We have a Facebook Cause. We set this cause up about 6 or 8 months ago and so far have 34 members and have raised $115. We are getting ready to roll out a comprehensive social media campaign over the summer and are taking a hard look at our Facebook Cause. While large campaigns like Stop Global Warning and Save Darfur have hundreds of thousands of members, their donations seem out of line with the membership. So, what I’m seeing is that even though your cause may have a gazillion members, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are donating.
Philanthropy.com posted Is Facebook’s Fund Raising a Bust? on their blog on June 2. Clearly, there is some skepticism regarding the effectiveness of Causes for fundraising.
Frogloop from Care2 is a fantastic blog as a whole. If you are working through the ins and outs of marketing your non-profit, get a feed. Among the huge repository of information is this little nugget – a total assessment of Facebook Causes written a couple of months after it was launched. It’s very informative and includes some great tips.
We plan to continue to promote our FB Cause to see what we can get from it, but I’d like to know what experiences others are having. Please share.
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So far, I agree that Facebook has proven to be much better at building community than actual fundraising.
We work with nonprofit camps to help them understand how to utilize technology to reach out to alumni and raise money. In the past, camps have had more general “Support Camp” Causes that have had limited success. However, we are beginning to test more focused Causes on Facebook. I believe that more specialized Causes that can be “owned” by the Facebook community have the potential to be much more successful. For example, “One more Camper to Camp next Summer” to fund a camp scholarship; or “Bring WiFi Access to Camp” to fund improving the technology infrastructure at camp. These Causes might even be branded as Facebook community gifts, such as “The Facebook Community Camp Scholarship Fund.”
Despite the limited funds raised so far, I suspect Facebook Causes can be successful. We just need to figure out how to get these growing communities excited about owning a particular Cause.
I hope to have some results of these tests on our blog in the next month or so.