Charities Look to New Social-Network Managers to Bolster Fund-Raising Efforts

While many organizations are hiring new staff members to help them gain a higher profile on social networks, most groups also hope the new employees will bolster fund-raising efforts.

Nearly half of nonprofit groups say that fund raising is an important part of their social-media strategy, second only to promoting the organization (at 92 percent), according to the Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report, released in April by the Nonprofit Technology Network.

Most charities, about four out of 10, gravitate to Facebook, deeming it the best way to raise money.

While only 3.5 percent of groups surveyed have raised $10,000 or more through Facebook, about eight out of 10 have raised up to $1,000 that way in the past year. Only 12 percent use Twitter to seek donations.

Texting Support

Despite those modest numbers, some groups have found that Twitter and other online tools can be effective in connecting with donors.

Soon after Wendy Harman was named director of social media for the American Red Cross, she says her bosses asked her to monitor the “evil bloggers who were saying bad things about the organization.”

But she quickly found that 98 percent of those online critics were passionate supporters of the American Red Cross and were mainly looking for more ways to interact with the charity. By reaching out to those people on social networks, Ms. Harman has turned them into supporters who help the charity spread its message. Perhaps nothing showed quite how much that effort paid off until the charity sought to persuade people to support Haiti relief efforts by sending text messages shortly after the country suffered a devastating earthquake in January. In 48 hours, the American Red Cross raised $3-million for Haiti relief largely with the help of 2.3 million Twitter messages posted by Red Cross supporters, Ms. Harman says. Many of the charity’s supporters made their own cellphone donations and sent messages to their Twitter followers with instructions on how to give. “Not only were they passing the information along,” she says, “but they took action. It was almost like a social-pressure thing.”

‘That’s a Gold Mine’

By encouraging donors to use social-media tools when they see them on a Web site or in e-mail messages, Carie Lewis, director of emerging media at the Humane Society of the United States, has turned her role into a multidimensional one: that of an online fund raiser.

Through her work, the Humane Society has raised $372,000 on Facebook Causes from its 13 million supporters on the social network. The organization in April raised $20,000 in one week through Causes for a campaign to save endangered seals, says Ms. Lewis. She has also been able to identify who solicits the most donations on Facebook on behalf of the Humane Society, who recruits the biggest number of friends to donate, and who gives the most, all information that has helped the organization in other ways than just dollars and cents. “That’s a gold mine for grabbing influencers,” she says.

So far, her efforts have been an unqualified success, says Geoff Handy, vice president of online communications and Ms. Lewis’s boss. “The entire investment of Carie and her team is paid for and then some by donations through social media,” he says.

In fact, 5 percent of the charity’s online income comes from promotions on Facebook and other social media, he adds. These efforts have catapulted the Humane Society of the United States to being one of three organizations that has raised the most on Facebook Causes.

This success helped allay fears from the charity’s leaders about what social media would contribute to the organization. Ms. Lewis says she showed the board and top executives the amount of money she had raised, the number of e-mail addresses she acquired, and other measurements that they readily understood. “That’s when, I think, the light bulbs went off,” she says.

False Starts

Even as charities take steps to professionalize how they work on social networks, they expect to make many mistakes and adjustments.

Going full-throttle in social media with fund raising can backfire. Some supporters feel such a personal connection with their charities through social media that they are often taken aback when the organization asks them for money on Twitter or Facebook. This is especially true for those who already receive fund-raising appeals through e-mail or the mail, says Danielle Brigida, digital marketing manager at the National Wildlife Federation. “Not that it’s wrong to ask them for money, but we’re still trying to figure out how best to engage people.”

She believes that generating revenue can only come from first creating great relationships on social media. And if it doesn’t work, she says: “The best thing you can do as an organization is to be agile. Fail fast and fail quickly.”

GlobalGiving, a nonprofit that connects online donors with overseas development projects, stopped entering contests run by corporations when its social-media supporters just didn’t bite.

“Contests don’t necessarily work for us,” says Alison McQuade, GlobalGiving’s online marketing manager. “It just didn’t get the engagement that other organizations were getting.”

Marc Sirkin, chief community officer at Autism Speaks, believes there’s great potential in social media as a fund-raising tool so he’s looking to raise $100,000 each year through Facebook, Twitter, and the like. “We’re trying to force ourselves to think that idea because if we don’t, we’re never going to discover the $10-million idea,” he says.

That dream can only take one so far, though. Some ideas just don’t work.

Take text-message fund raising, for example. Since about half of the total revenue that Autism Speaks generates comes from 80 annual fund-raising walks, Mr. Sirkin thought it would be an easy task to ask walkers to send a text message promising a $10 gift for the group after these events.

“It just didn’t work,” Mr. Sirkin says. Also a “major failure” was an effort to use social media to persuade people to raise money as part of the Autism Speaks 400, a racecar event.

Mr. Sirkin says the charity started too late, but that it was still a good “learning experience.”