I know we’re late to the party on blogging about this, but I did a doubletake when I saw Blackbaud’s most recent giving report. Only 13% growth in online donations? And they had to remove disaster relief organizations to get that number to be positive…in a year when a gigantic tsunami struck Japan? These reports have not been consistently tracking social media driven donations, but we look at overall online donations as a linked indicator. So what gives?

How international affairs organizations are counted makes a huge difference in the numbers, and to get a sense of how online giving is changing overall, I believe it is best to exclude this huge swing as Blackbaud has done in the 2011 report. We’ll leave the puzzle of why Japan and Haiti elicited such different responses for another day.

So, how do we compare the two? Note: The percentages by sector don’t add up to 100% (other sectors aren’t tracked, and account for minority percentages)

What I want to do is determine the percentage growth for the tracked sectors, excluding international affairs, from both years, but this number is available only in the 2011 report. An SAT word problem ensues! My method, excluding international affairs:

• For each sector, multiply the percentage growth in 2010 by the percentage that sector represents.
• Add those products together.
• Divide the total by the total of sector percentages represented.

If I did this wrong, please call me out on it. It’s encoded in a formula in this spreadsheet.  I’m glad I did the math, because my assumption was that the overall growth rate of online giving had radically slowed. Not true: The growth rate in 2010, excluding international affairs, was around 13% (@SMacLaughlin, with certainly more authority on the matter, says 15%), and the same number in 2011 was also around 13%. In 2007, according to Blackbaud data, overall giving grew 50%, then 40% in 2008, then 46% in 2009. I don’t have the source material to exclude international affairs from those figures, however.

So perhaps the big drop was actually 2009 to 2010. Let’s take a step back. Perhaps this whole discussion is flawed. Obsessing about online giving growth rates makes an implicit assumption that the overall magnitude of annual giving – $300B – is fixed, as it has been for the past few years.

We should be seeking to grow giving overall, and focusing on that percentage.

While the report’s statement “As with all large numbers, the bigger the overall percentage [of online giving within giving overall] gets, the slower it tends to grow” is usually true, overall giving is influenced not by a mathematical rule of thumb, but by:

• How many organizations exist, their capacity, and their participation and effectiveness in various kinds of fundraising.
• Changing donor demographics – yet, the US economy and population are growing much faster than giving is.
• Changing nonprofit demographics – some go out of business, new orgs are created to replace them with different ideas of how to fund themselves, perhaps by not needing donors at all.

The same growth rate from 2010 to 2011 (if accurate) can be viewed as a victory in that the growth rate did not decline as rapidly as from 2009 to 2010. The online universe has changed very rapidly over the last decade, but it is possible that most of the organizations who have the capacity to raise funds online have already started doing so.

So how do we continue to grow online giving as a percentage of overall giving AND grow overall giving too?

• Focus on the “long tail” – many nonprofits we talk with are still struggling with the basics of being online, let alone fundraising there. The temptation when the largest fundraising industry company makes plans to buy the next largest is for the mid-tier vendors to go after bigger nonprofit clients. Very few fundraising companies focus on nonprofits with 1-5 staff (please prove me wrong in the comments – let’s talk).
• Time. The cause of low experimentation for most causes is usually not lack of will or lack of skill or budget, but lack of time. We should focus on decreasing the amount of time it takes to use all kinds of fundraising tools. We think a lot about this – staff time per dollar with respect to community size – at HelpAttack!
• Stop focusing on big campaigns with lots of zeros, and make sure tools work well in efficiently converting unique online visitors or offline touches to donors. Very few organizations (Livestrong, American Red Cross, Charity Water) will be able to generate those impressive numbers with a mass audience.  We like it when reports and case studies focus on percentages and conversion rates instead.

What are your ideas to get US giving to $400B?

SxSW panelists talking about gaming for good!

There’s a whole new game to play out there in the nonprofit world. In fact, it’s such an important trend that it’s been given a name: Gamification. Whether it’s planting crops on Facebook  or unlocking badges on FourSquare game mechanics are working their way into all different kinds of businesses. So, is there a place for Gamification in nonprofit fundraising? I’d say so.

This past week at South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive, HelpAttack!’s CEO, Ehren Foss, gave a presentation on boosting fundraising and engagement with Gamification. (Big thanks to Frank Barry of Blackbaud for including little ol’ us!) Foss says, “It’s really just behavioral economics,” which nonprofits are already doing but via other mediums such as email marketing and matching donor contributions.

Simply, it’s all about knowing your audience and connecting to them whether it be through more traditional marketing or through gaming. Games can be great! They draw you in and can make you interact more than a static Facebook page can. It gives someone an incentive to keep coming back. The competition can heighten the commitment and encourage donations. There’s more motivation to share players’ successes (and ipso facto, to share your cause).

A great example of understanding and appealing to your audience is PlayMob’s GiverBoard, which allows players of social games to buy virtual products that are connected to a charity. For example, a Farmville player could buy a tractor that was linked to a specific charitable campaign. It then shows players how their gaming positively contributes to changing the world and does so through micro-donations, which can often be more reliable than infrequent, larger donations.

However, sometimes making a game that doesn’t align with your mission can be really bad! It has to emulate your overall gestalt. Make the game informative and help players learn about your nonprofit while they play. Give them rewards for their playtime. But don’t design a game that doesn’t reflect your goals as a nonprofit.

So, with those precautionary words alongside some encouragement to participate, let the games begin!

I have bad news.  Facebook Giving Fairies don’t exist.

giving fairies?

There aren’t billions of people waiting to give you money through social media just because you put a donate tab on your profile.  Just as with any other form of fundraising, you have to be smart, strategic, and even patient.  The great news:  it’s worth it!

A sage of social media fornonprofits and friend of HelpAttack!, Justin Ware at Benz Whaley Flessner, took the time to read Blackbaud’s 2011 donorCentrics™ Internet and  Multichannel Giving Benchmarking Report and passed along this gem of information in an recent article:

“Among the many findings in this study are the statistics that show a growing number of first-time donors are finding organizations through the Internet as opposed to direct mail. In fact, more donors made their first gifts online than via direct mail for every age group under 64 years old. The study also says online-acquired donors make much larger gifts than direct mail-acquired donors.”

Regardless of the tools and software you use to complement your social media fundraising, there are a few tips to keep in mind. When embarking on fundraising with social media, try implementing some of these ideas to make your campaign successful and stress free.

1. Set Realistic Goals If you have 2,500 Likes, you can ballpark around 5-10 donors  for the first ask.  Why? If you have around 2,500 followers, you’ll probably get 25 hits to the page to which you’re linking, and five or ten people finish the action (donate, like, etc.).

Here are some great goals for your Facebook Fundraising campaign: ·        Get 10 new donors ·        Learn who they are ·        Thank them personally ·        Stay in touch with them

2.  Reward Participation FreeArts NYC ran a successful HelpAttack! campaign in January by offering two free round trip Jet Blue tickets to one lucky pledger.  The result?  Their conversion rate was 28 times better than the average for email fundraising.

Here are some ideas for rewarding participation: ·        “Like” for a chance to win… ·        Non-monetary gifts (feature your picture, story, idea, etc.) ·        Gifts from a corporate sponsor ·        Shout out from your celebrity ambassador

3.  Leverage a Special Event Last year, the American Red Cross leveraged Red Cross Month (March) for a social media campaign.  They raised money and awareness.  You can do the same!

Here are some well-known and lesser known commemorations to celebrate: ·        Earth Day, Valentine’s Day, TV Turn-Off Week, Join Hands Day and more ·        Monthly health observances ·        …or create one! #oceangiving

4. Thank Donors Ask supporters for interesting and specific ways to help and then thank them right away on social media.  It’s free and powerful.  Provide inspiring stories about what donors are accomplishing with their giving.

Do you have any other tips?  Please join the discussion and leave a comment below!

Search engines work because people link to things that are relevant.  So, if nothing else, these little posts are helping build a better fabric for social media fundraising.  Without further ado…

• Zeidman Development Releases RETweet for Blackbaud’s The Raiser’s Edge – This looks like a social CRM plugin for Blackbaud’s donor management software.
• Social media as a fundraising tool – some hard facts (fundraising.co.uk)
• Political Campaigns’ “Social Fundraising” Starts 2012 with a Roar – Includes data from Fundly and a “Fundly Political Index”
• The Secret Sauce to Social Media Fundraising (livestream here) – “Giving Days” in San Diego, DC, Minnesota, Denver, and other cities have been very successful.  I’ve heard that Kimbia has had a role in several of them.

That’s it for now – back to work!