Platform offers free fundraising option & other services

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, social change advocates, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, community organizations.

Guest post by Christina Hirsch
Empowered.org

In the fall of 2010, a group of us launched Empowered.org, a free platform designed to help groups making a social impact. Our platform allows organizations to manage members, fund-raise effectively, recruit volunteers, grow organically and share your successes with their community and the world.

We’re made up of a group of passionate and proven leaders from the nonprofit sector, mostly volunteers, who want to share our knowledge to exponentially grow grassroots organizations using effective online strategies. We support nearly every type of service activity, including international trips, local community projects, run-walks and leadership conferences.

How we help the social good community

The Empowered platform allows organizations to conduct all of their fundraising, volunteer coordination, donor reporting, event planning and chapter management on one platform. The secret to our approach is that the Empowered platform can be integrated into your organization’s own website, allowing you to maintain you own branding and design all at no cost.

We believe that fundraising should be free. Because we work exclusively with social change organizations, we know that money spent on fundraising means less money toward the ground projects that make a difference in the world. We’re proud to be completely free for social good organizations, with custom features available at a low pricing.

Organizations can create activities, surveys and events and manage their volunteers with unlimited free access. Unlike other platforms, we allow for all fees, including merchant fees, to be passed to donors during checkout instead of as an additional cost to participating organizations.  This means that not only do we make fundraising free, but organizations can also cover their credit card and merchant processing fees.

How Empowered helped Global Brigades triple its members

Global Brigades, the world’s largest student-led health and development organization, turned to Empowered in 2010 to take over all of their online membership, fundraising and chapter management activities. To date, Empowered has helped Global Brigades to grow its membership by 300 percent!

Most successfully for Global Brigades, Empowered has leveraged social networking to exponentially grow the organization’s volunteer base. Empowered has customized Facebook share options, allowing volunteers to share with their Facebook friends when they have made a donation through direct wall postings and general Open Graph actions. Optimizing social messaging and sharing has resulted in Global Brigades receiving 100 volunteers through Facebook every month and one-third of its donations come through Facebook, all via Empowered’s social share functions.

Global Brigades operates on a chapter model, with hundreds of chapters across North America and Europe, representing thousands of volunteers. Empowered allows organizations to create unlimited “group pages” for their chapters across the world, while all being linked to the organization’s underlying account. This model has allowed Global Brigades to experience viral and decentralized growth with targeted messaging and opportunities to specific chapters and sub groups. Members are able to interact around specific initiatives while still being linked to Global Brigades’ underlying organization account. As a result, Global Brigades has tripled its growth to over 520 chapters with more than 12,000 members – all of whom are connecting, organizing, and fundraising through one centralized and free platform!

See how Empowered can take your membership organization and fundraising efforts to the next level. Visit Empowered.org or contact us at [email protected].

Related on Socialbrite

• Growing nonprofits and social movements with NationBuilder

• How Salsa Labs enables positive social action

• 24 tools for fundraising with social media

• Socialbrite directory of cause organizations

• Articles by Movements.org on Socialbrite

The post Empowered.org: Out to grow grassroots movements appeared first on Socialbrite.

Nonprofits can increase funds raised by more than 50%, says Fundly CEO David Boyce

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

This article is part of a series focused on social fundraising.

By Tamara Schweitzer
Socialbrite staff

Did you know that individuals donate $300 billion to nonprofits every year? But only 13 percent of that amount is given online. Why is that? According to David Boyce, CEO of the social fundraising platform Fundly, the only reason that number isn’t higher is because nonprofits don’t make it easier for their supporters to give online.

Boyce, who presented at the Social Media for Nonprofit event in New York last month, wants to help nonprofits make fundraising a more social and Web-based experience. Increasingly, charitable giving is moving online – in fact, online giving grew at a rate of 55 percent in 2010.

The problem, Boyce says, is that 90 percent of online donations are what he calls “one-and-done transactions.” Meaning, the supporter goes to the organization’s website, clicks on a form to donate, fills out their credit card information and hits contribute. There’s no shelf life to that action at all, and Boyce believes that’s not the way that most people want to interact when they give money away. “They want to join something and feel like they belong, so it needs to be inclusive and it needs to be social,” Boyce told me when we met at the conference.

What exactly is social fundraising?

Social fundraising is a way to leverage the power of your supporters’ social networks to gain more donations. If a supporter is giving to you, it’s because they care about your cause, and they’re going to want to share that with their friends, too. With social fundraising, you are opening up that individual act of giving to the power of social networks so that every transaction is just a jumping off point for supporters to be able to share their passion and commitment with their online networks.

Boyce says supporting a nonprofit is inherently a social experience. Want proof? According to figures from Fundly, people are 10 times more likely to make a donation when asked by a friend than when asked by an organization, and these gifts tend to be about 50 percent bigger.

Over the past few years, a number of platforms have launched to help nonprofits, organizations and individuals with online fundraising. Each has something slightly different to offer, but Boyce says regardless of what your needs are, there is a platform out there for you so you don’t have to build anything yourself. Most online fundraising platforms are as easy to set up as a Facebook page. If you haven’t explored the options, this article from the Socialbrite archives is a great place to start: 24 tools for fundraising with social media.

Also see Debra Askanase’s article from this series for a comprehensive breakdown of the different types of social media fundraising platforms available to organizations and a look at what features are right for your nonprofit.

What sets Fundly apart

Fundly is part of this emerging and fast-growing group of companies focused on social media fundraising. (See Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks.) However, unlike platforms such as Facebook Causes and Crowdrise, the Fundly platform operates within an organization’s own Web domain. Therefore, instead of visitors locating the organization’s fundraising page on another website and giving via outside channels, Fundly allows organizations to embed their campaign directly onto their website with a simple Java script. This allows organizations to engage supporters directly from their website and turn every giver into a gatherer for the cause.

Once a donation is made on a Fundly-powered website, that donor is prompted to tell their friends. Fundly’s algorithm has the ability to tell who your donor’s Facebook friends are and lets them know about any friends within their network who have also donated to the cause. This creates a sense of community around giving, says Boyce, and rather than an isolated action, giving quickly takes on a multiplying effect.

Once an organization has built a community of supporters around a cause, every time something noteworthy happens in your network, Fundly will spread the word via the social Web. For example, if a friend of someone in your network made a donation or joined, notifications will go out to your followers. Fundly calls this the “social multiplier effect.”

Mastering social fundraising

Boyce cautions that Fundly was not designed to have social networking take the place of traditional fundraising efforts. Just because you put your fundraising campaign out into the social sphere doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to spread around, he says. As with the rules to any fundraising campaign, you have to stay involved and continue to cultivate your zealots – your committed supporters, board members, community organizers, etc. who are your key to making your fundraising campaign succeed through social media. Your zealots are going to be the first people who share their support with their friends and networks, so it’s important to interact with them frequently.

Since its founding in 2009, Fundly has helped its clients raise over $215 million for their causes.

Have you used Fundly or another social fundraising platform? Let us know what you have found effective.

Fundraising 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

Previously on Socialbrite

• 24 tools for fundraising with social media

• 8 tips for raising funds online

• A beginner’s guide to mobile fundraising

The post Fundly: Tap into your supporters’ social networks appeared first on Socialbrite.

Has Social Media Fundraising Finally Arrived?

A look at the growing phenomenon of social media fundraising

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, fundraising executives, social media managers, donors.

This article is part of our series on social fundraising.

I’ve been looking forward to the promise of “social media+fundraising” for a while now. There are plenty of fundraising solutions that leverage social media, relying on fundraisers to tweet, share, and post their fundraising pages to their social networks. There are also fundraising solutions that fully rely on and live within a social platform, such as a Facebook fundraising application or a fundraising widget you place on your blog. Then there is the newest evolution: fundraising that innately uses social media as a platform.

In the slide presentation above, I review the three categories of social media fundraising and my thoughts about how social media fundraising has finally arrived in a real way.

Sharing is huge

A report from Share This states that sharing generates more than 10% of all internet traffic. In order of frequency, most people click on links shared within Facebook, followed by “other” (blogs, social bookmarking, etc.), email, and Twitter. Facebook is the largest sharing channel, at 38%, which is why so many online fundraising pages are shared and shared again on Facebook.

Social fundraising is growing

By all definitions, online fundraising is growing. Social fundraising is also growing. Network for Good’s online giving study’s quarterly giving index illustrates that, despite the current poor economic outlook, social giving is still rising. In Q1 and Q2 of 2011, social giving increased (though Q1 giving may have been skewed by Japan tsunami relief fundraising). The 2011 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report of US nonprofit social media fundraising reports that Facebook is the social media platform most nonprofits are using if they are participating in social media fundraising, though it is still a very small percentage who have raised significant money using Facebook.

Social sharing of fundraising pages yields results: Social media fundraising that leverages social networks

When fundraisers share their fundraising pages to their social networks, giving increases. Blackbaud recently issued a report and created an infographic about the power of peer-to-peer sharing. Blackbaud found that Twitter and Facebook posts convert 0.25% of impressions into donations. It also found that Twitter users increased donations nearly 10x more than those who did not use Twitter. FirstGiving found that for every share to Facebook, 5 people returned to a fundraising page. FirstGiving also found that the value of a share to Facebook was worth $10.87 in donations.

Peer to peer online donation solutions (such as FirstGiving, Razoo, Crowdrise, Donors Choose) where a fundraiser creates a fundraising page and shares that page are increasingly being used by nonprofit organizations, and the culture of online donations is growing. Sometimes these solutions are also called social media fundraising, because they rely so heavily on social media for amplification. These solutions are ideal for leveraging an organization’s base, and increasing donations through personal social network sharing. However, it’s just as important that the nonprofit also have a vibrant social media presence to amplify these efforts and engage with fundraisers.

Giving that relies on or lives exclusively within a social network

Social media fundraising can also be defined as fundraising that happens within a social network, rather than shared to the network. Most examples of these fundraising solutions live within Facebook. Examples include Causes, the What Gives or FirstGiving fundraising tabs that you can add to a Facebook page or profile, fundraising applications developed for a Facebook Page. These fundraising solutions rely on Facebook to thrive: You have to connect using Facebook, and they count on fundraisers sharing with their Facebook friends for amplification. Other examples include Google Checkout for nonprofits on YouTube or fundraising widgets placed on a blog. This type of fundraising is growing, but certainly is not mainstream, and best used where you have a fair number of supporters and know you can energize them.

Innately using a social platform for donations

Here is the promise of social media fundraising. What if someone could donate just by tweeting, posting an update, Liking a comment on Facebook, giving a LinkedIn recommendation, or writing a blog post? This is the true the convergence of social media and fundraising. A few companies are offering these types of social media fundraising solutions: Help Attack!, Twitpay, and Givey.co.uk.

With Help Attack! (featured later in this series), fundraisers can choose to give by assigning tweets, Facebook posts, using certain key words or hashtags, etc., until they reach their pledge amount. Givey and Twitpay offer similar services, but neither is as developed or offer as many ways to give as Help Attack! A fundraising solution like these are great to use during an online or fundraising campaign to raise awareness, increase donations within a limited amount of time, and energize your base. I suspect that you’ll also need to educate your fundraisers about this brand new way of fundraising merely by tweeting or posting.

I think the future of social media fundraising has just arrived. I can’t wait to see how it matures.

What do you think? Have a favorite fundraising tool? Please share in the comments!

Fundraising 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

Related

• 24 tools for fundraising with social media (Socialbrite)

• 8 tips for raising funds online (Socialbrite)

• A beginner’s guide to mobile fundraising (Socialbrite)

The post What social fundraising means for your nonprofit appeared first on Socialbrite.