We’re passionate about social media fundraising.  No surprise there, right?  You might be more surprised by the results of our recent study about the adoption of the web and social media by nonprofits.  We found that in a random sample of the 1.6M nonprofits in the US, only around 43% have a website, 28% are on Facebook, and 10% are on Twitter.  Wow!

Sometimes really pretty pictures of mountains come up when searching creative commons images on Flickr for “webinar.”

This matches with our experiences working with the nearly 260 nonprofits that have signed up to fundraise with HelpAttack!  Even among organizations that are already on the web, the communications staff responsible for those communities are already stretched very thin.  Moreover, their fundraising colleagues are mostly focused on direct mail, offline events, and email fundraising campaigns…for now.

We decided to do more to close the gap for the many thousands of organizations who want to…

• Be more efficient and effective while working with social media: saving time, saving money, and getting better results.
• Convince their leadership and colleagues (and themselves) that fundraising from online communities is one of the antidotes to declining direct mail and grant revenue.
• Skip over hours of online research and just get down to business: What are the next steps, what needs to be done now and what can wait?
• Know what success looks like:  How to measure return on investment, what metrics are appropriate, and how to improve them.

So, we’re offering a new set of online courses and webinars tailored to busy nonprofit professionals seeking to take their social media up a few levels.

Our first webinar, August 23rd, is for getting started quickly and effectively on Facebook.  You might think that’s a niche, but the math above suggests that there are 1,152,000 nonprofits in the US who might want to attend.  Sadly, we’re capping registrations at 100 for now.

Sign me up!

But what’s next?  We’re preparing to cover these topics as well:

• Should your org be on social media?  Data driven answers…

• (If so..) The case for social media: Convincing nonprofit leadership and offline fundraisers

• Facebook ROI: Likes, Ads, Tabs, and Social CRM!

• Twitter ROI: Followers, Engagement, #hashtags, and Social CRM

• Social CRM: Tools, approaches, and results.

Would you attend one of the above?  What topics would you like to see us cover in the future?

Many of you joined us for a webinar about the Return on Investment (ROI) of Facebook for Nonprofits. Thanks so much to all who attended and asked questions.  Here are the slides of the presentation.  Below you will find the questions we received along with our answers. If you have more questions, answers, comments, or anything to add, please do so in the comments section!

What is the Facebook pledge app? http://info.helpattack.com/2012/03/facebook-tabs-and-apps/

What does it mean when it says your post has been reached by a certain amount of people? I thought status posts are shown in everyone who “likes” you newsfeed. Here is what Facebook has to say about the difference between impressions, reach, and likes.

“Impressions measure the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked on or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, a fan might see a Page update in their news feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.

Reach measures the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. The reach number might be less than the impressions number since one person can see multiple impressions.”

Here is even more on reach, likes, etc.

What cost is involved in a HA! campaign? For every $100 captured by HA!, the nonprofit receives $91.75. HelpAttack! gets 4% for operational costs and FirstGiving gets 4.25% for credit card processing fees, etc. In terms of ROI, the average donation of a unique visitor to your HA! landing page is a $1.15. To raise $1,000, your HA! page needs to be seen an average of 870 times. It takes about 6 hours over 2 months to launch and run a successful HA! campaign.

Is Google+ the next big thing? Or not worth the time? Hangouts, Hangouts on Air, Circles, and SEO are the most interesting elements of Google+ for nonprofits. Here is a great piece by John Haydon that explains this in more detail.

What are the social media versions of “open rate” and “list size”?

In email marketing, “open rate” means how many people opened the email versus how many you sent it to (“list size”). In social media, your “list size” is your Facebook page’s total number of likes or the total number of people who viewed the post. What is important here is to be consistent. Whatever your organization chooses, stick with it.

Thomas the Thinktank

I recently helped create a community of practice at NTEN’s community site, focused on deeper discussions around social media fundraising. Today a few of us got on a webinar to try out the concept and dig in to a few nagging questions.

What do we call social media fundraising?

• Social network fundraising
• Social fundraising
• Facebook fundraising….

There seemed to be consensus that whatever the term, the definition had to be broad. Successful fundraising online isn’t just an app or a donation link, but an extension of the same culture of relationship building that is the bedrock of traditional fundraising methods.  Social media fundraising includes friends asking friends programs, apps, donation tabs, using social media to support other fundraising campaigns, lead generation, supporter cultivation and stewardship, and using social media friendly materials (images and videos) in non-social media contexts.  That’s a lot of stuff!

We also thought that social network fundraising was potentially confusing, as “social networks” refer to offline networks too: Gala events and mixers.

The cause marketing universe defines most of their programs as “action triggered donations” – when a company donates because an individual decides to Like, share, use a #hashtag, or participate in a context defined by the campaign. Almost always the company is providing the funds and the community “activates” the giving, but isn’t asked to donate themselves.

What about email?

We spent some time talking about the relationship between email and social media fundraising.  Some bloggers are moving “back” into email lists, and others are focusing significantly on capturing emails from their readers.  Email is a social network, after all, but one with different functionality and culture than most online social networks we’re familiar with.

It was noted that the experience of using email is becoming more social, with instant messaging and sharing built into the email program (like Gmail).  Also, email is useful as a way to follow up when the supporter isn’t able or willing to donate via smartphone, tablet, or text, but is willing to receive a followup donation link.

There was some concern about lumping email fundraising and social media fundraising together, as success in one area does not necessarily imply success in another.  Many organizations don’t recognize that the proportional size of communities (100 Likes on Facebook, 1,000 people on your email list, and 10,000 direct mail addresses) can have a huge effect on overall fundraising.

Culture and Geography

If you’re reading this in a big city, remember that large areas of the country are just now receiving dialup or broadband internet access. It’s not ubiquitous in rural Maine, Tennessee, and so on.  Some regional communities won’t use Twitter but will spend time commenting on news articles on their local paper’s website.

How do we measure social media fundraising?

At HelpAttack!, we pay lots of attention to conversion rates, dollars raised per unique visitor, and dollars raised per hour of staff time spent on a campaign.  Forward thinking nonprofits are setting up standards for tracking activity from different departments and different channels, so apples can indeed be compared with oranges.  For example, organization-wide guidelines for campaign, referral, and keyword codes encoded in URLs.  It’s important for organizations to track where a supporter originated (how they found you), and what ask tipped them over the edge to take action.  Donors don’t care which department a particular message came from, so your overall approach should be consistent & coordinated.

We met Canadian Lutheran World Relief through our Nonprofit Webinars session on social media fundraising in April.  CLWR correctly answered that Ashton Kutcher was the actor who donated $50,000 to Habitat for Humanity with his MySpace community to win a free hour of consulting with us.

“We carry out international relief and development on behalf of Lutheran constituencies in Canada. Our donors, naturally, are mainly Lutherans. At the moment we haven’t much thought about directly fundraising through social media in the way HelpAttack does. Right now, using social media has been about gaining, informing and engaging supporters. We’re trying to increase our Likes and Followers. Gaining and engaging young supporters (teens and adults up to age 35) is an important goal for the organization right now and social media has been one way we’re trying to do that, although our more active Facebook friends and Twitter followers at this point are generally older than 35.”

http://www.clwr.org http://clwr.wordpress.com/ http://www.facebook.com/CanadianLutheranWorldRelief https://twitter.com/CanLWR http://www.youtube.com/user/CLWRvideo

Overall, CLWR has a good looking website, and they have a solid set of practices on Facebook.  We suggested a few ways to align their website and blog, their Facebook page and email list, and their long and active history with a more social organizational mindset.  They were already using targeted Facebook ads and tagging of appropriate partners to grow their Facebook community.

Facebook Recommendations:

• Move Likes App out of top 4 positions
• Replace with an email list signup tab app.
• Continue to Like partner pages as the page

• Keep develop a list of partners, online & offline, aligned with your fundraising, mission, leadership, and board efforts.
• Continue ad campaigns with specific targeting, and review new Likes to see who responds
• Put more events on your timeline – founeed in 1946!  Tell the story in a few posts from each decade, using visual materials if possible

• Already have some newsletter and other content.  Link to your wordpress blog from the website, perhaps invite guest posts from partners.
• Deactivate donation form until the new one is ready.  Perhaps a PayPal button can fill the void for now?

Supporter Database

• Consider adding social media profile fields to your supporter / partner / donor database.

It occurred to me that we talk about this a lot but haven’t really written it all down outside of presentation form.  Some of these items are very broad, some very specific.  Not all are essential, but they all help.  Here goes:

1. Your communications and development (fundraising) staff should be buddies.  Break down those silos, and settle those turf battles.  The communications folks can do it on their own, because they control the Facebook page, but the campaigns will be much more successful if everyone’s working together.
2. Know how you’ve gotten online donations in general.  Who?  Why?  Be familiar with what a “conversion rate” and “conversion funnel” is in the context of online fundraising.  The same knowledge will serve you well on social media.  So will the process of shortening and simplifying the donation form on your website, as well as making it mobile friendly and accessible.
3. Continue building partnerships, and be sure to do so on social media.  Like pages and follow profiles of partners, funders, grantees, local media, your volunteers, and everybody else who rocks your offline world too.  Tag them in Facebook posts.  Retweet them.  These are the people who will help your fundraising campaign reach 30,000 people instead of the 300 who follow you.
4. Rename your “donor database” a “supporter database.”  Supporters can contribute by volunteering, sharing, retweeting, Liking, emailing, running (a 10k), referring, cheerleading, and of course donating too.  Make it easy to identify how an individual can best help.
5. Is someone listening?  Do you mostly broadcast stuff out through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn or is someone hanging out in HootSuite or TweetDeck answering questions, retweeting, and listening?

Done all that? You want something more specific?  How about these:

1. A way to accept payments on social media. Yes, you can link back to your website’s donation form, but consider adding a Facebook tab app too.
2. Do something special.  If you just ask people to give on social media, they won’t. Tell them why, and who they are helping, and they might.  Throw in a prize, video stories from recipients of care, shout-outs from a local celebrity, and you’re getting somewhere.  It doesn’t have to cost money, you can invent a “Facebook Fan of the Week” and award them with a hokey prize, and post about them.
3. When somebody shares the link, what image and description pops up?  Make sure those are attention grabbing and compelling.  Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol.
4. Gamify it. This means think about the incentives people have for sharing your content, and figure out how to align the goals of the campaign with that. Pay particular attention to what it means for someone to share and create awareness, versus give and drive donations.  Some content is good for one, but not the other.

Did you notice how few of those items are directly related to social media tactics?  We can help you with all of the above, and I’ll bet we’ll return to this post to add things as we continue learning.  For now, enjoy!  What made social media fundraising successful for you?  What helped you turn the corner?