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Friday May 02, 2008
People to people fundraising and web 2.0 - what does it mean for fundraisers?
I went to two conferences this week, both of with featured sessions on social networking and fundraising. The first was "Communicating Success" on Wednesday, which attracted a mixed bag of fundraisers and comms people, and the second took place yesterday afternoon and was purely focussed on "people to people" fundraising, social networking and web2.0.
Ted Hart, the US-based online fundraising guru was at both, and the yesterday's seminar was also the launch of his new book "People to People Fundraising – social networking and web 2.0 for charities".
Both were really useful, and helped to shed some light on what can sometimes seem like a bit of a rudderless mess down here in the fundraising world.
To grossly paraphrase the key points from both seminars (and I hope I'm not stealing anyone's thunder here):
- People to people fundraising online is just the same as offline – it's all about relationships and it's what fundraisers have been doing since the cows came home;
- The goal is "less fundraising, more inspiring";
- As things stand, charities aren't raising significant money from Facebook. There's a stack of data to back this up – Clint O'Brien from Care2 had some really interesting stats about the amounts most non-profits are generating from Facebook (eg. average donation per supporter on Facebook is $1.24). Having said that, Allan Benamer has some interesting stats on the Causes application – which has processed around $2 million in one year;
- Charities (and fundraisers) need to be better at "getting out of the way". Increasingly, donors want to share experiences with the charities they support – the more authentic, the better;
- This also presents huge challenges in terms of reporting impact. Look at www.kiva.org – a site that's extremely effective at putting you in contact with the people you're supporting;
- Organisational models need to change. Silo working won't work in this multi-disciplinary world, you need input from Marketing, Comms, Fundraising and Web teams.
For me, some of the key challenges facing fundraisers are:
- How do we build a business case for investing time and money in fundraising from social networks, especially when we know it's not a quick win financially (check out Frog Loop's Social ROI calculator for one take on this);
- Where does this sit within the organisation? If we work in silos, fundraising from social networks will never reach it's true potential;
- How can we make an individual's interaction with our charity as authentic as possible? And how can we "get out the way" when we really need to?
- How do we avoid (or at least remain mindful of) potentially asking our beneficiaries for money, given that they inhabit this web 2.0 world as well?
This final point is particularly pertinent for us here at YouthNet. As a purely online charity, separating the audience that needs and benefits from our content from those that can and want to support us is a challenge. The last thing we want to do is make anyone feel like they have to support us in return for finding the information they need on our sites – whether it's www.do-it.org.uk or www.TheSite.org.
Plenty of challenges there then. Anyone have any thoughts?
P.S. In answer to Peter Deitz's question "Is People to People fundraising dead, or just getting started?" – my two pennies worth is that we're just working it out. For me, the exciting thing is we're just working out what does and doesn't work, and where to focus our energies. So, it's a time for experimentation, openness and willingness to make some mistakes.
The question has opened up some interesting debate – check out the Justgiving blog for their view.Posted by Sam Thomas ( 9:04 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
1. The problem is people aren't used to spending money on their social network site of choice - so it will take a cultural shift for people to feel comfortable donating like this.
2. Are the people most regularly using social networks likely to be key donors? Well maybe not now but certainly in the future.
3. You have to be there - it may not be the panacea but social networking is here to stay and there must be ways to fundraise successfully.
So Sam your spot on - let's try some stuff out and see what happens...
Posted by James on May 07, 2008 at 08:19 AM GMT+00:00 #