Facebook’s Pros and Cons for Nonprofits

Use Facebook for:

Helping donors raise money from their peers

Many charity supporters use the social network to solicit donations from their friends, such as when they participate in walkathons. Twenty-eight percent of the traffic referred to charities’ fundraising pages originate from Facebook, says a new study of 135 peer-to-peer drives by Artez Interactive, a company that sells online fundraising services to nonprofits. The study found that visitors responding to a peer-to-peer request make a gift 23 percent of the time.

Acquiring data on potential donors

Facebook can help a charity see the connections between its pages’ “fans” and others who “like” and “share” its posts. It also can help nonprofits acquire potential supporters’ email addresses—and to make an appeal for donations later.

Educating supporters—and pushing them to action

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or Rainn, has found that infographics in Facebook posts (right) have been particularly effective in getting its message across to users of the social network, says Katherine Hull Fliflet, Rainn’s vice president for communications.

And OurTime.org (above), which encourages political action by millennials, registered 350,000 voters in 2012. It spent less than $1 per voter, largely because of its use of Facebook to get the word out, says Jarrett Moreno, OurTime.org’s founder.

Don’t use Facebook for:

Raising money directly

Only 2 percent of nonprofits in the United States raised from $10,000 to $25,000 through Facebook in a 12-month period, and 1 percent raised from $25,000 to $100,000, according to a report released last year by Blackbaud, a fundraising-software company.