What is the Future of Fundraising?

A special guest post from our friend Ehren Foss over @ helpattack.

Last month we took some time to plot the history of social media fundraising, and summarized our findings into 10 hard-won lessons of raising money on social networks. It’s relatively easy, with hindsight, to look into the past. But what about the future? What might happen in 2012, or 2015, as more organizations look to their online communities for additional support?

#1 Rewards for Sharing Content

It was tough not to use the biz-speak “incentivize” content in the headline, but this is a very important, and not well understood, part of online campaigns. When Ashton Kutcher donated $1 per MySpace follower to Habitat for Humanity in 2006, he was basically saying “If you follow me, I’ll reward you with the good feeling of knowing another $1 went to a cause you support.”

That basic model continues today – Southwest Airlines gave $1 per #SWAAFF hashtag, Pepto Bismol gave 8 Thanksgiving meals per retweet, and on HelpAttack! organizations like Progress Texas and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are using the Tweets of certain users to drive support.

I think we’re just scratching the surface. As the internet evolves, the cost and difficulty of tracking certain kinds of online actions continues to drop. Thanks to open data interfaces and great tools, we can easily count Flickr uploads, blog comments, YouTube uploads, online gaming achievements, every time someone opens an email or links to a certain URL.

• What if an organization asked their supporters to write a blog post about how that organization has helped them, while a matching donor contributes $10 per blog post? Those people will probably link to the organization in their posts too, improving search engine rankings.
• What if Occupy Wall Street, fighting for mainstream media attention and funds, had asked armchair supporters to give 1c, 5c, or 25c each time #OccupyWallStreet is mentioned on Twitter? As more people participate with donations, the incentive to use the hashtag increases, so more people use the tag, so more people hear about the campaign, and so on.
• What if, instead of those weird, inspiration chain letter emails your aunt always sends you, you receive an email from her where she tells you she’s agreed to give $10 to an organization you support, only if you forward the email to 10 people you know, and they open it?

In these three examples, donations, or potential donations, are used to urge people to take certain actions online. When you those actions up, they can have huge benefits!

#2 Online Currencies

Currently, each organization, or third party tool, that handles your donation has a different donation infrastructure set up. Some use PayPal, some use Authorize.net, some use FirstGiving. This is why you have to enter your credit card again and again! Once you have your payment details stored, you can start using “Give Now” buttons (like Amazon’s One Click Shopping). These gateways also have different minimum donations, policies for tax deductions, currencies, and international policies. It’s confusing!

At some point, someone will figure out how to make this easier for donors worldwide. That someone, rather than being a donation company, will probably be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google, BitCoin, or maybe even Weibo. Apple is notoriously stubborn on the issue, but at some point one of these companies will decide that the benefits of helping society, alongside those of cause marketing and corporate social responsibility, outweigh the benefits of collecting 30% of Facebook Credits or iTunes transactions going to a verified nonprofit or NGO.

Online currencies make it easier to give micro-donations, across borders, in creative ways that harness the social power of the internet. Start looking at the size of those communities versus the cost of implementing donations to your cause in that medium. Worth it yet? It will be.

#3 Respect Your Elders

Billions of dollars of knowledge, infrastructure, study, and effort have gone into direct mail fundraising. The online medium is fundamentally different, but many of the lessons, techniques, and best practices apply in extremely similar ways.

Direct mail pieces are costly to produce: You need to design them, test them, print them, track them, and handle the responses. I think we’ll see more online “pieces” like Apps, Facebook tabs, and websites, that are more involved, costly, and higher quality than what we’ve seen so far, because organizations can invest what they would have spent on postage in a richer online experience.

The direct mail professionals who are retiring are an extremely valuable resource. They know that sometimes you have to spend money to make money, and they know how to track every last little detail. Go out for coffee and learn about the kinds of things you’ll be doing online in 5 years.

We aren’t the only ones guessing what might happen in the future of online fundraising, and remember that most pundits are wrong most of the time. What do you think will happen in the year 2017?

SOPA + PIPA? What does it mean?

A special guest post from Ehren Foss, CEO of HelpAttack!

In terms of demonstrating the power of online communities to have an
impact in the very offline process of legislation, today is an amazing
day.  Wikipedia, Google, and many other sites are  putting the SOPA
and PIPA legislation, and their opposition to it, front and center,
and individuals are responding strongly as well.  What could be wrong?

Even if these bills are defeated, they will return, and they will
never be perfect.  We need great, expert organizations with effective
tactics to have the resources to continue their work.  Did you change
your Twitter avatar?  Great!  Did you black out your website, no
matter how small? Wonderful!  It’s time to do more.
Please donate to one of these organizations, of one of your choosing,
right now.  The sooner the funds reach them, the sooner they will have
the resources to do more positive things that we can’t do while
looking at our computer screens, changing our Twitter pictures, or
adding Javascript to our sites.

Electronic Frontier Foundation:  https://supporters.eff.org/donate
American Civil Liberties Union: http://action.aclu.org/
Sunlight Foundation: http://sunlightfoundation.com/donate/
Open Congress: http://www.opencongress.org/donate

AFTER you’ve done that, please consider sustaining your support by
creating an ongoing HelpAttack! pledge like this one.

Are you seeing Invisible Dogs?

Well I want you to! As many of you know I have been doing some work for Best Friends Animal Society (@BFAS) around Digital Strategy and creating online movements to solve social issues. Our newest digital movement is “The Invisible Dogs Campaign“(#InvisibleDogs). We are starting with the smile that comes to people’s faces when they see the iconic “invisible dog” leash from the 80′s and 90′s, and turning that into a real message about adopting dogs lost in the shelters system. These “invisible dogs” are often found in city shelters, forgotten about by most people and rescue groups and facing tremendous odds to get adopted.

Our whole digital movement is to make these “invisible dogs” visible for people in generation X and Y. We are using everything from traditional social media, check-ins, self organized meet-ups to online video advertising to create something beyond a campaign to save these animals. Our most interesting push so far is using User Generated Content to identify dogs that need help (As seen here using people’s mobile phones) and working with FourSquare on a National Shelter Check In Day in November. The content, conversations and online social sharing tsunami generated by this digital movement will help us save thousands of dogs into 2012.

Will you join the movement by taking the pledge at www.invisibledogs.org and sharing it with at least 10 people?

Who’s listening to who? Online Dashboards

Share Online Engagement – Build a Social Media Dashboard

This is very similar to the one I built for the American Cancer Society. However this one takes a lot less work and does more!

Guest post by Haila Yates, Communications and Outreach Manager, Greenlights for Nonprofit Success

A social media dashboard is an easy way to share a variety of online engagement in a single view. A communications or marketing professional may have a daily routine of checking a variety of pages and accounts to stay on top of the social media conversations relevant to their organization, but it’s just as important that the rest of an org’s staff, board and other constituents stay engaged.

At Greenlights we have a social media dashboard that pulls together a view of our online activities, including tweets by Greenlights and about Greenlights, flickr photos, Google alerts to capture media and blog mentions, Facebook and YouTube content, plus feeds from a variety of blogs our staff reads. Staff and interns at Greenlights are encouraged to set the Greenlights dashboard as their homepage (or one of their homepage tabs) so that they’re always informed about our online presence and can choose to engage in ways they’re comfortable with.

We recently created a social media dashboard for our upcoming event, the Texas Nonprofit Summit. The TXNS dashboard displays tweets about the event, including a twitter search for the event hashtag – #TXNS, a feed created from a twitter list of event speakers, Google alerts to capture articles and blog posts about the event, blog feeds from speakers, a flickr module that gathers photos with our event tags, and a module that simply links back to our main Texas Nonprofit Summit webpage. We’re sharing this dashboard with our entire Greenlights community (not just event participants) via twitter, email and we’re including a QR code to the dashboard in the event program.

Both of our dashboards were created using Netvibes. A free service that’s ideal for setting up personal, private dashboards, but also allows one public dashboard per account.

Greenlights for Nonprofit Success is a 501(c)(3) based in Austin, Tx that strengthens other nonprofits for extraordinary impact and performance by providing a variety of services and resources that are either free or affordable, including management consulting services, professional development workshops and conferences, in-depth research, a membership program and more.