On-Line Fundraising: The Giving Tree

Media Maven Workshop: Online Fundraising
May 15 2008

Resources: http://del.icio.us/lgdavitian/fundraising
Peter Dietz:
Person to Person Fundraising Tools
Group Fundraising Tools

1. RELATIONSHIP BUILDING/ FRIENDRAISING

“Everyone in the community is part of our family. Our job is simply to let them know that!”
The key is to base your revenue development efforts on everything your organization does, is and has. The best part of this approach is that it encourages you to build on those assets - get more people involved, have more people attend, increase the programming, increase the bond with the community. The stronger your asset base, the stronger your mission can grow, the more you can accomplish for the community, and the more those assets can continue to support the organization, all while you just continue to do your work.
Hildy Gottleib, Organizational Sustainability: Where " Friend Raising" Meets " Fund raising"
http://www.help4nonprofits.com/NP_Fnd_Sustainability_Art.htm</span>

Online Fundraising is part of your larger strategic plans and your strategic communications plan. It is, essentially, about relationship building.

2. THE GIVING TREE/ FRAMEWORKS FOR FUNDRAISING


How public radio/ TV move from a listener to a contributor:
1. Become a regular listener.
2. Become aware of a station's need for their support.
3. Come to agree that the station's need is valid.
4. Accept responsibility for helping the station meet its needs.
5. Act by pledging or making a donation.
http://www.pledgewell.org/thepath.html

Michael Gilbert of Nonprofit Online News

  • Prospect
  • Cultivation
  • Involvement
  • Steward

We use different words for the same concepts:

  • Welcome - Invite them into your cause and organization.
  • Educate - Tell them about the work you do and why it is important. (The story is important here).
  • Ask - Be clear about what action you want people to take? Donate, Join, Act, Order...
  • Thank - At least 7 times a year in different ways.
  • Measure - Set goals, track your efforts and analyze if you are meeting your goals.

Discuss off-line and on-line strategies--because these work together.

WELCOME
Offline
Online

EDUCATE
Offline
Online

ASK
Offline
Online

THANK
Offline
Online

MEASURE
Offline
Online

3. CASE STUDIES IN ONLINE FUNDRAISING

 

a.Easter Seals - Used MySpace and Facebook to generate donations in a microfundraising campaign. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Easter-Seals/6279167307?ref=s**

Prepared for 8 hours and worked it for 4 hours on the day of the event. Their goal was 200 donors, they gained 7 and raised $2000. The did not meet their goal, but they learned alot:
Lessons:
- Need more bite size pieces
- Difficult to learn about the tool as you slingshot a campaign.
- Set realistic expectations
- Pick the right dates
- Small experiments add up
- Dedicate realistic amount of time.
- Influencers are more valuable than donors (see how American Cancer Society tries this http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7154696938&ref=s)

Takeaway: This is not about the end result. It is about the experiment.
b. National Wildlife Federation - Used social media, namely digg and stumbleupon to generate traffic to their site, develop brand new audiences and brand recogintion. See thier facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/pages/National-Wildlife-Federation/5644748986?ref=s
Stumble and Digg are currently top referrers for nwf.org In the past NWF, the site has received 100K page views. 95% new visitors from these sources.

Digg– 65% male and gets a lot of traffic. International. Front page of dig makes a big difference. Once it hits home page it can generate 30K page views. This moved the traffic from 15k to 43K which generate more review of other parts of the site. Not just traffic, but comments. When something goes popular on Digg is gets popular and then posted to RSS feeds. Bloggers go on to the site to generate content. Increase through reposting and references.

How to work with Digg.
- Have to work as part of the community.
- Always submit quality content.
- Create relationships.

"StumbleUpon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been stumbled upon by other web-users" - BBC News.
4.5 million members, 1.5 unique vistors, 56% male
- Download it and use the tool bar.
- Push people to your site and use targeted marketing.
- Stumble upon people spend longer on site and bounce rate is lower.
- Part of the investment is Profile Development.
Challenges : Part of the job but it takes time to develop profile, over time. Social media takes time but it is a cheaper way to develop a profile.

c. Humane Society Response to Michael Vick Case
Tie online efforts to list building or donation only.
You Tube Video Contest
- Promoted voting through integrated strategy
- Featured on Web site
- Blogs and bulletins on their social networks
- Created web badges
Results:
- Increased email file
- Raised awareness about issue
- Obtained original content
- Engaged people in the issue
Tangible outcomes
- 22 submissions
- 2500 new list members
- 17K page views of winner page
- 18.5 K People Choice Award
- 90K video views of winning video
Measurement Tools/ ROI
Source Links from Getactive – new list members
Exposure – page views from stats, poll count
Time spent on the page

Intangible outcomes
- Discussion
- Blogging
- Buzz online
- Earned media

How do you measure buzz: link love?
- Need to do more blogger outreach.
- Visual Sciences for measurement.
- A lot of reference with stumble upon
- People are already active in sharing their stuff on stumble upon
- *way of measuring generating buzz sign up for google RSS alerts
- aggregated and sent to you every week/day/ as it happens

Worth it?
- Compare to past contests
- Compare to similar contests
- Lull seals.
- Don’t get stuck on numbers
- Track your time
- Learn from failures
- Try new things
- Make an ROI evaluation cechklist
- Pick one URL to market
- Make it easy as possible for the user
- Designate one progject manager
- Opt-in policy and permissions
- Generate more submissions by embracing op culture and celebrities
- Learn from first campaign and then spend time creating buzz
- Consider tangible and intangible results
- Time is money.


4. ONLINE FUNDRAISING DETAILS

Two primary strategies: