More Charities Are on Social Networks — but Few Have Raised Much

As membership on social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter continues to explode, charities are grappling with uncertainty about whether the networks will become powerful fund-raising tools.

Nearly 75 percent of 980 nonprofit officials who participated in a new study said their organizations were using Facebook — the most popular online social network among those surveyed. The average number of people who participate in the Facebook’s charity sections for these organizations is 1,369.

But few of those people are giving to charity — less than 2 percent of survey respondents said their organizations have raised $10,000 or more with Facebook. The survey was sponsored by the Nonprofit Technology Network and two companies — Common Knowledge and ThePort — that help charities use the Web to attract support.

‘Jump In and Do It’

The findings of the new survey, which focused heavily on organizations with budgets of $5-million or less, suggest that big charities have been somewhat slower than small ones to use social-networking tools.

For the past four years, The Chronicle has been tracking charity interest in social-networking tools as part of its annual survey on online fund raising; Participants in the study are among the 400 American charities that raise the most money from private sources. Some 55 percent of the groups said this year they were using Facebook to raise money, for example. And the share of charities experimenting with blogging, text messages, and other newer technologies in their fund raising work has risen from 7 percent in 2006 to 41 percent in 2009. But experts are divided on whether those approaches will ever make a difference in producing revenue.

“This is huge for nonprofit fund raising,” says Tanya Zumach, senior director of online strategy at the Metropolitan Group, a consulting company in Portland, Ore. She predicts that as social-networking sites grow, charities will see diminishing numbers of people joining e-mail lists or responding to e-mail solicitations.

Ms. Zumach’s social-networking advice to charities: “Just jump in and do it. Devote an hour a week to it. If you don’t have anything set up, just take the steps.”

But Mark Rovner, a consultant in online fund raising, in Takoma Park, Md., says that the excitement over fund raising through social networks is “more hype than reality.”

He worries that the novelty of the medium may be drawing fund raisers away from other communication channels such as blogs and online video just as they are gaining currency with masses of donors. “We’re talking about Twitter and Web 3.0 and stuff that tiny fractions of the world are embracing, and we’re letting go of the things that are starting to be useful,” he says.

Facing Facebook

Other experts, however, argue that fund-raising returns from Facebook and other social networks have grown and will continue to rise.

Facebook, they note, is now used by 200 million people, and the fastest-growing group of people who join the network is women over 55. A March report by the media-research company Nielsen found that social networking and blogging have now surpassed e-mail as the most popular online activities.

Facebook offers an online charitable giving tool, called Causes, that enables the site’s users to declare themselves as supporters of a particular cause. But it has yet to produce much money for many of the thousands of nonprofit groups that use it to attract supporters through Facebook.

Joe Green, who created Causes, says the tool has helped raise nearly $8-million in total in the two years since it got started, and now processes $30,000 to $45,000 in donations every day — up from just $3,000 a day one year ago — with a median gift of $25. The returns, he says, are only likely to grow as Causes finds new ways to attract supporters. For instance, it is now testing a birthday promotion that would make it easy for Facebook users to ask their friends to contribute to charity in lieu of buying them gifts.

Mr. Green argues that Facebook and other social networks are making it easier for small, new groups to compete against larger ones. For instance, the two-year-old O Campaign for Cancer Prevention, a cancer-research charity, has attracted more than 4.6-million members and raised $87,000 through Facebook. A far larger group, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has attracted 495,762 Facebook members and has collected $21,388 through the site.

Indirect Returns

But most nonprofit officials say that, so far, social-networking sites are more valuable for forming online relationships with potential donors and volunteers than for raising money. A more important measure of the success of social networks, they say, is not how much money they bring in, but how many of its users they attract, and the quantity and quality of interaction on the site.

Such indirect returns, however, pose challenges for charities figuring how much time and resources to devote to social networking. The Nonprofit Technology Network survey found that four out of five nonprofit organizations have allocated at least a quarter of a full-time staff member’s working hours to maintaining social networks. More than half of the respondents said they planned to increase the amount of staff time spent on social-networking sites over the next year.

Still, charities are struggling with the level of personalization and interaction required to sustain relationships on social-networking sites, says Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network.

“If you think about traditional direct mail, or even traditional e-mail, you’re having one conversation with a thousand people,” she says. “Now you’re trying to have a thousand conversations with a thousand people. This takes a lot of time.”

Then there’s the challenge of keeping people’s attention on social-networking sites that bombard users with minute-by-minute updates, says Joseph Mettimano, vice president of advocacy at World Vision, the international-relief organization.

World Vision has created a way to grab people’s attention in a new campaign promoted on Facebook called Night of Nets, which seeks to inspire college and church groups to hold local “sleep-out” events, in which participants sleep outside under mosquito nets and collect pledges from friends and others after they make it through the night. The money is used to distribute bed nets to African children to prevent the spread of malaria.

As part of the campaign, World Vision created an eye-catching feature that allows people to turn the photo of themselves red on their Facebook profile page, making it appear as though they are menaced by a giant mosquito. Every time Facebook members use the feature to change their profile photo, the site automatically alerts everyone else in their networks, notes Mr. Mettimano: “That’s the trick of trying to make your efforts stand out.”

Another approach to using Facebook has helped propel the Nature Conservancy into the handful of charities that have raised more than $100,000 through the social network.

Altogether the conservancy has raised $198,000 through the site, and the most money — $162,000 — has come from Lil Green Patch, a game that allows Facebook users to plant and tend virtual gardens on their profile pages. Every time somebody adds to his or her garden or makes a gift of a virtual plant to friends, the game’s developer gives a portion of the advertising revenue it receives to the Nature Conservancy.

Most charities, however, are still a long way from achieving results like the Nature Conservancy’s, even as they glimpse the potential of online social networks to help them reach new supporters. For example, working on World Vision’s Night of Nets campaign, Mr. Mettimano has been impressed that Facebook, in less than a month, has helped the charity recruit 40 schools and churches that will hold local events to support the campaign.

But the key question remains. “How much money do we think it will make?” Mr. Mettimano asks. “To be perfectly honest, we don’t know.”