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.

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!

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?

The HelpAttack! team is proud to announce the launch of the new and improved HelpAttack! website tomorrow, August 1st, 2012. We’ve listened to feedback from both supporters and nonprofits and we’re very delighted with the result!

So what does this mean?

For Everyone:

It’s prettier and much easier to navigate. We hope you’ll more intuitively know what to do, where to go, and when to do it thanks to the details of the design. It’s also even more mobile and tablet friendly, allowing you to give on the go!

Don’t worry! If you already have an account, you don’t need to do anything. We have transitioned you over to the new site and all your account details have remained the same.

For Causes:

Thanks to the new HelpAttack!, you can more efficiently create and maintain successful fundraising campaigns!

HelpAttack! is now more connected to your cause. Providing tighter integration with all of your social profiles directs more traffic to your website and your other profiles. There are also more opportunities for supporters to donate earlier in their pledge. With the new “Just Donate” widget, supporters can instantly make a donation to your cause.

Also, we have short How-To videos to guide you through the campaign process. Some pages have moved to HelpAttack’s Blog. Here, we’ve updated our Resources and now have lots of helpful information available to you including a ROI social media calculator, campaign time estimator, and tips for each campaign type.

For Donors:

 Thanks to the new HelpAttack!, you can make a pledge in three easy steps:

1) Choose a Cause 2) Choose a Pledge Type 3) Pledge!

We now have short How-To videos to guide you through the giving process and have moved all the additional information to HelpAttack!’s Blog.

For Social Media:

We’ve made changes there, too! If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, stop by our pages next time you’re on.

Feedback: 

If you experience any problems with the new site, or you have some general comments, please let us know. We love to hear from you!

After the 2011, and then 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Reports came out, we decided to do some reporting of our own. It’s great that the number of nonprofits on social media continues to rise, but how many of the 1.5 million out there are actually involved?

If you missed it, we did some research in March and selected 100 random nonprofits from the available IRS data, and searched for a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account for each. We started with the database of all registered nonprofits and used SQL to select 100 random rows.

As part of some ongoing efforts looking related to uncovering data for nonprofits on the web and social media, we upped our sample size to 1,000 organizations to get more accurate results. You might notice that the percentages below are lower than we reported from the group of 100.  That is probably due to changes in how we considered regional or chapter organizations rather than a national or state-wide parent organization.  We looked at two pages of Google or Bing search results for the organization’s name, and then performed additional searches filtering the results by site to find facebook.com / twitter.com pages.  Each potential match was manually reviewed and only counted if the page was specific to the organization.  We’re happy to talk more about our methodology if anyone’s curious.

Without further ado: Here are the percentages of nonprofits in our random sample for whom we could find a website, Facebook page, or Twitter profile.

• Website: 43.4%

• Facebook: 28.2%

• Twitter: 10.0%

These results are very different from what the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Report found. We talk about the possible reasons why in this post: See Something, Say Something, Do Something.

We’ve continued to reach out to lots of other organizations and thinkers in the industry, seeing who else might be studying these issues, but there isn’t too much out there. In result, we’re continuing to work on covering the whole database of nonprofits. More to come! We’ll keep you posted.

Learn more about our first round of research here: Nonprofits and Social Media: Check Your Facts.

In the next few months we’re going to roll out a new version of HelpAttack!  We’ve learned a lot about how organizations can fundraise effectively on social media, and we’re going to continue adding features in that vein.  We’re also going to give the look and feel a nice facelift.

The new version will also acknowledge that how we earn revenue for our services needs to line up better with what nonprofits and other organizations find valuable.  Donations are great, of course, but many organizations are equally keen to learn about their supporters and how effective their efforts are.  We’re working to add better campaign analytics and supporter data tools.

We also have to pay keen attention to how small, medium, and large nonprofits look at social media fundraising.  We’re going to offer a few monthly subscription options which also lower the percentage of donations we use to cover our expenses.

Some of our new features will be tied to those subscription options too, but don’t worry: Any organization who signs up for HelpAttack! by July 1 will be able to use the current features for at least another year, for free.  We might push that date towards August depending on how quickly the new version is ready.

Thanks for helping us grow and serve so many great organizations!  We’re really looking forward to what the future holds.