Community Funds’ Online ‘Town Squares’ Link Charities and Donors

George Boosey, a longtime public-radio executive in Durham, N.C., was looking to donate some time and expertise to a local charity. Checking out the organization profiles on a site created by the Triangle Community Foundation, he was intrigued by the mission of Kids Voting Durham.

He fired off a quick e-mail message and was soon talking on the phone to Carolyn Kreuger, a program director at the group, which helps young people find ways to get involved in the political process.

Since he began volunteering with the charity in March, Mr. Boosey has helped spread its message in the news media, lent a hand with voter-education efforts, and now serves on the board of directors. The foundation’s Web site, called Triangle Gives Back, “gave me a chance to look at various nonprofits and figure out the best fit,” Mr. Boosey says. “I like working with children and I’m interested in politics, so it was the perfect match. If it hadn’t been for the Web site, I’m not sure if I would have ever known the organization existed.”

Building Networks

Triangle is part of a growing trend, as community funds grapple with the recession and the challenges of raising awareness and connecting donors and volunteers with nonprofit groups and causes. Many community foundation are moving into social networking, reaching beyond static Web sites to serve as dynamic virtual clearinghouses or “town squares” that hold conversations between local charities, citizens, donors, and volunteers.

Triangle Gives Back, which seeks to make it easy for donors and volunteers to connect with charities in North Carolina’s Triangle region, which encompasses the cities of Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, has received more than 60,000 “hits” since it went live in February. To date, more than 250 charities and 380 individuals have profiles posted on the site. The profiles of charities include their contact information, information about their missions, news about forthcoming events and developments, pleas for money, and a listing of volunteer opportunities. Profiles of individuals, usually prospective donors or volunteers, include information about the causes that interest them.

“We wanted a Web site that was innovative and had a social-networking element so people and organizations could create profiles and then link up according to their interests,” says Andrea Bazán, president of the Triangle Community Foundation, in Durham. “If people don’t feel connected to the community, it’s less likely they are giving back.”

Community fund leaders say they are hoping to develop some measurements of whether the updated sites are generating more gifts or volunteerism. So far, the evidence is largely anecdotal.

In North Carolina, Triangle Gives Back grew out of soul searching by academic, business, and philanthropic leaders. They had formed a committee in the fall of 2008 to assess why there wasn’t a higher level of civic involvement in the region.

“We realized there were two different pictures of our community,” Ms. Bazán says. “We live in a great region that consistently ranks in the top 10 for places to live in the country, but we questioned why we weren’t ranked high in giving back as well.”

A report published last year by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Program on Public Life revealed that the Triangle region lagged behind in giving compared with similar locales. The report stated that “the Triangle has a rather shallow base of foundations and philanthropic assets.” It cited the transient nature of the area — with nearly half of all residents not natives — as one barrier to creating strong connections with its 5,200 nonprofit organizations.

The sprawling geography and makeup of the region, which encompasses many different cities, towns, and communities, was cited as another factor that made it difficult to focus philanthropic efforts and get people involved in volunteering.

In response to the report, the community fund laid out a plan to increase giving in the region, to encourage more strategic giving to maximize the dollars available, and to strengthen the connections between the people living in the area to their local communities.

‘More Organic’

The new Web site is designed to strengthen those ties, and encourage more giving. The site allows volunteers and donors to type in key words such as “homeless,” “substance abuse,” or “children” to instantly see profiles of charities committed to those causes, and connect with others who are also interested in those causes.

Triangle Community Foundation facilitates the site and monitors what people post, but with a light touch, says Ms. Bazán.

“We did not want the community foundation to be heavy-handed and controlling,” she says.

“If you’re Jane Smith and you want to get involved with Habitat for Humanity,” she says, “you can communicate with them directly through the site, and that relationship can really fly.”

After several months of operation, says Ms. Bazán, “‘What is the impact?’ is a question we have to ask. Are the nonprofit organizations getting any traction? Are these connections producing results? We want to measure the value this brings to our community.”

Ms. Kreuger, of Kids Voting Durham, says the value of the site is about “creating possibilities.”

“It’s much more organic in the way charities and volunteers can connect and learn about one another,” she says. “It’s a central clearinghouse that provides enough information about a charity that it can engage a volunteer’s imagination and encourage them to pick up the phone.”

The need for an interactive community calendar largely drove the creation of YourBrookline.org, a Web site created by the Brookline Community Foundation that is touted as a “new town square” for the Boston suburb.

Groups and individuals can use the free site to interact with their neighbors, or create a private space on the site to connect only with those interested in a particular charity or cause.

The site, which went live in March, is already being used by a wide range of local charities and interest groups. “It’s been quickly populated with content, some from groups we didn’t even know existed,” says Sara Dassel, program manager at the Brookline Community Foundation. She adds, “This fulfills part of our mission of raising awareness and knitting this community together.”

For the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta, the redesign in February of its Web site grew out of an effort to better define the foundation’s brand and the need to more clearly explain how the foundation does its work and how it will measure its results.

“People come to us for personalized service and our community knowledge, and frankly we weren’t doing a very good job of showcasing that knowledge,” says Lauren Norton Welsh, vice president of marketing and communications for the fund.

‘Strategy First’

Further, the foundation realized that many Atlantans were unaware of local needs and charities’ work throughout the sprawling metropolitan region.

The revamped Web site seeks to deal with those issues by providing simplified instructions for grant applications, detailed information about a range of issues and causes in the region, and interactive maps of the towns and cities served by the foundation and other area nonprofit organizations.

The site also has social-network capabilities, though Ms. Welsh says the organization is proceeding cautiously: “We’re excited to get into more-interactive social media, but we also realize you have to consider the strategy first.”

Ms. Bazán of the Triangle Community Foundation says foremost in the minds of community-fund leaders should be the importance of helping donors, volunteers, and charities build stronger ties.

“People do want to feel connected — there’s a lot of hunger for that out there,” she says. “There are people who want to give back who don’t know how. If you present the information to them on the Web in a fun, attractive, and interactive way, it gets them engaged.”