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Mar 25, 2010

Relationships and Online Fundraising

Posted by: SethG

While catching up on some reading, I read one of my favorite blogger’s, Debra Askanase, post on Principles of Social Media Fundraising. She summarizes some key points that integrate community organizing best practices with online fundraising best practices to suggest the following criteria for effective social media fundraising.

• Link your fundraising project to the larger cause movement to give it emphasis and compelling context
• Power mapping: ID influencers, key donors, and how the donors will share and influence
• Develop online influencers and key online donors into organizational leaders
• Be where the people are: make sure that online activity within the campaign occurs where your stakeholders are
• Transparency means: broadcast as much about the campaign, on the campaign site and social media, as it happensLo
• The following slideshow that she shared from a recent presentation (with credit being made to Amy Sample Ward for contributions of screen shots from the Tweetsgiving campaign) extends and elaborates on these ideas.

Her post reminded me of a line that Geoff Livingsting wrote in a blog post entitled Creating Movements

“Create relationships instead of transactions.”

Whether fundraising, community organizing, teaching, running a successful business or any similar human venture that involves interaction between two or more people, these initiatives all share relationships as a foundational element that drives success. I agree completely with Debra and others that when it comes to online and social fundraising efforts, building relationships, engaging and connecting with supporters (existing or potential) is critical. Debra’s bulleted list above strikes me as a great series of actionable principles that lead to furthering connections, activating them, and guiding them towards desirable financial results.

Assets like strong leadership, well-formed copy, and engaging design solutions are complimentary and seek to further drive the effort towards cultivating relationships that lead to desired fundraising outcomes. Similarly, technology can also play a significant role in supporting campaign efforts to connect and address the actionable items noted above. Assessing Giving Impact’s ability to support Debra’s recommendations, we believe that we can play a key roll in the following:

• provide easy to use tools to promote the campaign across multiple online channels and reach supporters where they are;
• provide key stakeholders with campaign tools including links, widgets, and the ability to share to key social networks that allow them to actively solicit support;
• provide the ability for anyone to share the campaign with their followers or friends;
• and support transparency by allowing organizations to provide a meaningful campaign description that is included in the widget, on the initial donation page, and in the wall post made from a share to Facebook.

These bullets are just in response to Debra’s specific recommendations. In addition, we feel the following are also meaningful features:

• the ability to have all donations and shares through Giving Impact be tracked to help monitor activity and measure success;
• a smartly designed solution that is easy to use;
• and a brandable solution to help supporters feel further connected to the organization they are supporting through out the sharing and donation process.

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