HelpAttack!’s site will shut down December 31st.

If you are a donor or supporter you should log in and write down the amounts of donations you’ve made, if you plan to use it for your records.  Note, you will also likely need a receipt from your nonprofit for tax purposes. Consult your tax advisor!  Also, look up the donation form on your favorite nonprofit’s website and bookmark it.  If they don’t support recurring donations, make your own recurring calendar reminder.  :-)

If you are a nonprofit, download data about your supporters in the Reports link.

Whoever you are, keep supporting your favorite nonprofits!

Any questions?  theendisnigh@helpattack.com.

What’s the whole story?

The purpose of the rest of this post isn’t to tell the whole story of HelpAttack! We hope, however, to pass along the most valuable wisdom we have accrued.

Sarah Vela came up with the idea that became HelpAttack! during Austin’s “Movember” fundraiser of 2009. Austin’s team had a lot of social media people on it, and Sarah’s feed became noisy with fundraising asks. Why can’t we just give each time we Tweet about other stuff?

Sarah knew David and David knew Ehren and we all got together to talk about the idea, at that point called “Change4Change.” In April of 2010 we paid some lawyers and became a Delaware C Corp. We developed an early version late that spring and early summer, and launched our “Beta” on August 23rd.

The core of the idea – giving each time you send a Tweet, no matter what the Tweet is about – soon grew into a broader concept: Micro donations driven by all kinds of online activity: Facebook posts, blog posts, comments, photo and video uploads, petition signatures, and so on.

Individual Supporters

At first, we focused on building an app that individuals could use to support a cause of their choice. Our goal was to become a place where people could express their good natures online, like a Change.org, Care2, or Jumo but focused on social media. We created “coins” which were like Foursquare badges – rewards for making different kinds of pledges.

A cursory look around the internet reveals a graveyard of companies who tried to build their own social networks and own user bases from scratch. At this point we were also seeing signs that while people want to be good and believe they are good, they usually need more of a push to actually do something good. Sharing a photo (think Instagram) doesn’t cost anything. Donating does, and the psychology of people while they are giving is very complex.

Nonprofits

Our next major release, in early February of 2011, included a Facebook integration (for a second pledge type), and a dashboard for nonprofits to log in, access donor data, and monitor their fundraising efforts.

Shortly afterward, American Red Cross and Best Friends Animal Society gave it a go. To date, they were the most successful nonprofits on our platform.

Restructuring

In May of 2011, Sarah and David left the company but stayed on as valuable and active advisers.  In August of that year, Vanessa Swesnik joined to kick butt at business development.

Celebrity Ambassadors

Celebrities have large online audiences. The larger the celebrity, the more people after them to post a link or give a shoutout. On the other hand, many celebrities have strong ambassador relationships with nonprofits, and the PR / talent management industry is well versed in the concept.

We learned a few things. One, IMDB Pro, LinkedIn, and a little creative Googling makes it easy to get the right phone number with about 15 minutes of work. Two, these people are professionals.

Remember the Miley Cyrus campaign we blogged about? We called the nonprofit, and learned that the chairman of their board of directors is also the chairman of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Furthermore, while it was now obvious how they were able to get nearly 100 celebrities onboard, they explained that the participating marquee celebrities would not allow the fundraising totals to be shown, as that could be construed as a stand-in for popularity. Celebrities don’t want to appear less popular in any context.

In another case, we reached a PR firm who was interested, but asked that we reconfigure our platform to allow people to give when their client sent out a specific type of Tweet. For example, every time Liza Minelli tweets a photo of herself, her fans would give $1.

We weren’t able to totally win over the staff of any celebrities. We got close a few times.

Cause Marketers

Like celebs, companies have specific goals and hangups when it comes to social media and supporting nonprofits. Retail firms are tough: they want you to buy their stuff, so they are unlikely to push a campaign where the first priority is direct donations to the nonprofit. Other industries have other challenges: regulatory compliance, privacy concerns, and so on.

In the cases where we were able to make a serious pitch for a cause marketing campaign, it was sunk by too many cooks in the kitchen! Having a national nonprofit, and a national brand, and both of their teams of lawyers, together with a PR firm and us… didn’t make much progress.

Nonprofits Again

Ok, so if celebrity ambassadors and cause marketers… back to nonprofits!  We spent the rest of our run attempting to convince nonprofits to run social media fundraising campaigns. We used IRS and other data to identify those who would be likely to have a large online community already.  We had some success with PETA, Heifer International, World Food Programme, UNICEF USA, and a few others.  Several smaller nonprofits surprised us and ran very successful campaigns (for their size).

Still, the amount of effort required to do the convincing, help craft messaging, talk through the results, convince them to continue the campaign, and so on far outweighed the 4% of donations we were getting back.  We did a couple custom apps or consulting engagements for organizations to fund a snazzy redesign in the summer of 2012.  Success did not follow.

Vanessa, Holly and I were worn out and tired of not having a sustainable business.  We talked with David and Sarah and decided to call it quits in early September of this year.

Other Topics

Legally Transacting Tax Deductible Donations

We didn’t know anything about this topic when we started. It took a long time, and a lot of networking and effort, to find a few people who actually knew the rules.

If you are transacting tax deductible donations on behalf of a nonprofit, there are generally two approaches.

One, you can register as a professional solicitor in each state that requires it. This costs around $10,000 in legal fees, more if you have someone do it for you. The professional solicitor structure was created for people who reel in big fish at galas (and get paid for it) and also for some telemarketers who participate – directly or indirectly – in fundraising.

Two, you can set up a donor advised fund. A donor puts money in the fund, and then the fund is required to distribute the money to nonprofits in accordance with the donors wishes. This is most common with trusts or other structures where the donor doesn’t want to deal with as many of the details, but has a lot of money.

Both of those routes were annoying and expensive from a legal perspective, so we looked for a partner who would transact the funds for us and we found Network for Good. At the time, they were the only such entity in the US, and they were also expensive.

We didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that nobody really knows how the laws apply to third party online fundraisers like HelpAttack! No case has been brought forward far enough in the internet age. Attorneys General are paying attention, and keeping their eye on various parties, but they aren’t aggressively pursuing startups like ours.

So, did we have to pay all the extra money? Probably not. We’re not advocating that anyone skirt the rules. The point is that knowledge is incredibly potent. If we knew we could get the Excel files of every single nonprofit in the US, for free, from an IRS webpage, that would have helped (you can). If FirstGiving had entered the market sooner, that would have helped too. We could have gotten through our first 18 months spending $10k less and generating more revenue than we did.

Our Competitors

There still aren’t very many companies out there doing similar things.  Rt2Give (TwitPay) gave up at least a year ago.  Snoball continues (thanks to some nice fundraising rounds in lieu of actual growth) and their model is the closest to HelpAttack!  Pledge4Good, Rainmaker App, Charity Swear Jar, Pledgie… there are always a spectrum of new companies and new models out there.  Kickstarter-style sites, and team fundraising sites, meanwhile, have done very well in the past few years. So…

Does Social Media Fundraising Work?

This is the $100B question. If you’re reading this you probably already know that Americans donate around $300B per year, but that amount has been flat for the last decade. Online giving has been growing hand-over-fist, but still represents only around 10-15% of the total. Meanwhile, direct mail and fundraising from other channels have likely declined by the same margin. If nonprofits are going to grow overall, and gain more resources to fight the world’s ills, online fundraising has to grow faster. Social networks and social media seem like the most obvious place for that to occur.

Some entrepreneurs confide privately that “nonprofits don’t know what they are doing.” In some cases, with regards to online fundraising, that is absolutely true. There are some organizations out there that will be a lot smaller in 10 years for this reason.

But that’s cynical. What’s really going on is that nonprofits don’t seem to have TIME for anything new. Small nonprofits are stretched extremely thin. Even if the executive director “gets” the internet and social media, how much time can they spend? Can they afford any of the tools that help save time? Can they afford ads to help boost their community growth? Medium and large nonprofits suffer from other maladies: The most common is that the communications team may do a fabulous job managing the website, blog, and social media, but the fundraising department is in another silo. The communications team is driven by engagement: likes, comments, stories, interactions, and community growth. We observed that this environment does not make it easy to create, establish, and sustain a recurring fundraising program within an online community. That’s a whole new ball of wax and although large nonprofits have more resources and staff, they still don’t have enough bandwidth.

Another factor is that after a few years of record growth and constant buzz, financial realities have hit Facebook and other networks, and many nonprofits are disillusioned at their inability to efficiently reach the communities they worked so hard to build.

I still believe social media fundraising absolutely can work.  For most who try, it doesn’t, because:

• The numbers don’t work out:  Not enough people see or spread enough posts to generate enough clicks for the conversion rate to favor viral growth.  You either need to start with a very large audience or sacrifice the fundraising potency of a message for viral potency.  The solution to this problem is to nurture partners with larger communities and to craft a set of messaging that will spread AND get clicked on.
• They only try once.  Almost never will a single Facebook post bring in a significant amount of money (natural disasters perhaps the notable exception)
• Social media and fundraising practices at most nonprofits are not integrated.  Sometimes these teams don’t even talk.

Perhaps we would have been successful if we executed our plans better, or perhaps we would have been successful with different plans, or the same plans in a different order.  Who knows.  A few people said we were more of a feature than a business, and that may have been true.

What do you think?  Good luck to all those working to crack this very tough nut!

Ehren Foss, 11/21/12

 

We’ve decided to take a step back from HelpAttack! We are not taking the platform offline yet. Nonprofits and their wonderful supporters are welcome to continue using it.

Why this change? We haven’t been able to figure out how to sustainably support our business.  It’s true that we earn some revenue from a percentage of the donations moving through our platform, and we have also experimented with paid webinars, consulting, custom donation app development, and other projects this year.   We’ve done some amazing things with a very small pool of bootstrapped resources, but we can’t continue in this mode forever.

What now?

We are still, and always, listening.  We are open to suggestions on where we should take HelpAttack!, as we welcome any proposals to work together, share wisdom, or build something new.

We will monitor the platform for bugs, and provide some email support to causes with questions.  That said, HelpAttack! will no longer be our day to day focus.  We will provide at least 30 days notice if the platform will be taken offline.

Thank You!

None of this would have been possible without the wisdom and hard work of the community.  Most especially, we want to thank Jan Gunter, Narissa Johnson, Andrew Urban, Tyler Goodwin, Mariana Silak, Kaleen Reitcheck, Andrew Chou, Monica Williams, Kurt Bradley, Holly Ross, Amy Sample Ward, Zan Mcculloch-Lussier, Noland Hoshino, Filiberto Gonzalez, Debra Askanase, Barbara Talisman, Karsten Robbins, Dina Pradel, Chris Dumas, Jon Dunn, Wendy Harman, Victoria Taylor, John Haydon….There’s a much longer list – you know who you are, and we thank you.

Don’t be strangers

I’m sure we’ll cross paths with you again soon.  In the meantime, hip hip hooray for Team HelpAttack!

Ehren, Vanessa, Sarah, and David

Building something like us?  Use FirstGiving’s API.

Need someone to save the world by building your organization?  Hire Vanessa.

BEFORE you ask your supporters to donate on a social network, offer them something in return: whether it be attention, knowledge, or inspiration, give them a reason to visit your Facebook or Twitter page. Let them get to know you and trust you on these pages before you begin to fundraise on them. Once you have built a community base, you’ll have a better understanding of 1) the social platform itself and 2) the audience that you reach on that platform. You’ll know what they respond to, why they’re there, and what they care about, which you can then use for your fundraising efforts.

So, if you have a strong following, it’s time to start fundraising! Here are 10 different ways you can ask your supporters to fund your cause, and make it easier for them to do so:

1) Tell them what the donation is for. Be specific. If you say what exactly you’re doing with the funds, you’ll draw a closer connection between your donor and the real-life difference they made thanks to their donation.

2) Highlight a new donor. People like being acknowledged. Give them a moment in the spotlight by choosing a “supporter of the week” who you mention on your Facebook and/or Twitter page and tell others what they’ve done to make the world a better place. It’ll make their day!

3) Make it easy for supporters to share with friends. People like letting their friends know what they’re up to on social media. That’s one of the main reasons they’re there! Make sure your fundraising app has a “share” option so your supporters can easily tell their friends how they’ve helped your cause. This will help spread the word and encourage others to join in!

4) Tell them about the fundraising platform you’re using. If you’ve grabbed your supporters’ attention, make sure they don’t get lost along the way. Every once in awhile, post or tweet about the fundraising app you’re using and give a quick, simple explanation of how to use it. This way, anyone that wants to make a donation will know exactly what to do and how to do it.

5) Thank them individually. Every donor counts, so make sure to say thanks and even just say hi every once in awhile to let them know you care and appreciate them.

6) Make your “Donate Now” button stand out. If your fundraising app gets lost on your bright, colorful Facebook page, no one will notice it. Make sure you draw attention to it, at least in the first few months you’ve started fundraising, so supporters become familiar with where to find it.

7) Make it a contest. By adding some interactivity on your page, you’ll get people more involved and excited. When there’s competition, there’s some pressure to win…some GOOD pressure, and you’ll have supporters steppin’ up their game (especially the more competitive ones). Not only that, but offer a prize, which gives even more incentive to join in on the fun. The prize could be one of your cause’s t-shirt or free admission to your organization.

8) Talk about things you’ve accomplished thanks to donations. You may have told your supporters what you can do or what you’re trying to do, but have you told them what you’ve already done? Tell them an inspiring story about how your organization changed someone or something’s life.

9) Create a time-specific campaign. Again, the pressure factor. When there’s a time limit or a countdown, it becomes less of one of those “ahh, I can do it later” things and more “whoa! only 1 day left before I can help?!” things, you’ll see better results. Base it around an upcoming event or a deadline for a goal that your org is trying to reach.

10) Incorporate other fundraising methods. If you’re fundraising on your website, via email, or standard mail, make sure you tell people about your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. If they don’t know you’re there, they won’t visit you! This will help integrate all your fundraising efforts.

There you have it! 10 very different ways to ask supporters to donate, and make it simpler for them to do so. If you feel like you’re struggling to build your audience, so you can’t even start to raise funds online, try one of our social media training courses to get the ball rolling!

 

Last year I wrote a post for NTEN about four social media fundraising tools. This year I’m going to take a vertical rather than horizontal approach, and identify several important types of tools you’ll want to consider when raising money online – either through your website or on a social network.

Website Donation Form

I think humble donation forms are the bedrock of online fundraising: You can steer people to them from elsewhere on your website, from email, from QR codes, and of course from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks. These forms can be great lead generation tools at the same time they are bringing in necessary revenue.

While it seems like donation forms were “solved” years ago when our sector turned its attention to social fundraising and social media, many organizations are still struggling. Some causes who have invested in building their own forms find them difficult and expensive to maintain. I can see why; simple forms are harder than they seem: You should…

• maintain a high level of security for PCI compliance
• ensure mobile friendliness and easy social network sharing
• provide flexibility for varying needs of campaigns and programs
• measure, tweak, and improve conversion rates by altering images, copy, and other attributes of the form

The alternative used to be directing your supporters off-site, to PayPal.com, Authorize.net, or other secure but not as flexible (or branded) donation flows. My favorite tools these days embrace the best of both worlds. Let someone else worry about HTML5, standards compliance, scalability, and usability while still enjoying the benefits of hosting the form at your own domain. “Embedded” forms usually have easy to use form building kits too. Kimbia and FormStack are good examples, and both are starting to integrate with large CRM platforms like SalesForce.com.  Blackbaud, Salsa Labs, Fundly, and other  nonprofit tradeshow regulars offer embedded forms too.

Help The Social Web

Everything you put on the web can help, or hurt your overall results. Does your website CMS (content management system) automatically create the proper meta tags for the big social networks? When someone shares a URL on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, what image, blurb, and text is included automatically? When someone pins a great image from your website, where do clicks on it end up?

If you view the HTML in a socially shareable webpage, you’ll see a set of A good CMS (perhaps with a few plugins) should allow you to set up defaults for this kind of sharing, while allowing you to override titles, primary images, and other shared attributes if needed.

Your supporters will share the page you want them to, but they will also share pages buried deep in your site that you haven’t thought about in months. When they do, make it easy and effective.  These four “open graph” tags make Facebook and Twitter happy.  The “title” tag is very important (it’s what shows up as the tab name in your browser).  The “image_src” one helps your image show up in LinkedIn.  Along with the description and keywords tags, they all help with search engine optimization too.

<meta name=”og:type” content=”cause” /> <meta name=”og:image” content=”http://helpattack.com/images/helpattack_logo_200x121px.png” /> <meta name=”og:url” content=”http://www.helpattack.com” /> <meta name=”og:site_name” content=”HelpAttack!” /> <meta name=”fb:app_id” content=”117175691682196″ /> <meta name=”title” content=”HelpAttack! – Social Media Fundraising” /> <link rel=”image_src” href=”https://helpattack.com/images/helpattack_logo_200x121px.png” />

Social CRM

This is another foundation of online fundraising. Consider adding new fields for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, or other social network URLs that are important in your community of supporters to your CRM (constituent relationship management) system. That way, social data you collect can inform your direct mail, email, volunteering, advocacy, and other efforts. You might be surprised to learn that your funders, board members, and partners are on social media too.

There’s lots of talk about the ROI of social media. Adding social data to your supporter database is a very important step in making sure you can increase and sustain the return on your invesment for years to come.   The simplest example of this is figuring out which people hate your paper mailings and want to hear more tailored messages from you online instead.  Save money on your mailings and have happier supporters too.

Getting this data out of Facebook and other networks can be a challenge. If appropriate, allow your users to share this information with you in other channels or with apps. Consider using apps that allow you to retain ownership over the data.

SmallAct provides a lightweight social CRM platform called Thrive, and also allows organizations to mass update their contacts with social data. Blackbaud recently launched a “social score” tool, similar to Klout. Many other data sources are more focused on for-profit data and sales needs, but it’s worth checking out Rapleaf, Rapportive, their competitors.

Platform-specific Donation Apps

For most organizations, the Facebook tab donation form is still one of the only options out there. Twitter offers advertising, sponsored Tweets, sponsored #hashtags. Few organizations are asking for donations directly through LinkedIn (a much better place to find skilled volunteers or build your network, IMHO). Pinterest and Tumblr are great places to share visual content, and a best practice is to make sure that content is linked back to a donation page or another place where supporters can take action.

While quite useful, tabs ain’t what they used to be. Tab engagement dropped more than 50% after the shift to Timeline. Remember, most supporters will interact with your content in their feeds, and won’t visit your page frequently. Expect low numbers from your tab apps, compared with your posts.

I’ve also noticed that lots of organizations still have Causes.com’s tab on their Facebook page. However, Causes.com has deprecated this tab and simply redirects clicks to causes.com.

That said, once your page reaches a certain level of activity, tabs are still a worthwhile investment. It’s easy enough to add a donation form, a mailing list signup form, and perhaps one or two other action oriented tabs, and let them do their thing. Remove the default Likes app, since that information is available elsewhere. Assuming you’re sharing great visual content, keep the Photos app (you don’t have a choice anyway – that’s Facebook’s way of telling you how important visual content is).

Nailed It?

If you are totally kicking butt at all of the above, and you see how your website, your other online communities, and your other channels are all flowing harmoniously together to drive donations and other actions, then…. good for you!

I caution against building custom native (iPhone, Android, Facebook timeline) apps unless all of the above is aces for your organization AND you’ve run the numbers and are really sure your community is large enough or active enough to make a custom app worthwhile.  If you’re still tempted, I then suggest doing a simpler version as a proof of concept, or finding a similar app that you can borrow or customize.

In House Vs. Off The Shelf Addendum: If you’ve found a app or donation form vendor but you are concerned about an extra percentage being taken from the donation, make sure the math is on your side.  Let’s say the vendor is taking P percent above the typical 3% credit card fees.  Let’s also say you’ve spent D dollars (be sure to include technical staff time) building your own forms or apps in the past year.   That means you need to raise at least 100 * D / P = T total dollars from your forms to justify keeping them in house.  If you’ve spent $2,500 building forms last year and a new vendor who can do it for you adds 3%, you should go with the vendor unless you raise more than $83,333 per year (subtract any of the vendor’s fixed costs like monthly fees).