which will become an increasingly important part of charitable giving in the years ahead, as young people in particular want transparency, interaction and accountability when supporting a cause.

Adnan says Jolkona is the first nonprofit “to give tangible feedback on your donation.” Kiva, which pioneered the technique, provides entrepreneurs with loans. And while nonprofits like charity:water and Global Giving often give updates on projects, Jolkona is positioning itself as a technology platform that enables one-to-one philanthropy for nonprofits of any size.

Watch, download or embed our interview on Vimeo

The year-old Jolkona — which means “drop of water” in Bengali (Adnan is a native of Bangladesh) — currently showcases 75 projects in 35 countries, including the United States.

Jolkona’s premise is simple but powerful: Support a library in Tibet that needs $50 to buy books, and you’ll get the list of the books purchased through your donation. Help people in Bangladesh and Myanmar get an artificial limb for $200 — $200! — and you’ll receive a before and after photo. In Iraq, you can save a girl from an honor killing for $120: You get the story of the girl you saved, though for security reasons they can’t supply a name or photo. And in the U.S., you can provide field trips to a classroom of disadvantaged children in Seattle.

Says Adnan: “If you ask any nonprofit, Do you want to tell your supporters how their money was used, they’ll all tell you, Yes I do. But they don’t because they’re strapped for resources. Jolkona decided to come in and provide that technical infrastructure.

“Our focus is on youth philanthropy,” he adds. “We’re focused on galvanizing this next generation of givers. We’ve seen the frustration of this generation — that they don’t know where their money is going to. … We want people to feel that their [donation] can make a difference.”

It does, and the Jolkona team has gone out of its way to provide transparency and dispel worries that surfaced after it was revealed that Kiva wasn’t being forthright about its donations process.

Jolkona is now accepting nonprofit partners, though there’s a waiting queue. “If you are doing great work and are committed to showing impact, we are your best partners” as a platform solution, Adnan says.

The post Jolkona: Now we can all be philanthropists appeared first on Socialbrite.

Noland Hoshino, who created the LinkInLog from SMO Books, shares three ways you can use the new LinkedIn Company Pages to bring out the human side of your nonprofit. Recently, LinkedIn has made some changes that allow your nonprofit to have more of a presence on LinkedIn. In the video above, Noland talks about the ways nonprofits can optimize their Company Page and bring more attention to their cause.

For starters, if you don’t have a Company Page that represents your nonprofit, you should create one. One of the newer features that you can use your Company Page for is to send out a message to your followers as your nonprofit organization. Previously, you had to send the message out as an individual who worked at the nonprofit. This allows you to have more of an organizational voice on LinkedIn.

Another way to strengthen your brand and build awareness for your organization is by encouraging your staff, members and volunteers to add the “Volunteer and Causes” field to their profile. Anyone on LinkedIn who indicates that they are involved with your nonprofit will also appear on your Company Page, which creates a greater sense of community around your cause. And, don’t forget about linking up your other social media accounts with your Company Page. By attaching your Twitter feed to your Page, you are providing your followers and people searching on LinkedIn with more ways of keeping up with your nonprofit.

In addition to these tips, Noland recently published the LinkedIn Log, a pocket-size guide book to help organizations get more out of LinkedIn.

Here are some of the topics you’ll find covered inside the LinkedIn Log:

• An easy-to-follow guide to identify your LinkedIn goals
• A simple action plan for building and connecting with your network
• How to Optimize Your Professional Profile
• How to Personalize Your Introductions
• How to Utilize Your Network Connections

How are you using LinkedIn?

Related

• Highlights of LinkedIn’s new program for nonprofits (Socialbrite)

• Nonprofit strategies for getting more out of LinkedIn (Socialbrite)

• 8 simple ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile (Socialbrite)

• Using Twitter & LinkedIn to promote your event (Socialbrite)

• How to use LinkedIn to promote your blog (Socialbrite)

• LinkedIn for Nonprofits

The post How to use LinkedIn pages for your nonprofit appeared first on Socialbrite.

Matanya’s Hope tells stories of Kenyan schoolchildren through photos & video

Multimedia storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool for your organization to attract funders, motivate volunteers and demonstrate the power of your message.

Our friends at Matanya’s Hope asked us to create a visual story for their nonprofit by seamlessly blending photos and video footage that they have captured over the past several years with original interviews, music and graphics we developed.

Founded in 2005 by Illinois native Michelle Stark, Matanya’s Hope is a nonprofit dedicated to educating children in Kenya. Last summer I accompanied Michelle to Matanya Primary School and saw the destitution these children and their families face: severe poverty, hunger, lack of clothing. And I realized why Michelle is dedicating her life to this cause.

For nonprofits and other organizations looking to capture their stories through powerful imagery, here are some simple tips for creating professional-looking video:

• Use “b-roll” (stills & video)
• Incorporate stock music
• Use narration or background sounds

How to incorporate b-roll

By using B-roll – still photographs and short video clips referencing what the interviewees are talking about – you can make the video much more interesting than by solely using “talking heads” (straight interviews of people talking without any additional footage). As we are hearing Michelle talking about the children with “no shoes and torn and tattered clothing,” the still photographs visually reinforce what the interviewee is saying. B-roll also allows us to edit the interviews without a noticeable cut (“jump-cut”) in the action or picture on screen.

Use background music to add texture

Background music was also selected to set the mood of the video. Royalty-free music can be purchased online from a number of stock music websites for a modest charge. One of my favorites is Triple Scoop Music. There are also a slew of free sites offering rights-cleared music, generally using Creative Commons — see Socialbrite’s Free Music Directory.

For the Matanya’s Hope video, we licensed a song from a local Kenyan composer we discovered while we were there filming the video.

Narration and background sound round out the piece

Using natural, or ambient, sound captured while videotaping b-roll is another effective way to make the storytelling more compelling. Background sounds of children talking in a classroom help create a more natural, captivating video. Natural sounds can also be useful in making transitions or in reinforcing a point the speaker is making.

Next up: We’ll share our learnings on professional interviewing techniques.

And please make a donation to support Matanya’s Hope’s efforts to educate children in this region of Kenya. All net proceeds from the sale or leasing of photographs from the Matanya’s Hope gallery will go directly to the children of Kenya this charity supports.

Related on Socialbrite

• Online advocacy video best practices
• How to find amazing, powerful stories for your nonprofit video
• How nonprofits should be using visual storytelling
• 10 secrets to video storytelling success

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Causes, with 140 million+ users, takes it to the next level

Guest post by Joe Green
Co-founder, Causes

On Thursday Facebook announced two of the biggest product changes in its history. First, Facebook is making it easier for people to share the action they take on Causes and get their friends involved in real time. Second, Facebook is launching Timeline, which will allow people to curate all of the information on their profiles to better share the moments in life that matter most.

Because taking action and then sharing it with friends is the core of what people do on Causes, we think that these changes will have profoundly positive effects on people trying to help the world by using Causes.

Causes was founded with the mission of empowering anyone to change the world. Our model is based upon the belief that everyone has the power to have an outsize impact on the world by banding together with other like-minded individuals, taking direct action, and inspiring their friends and their friends’ friends to join in. In short, we provide the grassroots with organizing tools for creating large-scale collective action.

We could not have launched Causes without Facebook Platform, providing real identity and real friends. Facebook Platform was created so that experiences that are inherently social in our offline lives could be brought online as an authentic expression of who we are; Facebook did this best in revolutionizing photo sharing.

Altruism is one of the most fundamentally social impulses, and doing things for others without expecting anything in return is core to what makes us human. This is why from the day Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Causes has been honored to be one of the most popular applications, with over 140 million users.

Timeline + new Causes profiles = a townsquare of giving

One of the most popular features we included in the launch of Causes was the ability for Facebook users to feature their favorite Causes on their profile. With Facebook updates over time, those featured boxes were removed, leading to the greatest user uproar in our history. Our users’ reactions demonstrated that people feel that their causes represent an integral part of their identity, and that we need to make it as easy as possible for them to express that.

Since then, we have worked with Facebook to once again empower our users to make their causes a core part of their Facebook profile, which is now an even more expressive and powerful tool called “Timeline.” Your timeline will include “reports” that roll up all of a user’s activity through a given application in a comprehensive report of what he or she has done. This change, combined with our newly re-launched Causes profiles, provides people a central public place to organize and promote all of their giving.

Until now, Facebook profiles have been dominated by recent information, such as a friend’s posts on your wall, or relatively static information, such as your hometown), but Timeline now offers an important middle ground for people to feature and curate lower frequency, but highly meaningful information that changes and builds over time.

My mom, for example, can join the Arts in Education cause, which supports her favorite nonprofit, choose it to be her featured cause, recruit friends to join it, and donate. Currently, all of these actions can be published to my mom’s friends in real time, but there is not a good way for her to showcase this cause and the work she has done to support it on her profile, which ideally should be the most complete representation of who she is. The reality is that my mom’s involvement with the Arts cause may be less frequent than playing a game on Facebook, but she may care more deeply about the Arts organization and its mission.

Frequency and recency don’t necessarily correlate with quality or “coreness” with respect to her personal identity. Facebook’s willingness to tackle this issue and give people the power to curate their timeline to feature depth of attachment and not pure frequency of engagement is exciting for developers like Causes that power deeply meaningful social experiences.

Facebook turns your profile into a life scrapbook

From the day Facebook launched in 2004, the profile was the most critical page on the site. People used to navigate the site by surfing friends’ profiles, and used their own profile as their navigational starting point. The profile mostly contained a list of interests, actively curated by the profile owner. Only with the addition of the news feed in 2006 did attention shift away from profile and toward recent activity. This shift certainly allowed Facebook to capture what someone was doing in the moment, but that information did not represent the whole of the person.

Now Facebook is making your profile into a more holistic timeline, or scrapbook, of your life. This will enable a new class of applications focused on helping people express themselves to emerge and revolutionize existing industries and experiences. We are grateful at Causes to be in a position to lead this sea change in the way people give and get involved in social change and will continue build a platform that empowers anyone to make a difference by taking action with their friends.

Look out for new ways to integrate Causes into your online identity and check out this piece in TechCrunch for a first look at the Facebook Timeline.

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Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, fundraising professionals, social media managers, cause supporters.

This is Part 6 of our series on social fundraising. See below for other articles in this series.

If you’re a nonprofit looking to raise funds online or an individual looking to support a favorite cause, there’s a new kid on the block you should know about: Rally. Rally is an online fundraising platform that helps causes raise money faster, easier and in a more social way.

Following in the tradition of Causes, Give2gether, Fundly and other social fundraising services we’ve been writing about in this series, Rally brings some impressive things to the party: a sleek, streamlined interface, a simple business model and a platform that will soon be open to anyone who wants to support a cause. We wrote about Rally in Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks.

The platform is currently restricted to beta testers, like Students of the World, which raised an impressive amount of money in a few weeks, but is expected to open up to everyone this fall. Rally will be for anyone — nonprofits, foundations, political campaigns, churches, sports teams, neighborhood improvement efforts, filmmakers creating a documentary — looking to leverage social media on behalf of a bigger idea. We’ll update this article when Rally flings open the doors wide.

Check out the Students of the World page on Rally to see what it’s all about. Students of the World is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits tell their story through video and photography, and they achieved success on Rally by interacting with their supporters with photos, videos and conversation.

I recently visited the San Francisco headquarters of Rally — where they also host the “RallyPad” incubator space for fledgling startups — and interviewed Kaitlyn Trigger, Rally’s director of marketing.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

Rally is for nonprofits looking for a new revenue stream, Kaitlyn says, but it’s also for any person looking to raise funds to build a neighborhood playground or to raise money to support a friend with a medical condition.

“We know that one of the most powerful ways to get people to donate money is to have a friend ask them,” she says. “It’s the Uncle Joeys and Aunt Lucias of the world. When they tell family and friends about a cause they deeply care about, they’re going to respond much more generously than if an organization makes that ask.”

Rally has no monthly charges, no contract or set-up fees, and a flat per-donation fee of 4.5 percent, which drops to 4 percent when you raise a certain amount.

How Rally differs from its competitors

I asked Kaitlyn how Rally differs from its main competitors — all of whom do estimable jobs — and she laid out these reasons:

• Customization: Rally allows causes to completely customize their donation pages to align with their brand identity, while Fundly and Give2gether have a set modular template.
• Fan fundraising: Rally empowers your supporters to instantly create their version of your donation page and post their own content about your cause. Give2gether doesn’t accommodate this, and this feature is minimized in Fundly’s user experience.
• Ongoing vs. project-based: Rally is built for causes that want to raise money year round with multiple different campaigns. We make it easy for you to create unlimited donation pages, each with its own design, copy, and donation amounts. Give2gether and Fundly allow you to create only one page. Give2gether also asks you choose an end date for your campaign, and they transfer money into your account only at the end of the campaign.
• Pricing: Rally has its own payment processing network (just like PayPal), so we charge no additional fees on top of the 4 to 4.5 percent transaction fee. Both Fundly and Give2gether charge their own transaction fee, plus an additional credit card or PayPal processing fee on top of that. They both also charge a monthly fee, which Rally doesn’t do.

In this series on Socialbrite

• What social fundraising means for your nonprofit

• Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks

• Fundly: Tap into your supporters’ social networks

• GoodThreads: Custom T-shirts as a fundraising tool

• HelpAttack!: Unleash the charitable power of social media

• Rally: Raise money for your favorite cause

• Mobile: The next frontier of nonprofit fundraising

• 10 tips for a successful fundraising event

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