September 19, 2010 | Read Time: 8 minutes
From the time the Thanksgiving holiday wrapped up last year through New Year’s Day, it was hard to miss the American Red Cross’s appeal called “Give the Gift That Saves the Day.”
That theme appeared in traditional places—in paid ads on radio, television, and in print, plus billboards. It showed up on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and in a new gift catalog the charity used to seek year-end donations.
Peggy Dyer, the Red Cross’s chief marketing officer, says the appeal did better than expected and the charity is repeating it again this year.
In a struggling economy, many other charities will also be conducting year-end campaigns that mix e-mail, social media, traditional mailings, and advertising. What’s more, many of them will be making pitches for gifts right up until New Year’s instead of wrapping up earlier as they did in the past.
Charities have little choice, says Ms. Dyer. “This is a busy time of year for donors, and it is cluttered in terms of competing messages. It is all the more important for us to make a bigger impact.”
Growth in Hard Times
While charities are using every approach they can to attract donations, many groups are putting their bets on online giving this holiday season. At a time when most fund-raising methods—including direct mail, special events, and big-gift appeals—have faltered, online donations continue to grow.
Network for Good, a nonprofit organization that processes online gifts to charities, found that contributions rose by 25 percent, to $31.4-million, in December 2009, compared with the same period in 2008.
And so far this year, both Blackbaud and Convio, two software companies that each help thousands of charities raise money online, report that contributions have grown by 20 percent or more, even without counting the surge of online donations after the Haiti earthquake in January.
Donations made online during the holidays tend to be much larger than at other times: The average gift processed by Convio in December 2009 was $127, compared with $67.54 during the rest of last year.
Blackbaud reports that 77 percent of its clients last year received at least one online gift of $1,000, and a large percentage of them were made at year end.
To improve their ability to secure such gifts during the busy year-end season, some charities have recently made small changes to their Web sites that can make a big difference, says Nick Allen, a San Francisco online fund-raising consultant.
He has been working with seven national charities in recent months on ways to increase the number of people who make a gift after landing on the donation pages of the organizations’ Web sites.
The charities are using a free tool from Google known as a “Web site optimizer” to figure out whether changes in layout, design, language, and other elements can make a difference in persuading people to give.
“Only 10 to 15 percent of the people who come to donation pages actually give,” Mr. Allen says. But as a result of the tests, he says, one charity has increased the number of people who donate through its Web site by 40 percent.
A Valuable Network
Like the Red Cross, a growing number of charities will use social networks to expand holiday-season gifts, says Tad Druart, Convio’s director of corporate communications. More charities are sending out e-mail appeals that also provide recipients with information they can share on a Facebook page or send to all their followers on Twitter, he says. “Nonprofits are getting smarter about using this stuff.”
ShelterBox USA, a charity in Lakewood Ranch, Fla., that provides disaster victims with tents and other survival tools in a distinctive box, is using its networks on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere to urge donors and volunteers to tell everyone they know to do their holiday shopping through a Web site called GoodSearch. A portion of GoodSearch’s proceeds go to charities chosen by people who buy goods and services through the site, and it doesn’t charge those nonprofits anything.
“We want to saturate every free online media space there is,” says Veronica Brandon Miller, ShelterBox’s executive director.
In the past year, ShelterBox has learned just how powerful free online tools like the shopping site and social-networking hubs such as Facebook and Twitter can be. When she joined ShelterBox in August 2009, it was in the red, Ms. Miller says. “We had no money, so I turned to social media.” She and the charity’s only other employee spent about 80 percent of their working hours on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.
By the time the Haitian earthquake hit in January, the charity had built up a network of online donors and volunteers who sprang into action, including a blogger who raised $500,000 from her readers and several other big gifts from foundation and corporate leaders, all of whom learned about ShelterBox from someone in their online network. As a result, the charity has gone from raising $800,000 last year, needing loans to cover its operating costs, to raising more than $10-million this year.
“I love to tell this story to people who are skeptical about social media,” says Ms. Miller.
High-Tech Features
Online fund-raising experts expect social networks to keep expanding their fund-raising abilities.
Causes, a Berkeley, Calif., company that builds fund-raising and advocacy tools for people who use Facebook, for example, has recently added several new features designed to help charities raise money and make it easier for individuals to solicit donations for their favorite organizations. Charities can now create Facebook pages about specific projects—rather than their entire organizations—and log into a new “Nonprofit Partner Center” that automatically tracks everyone on Facebook who has used Causes to raise money on their behalf. With just a few easy steps, charities can send bulletins to those individuals.
“This is the future of where peer-to-peer fund raising is going,” says Jeff Patrick, a San Francisco fund-raising consultant.
Responses to Ads
The World Wildlife Fund, which depends on a holiday gift catalog for a big chunk of its year-end contributions, is trying to increase the number of people who turn to its catalog by placing ads on Facebook and Google. The animal-welfare organization’s catalog offers donors the chance to “adopt” more than 100 species by making a donation or giving money in honor of a friend or family member.
Last year, by advertising on Facebook, World Wildlife was able to search the social-networking site for people who list polar bears or other species as an interest or activity on their Facebook profile.
The charity then placed an online ad on the Facebook pages of those individuals, urging them, for example, to “Adopt a polar bear and tell someone you care.”
World Wildlife paid Facebook a small fee, but only when somebody using Facebook clicked on its ad.
“This feature is really neat,” says David Glass, the charity’s director of online marketing. “You can log into their online center and look at real-time statistics, so you can quickly see if the ads are cost-effective.”
World Wildlife, he says, has also increased online gifts to the catalog by using similar ads on Google. Its message about polar bears, for example, will pop up anytime someone searches Google for information about that animal, and the charity pays Google only when someone clicks on its message.
Good for Procrastinators
Other charities have stepped up their year-end holiday appeals by adding text-message reminders and, in some cases, by making telephone calls to online donors.
Madeline Stanionis, a San Francisco online fund-raising consultant, says that some of her charity clients started making “last-minute calls” in 2009 to talk to online donors in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Ms. Stanionis recommends wishing the recipients of such calls a happy holiday, rather than asking for money, and briefly describing the charity’s accomplishments over the previous year and what the group hopes to accomplish in the coming year. The caller, she says, should also let each person know “we’re glad you’re with us” and follow up with an e-mail message or text.
Organizations that tried the calls last year are repeating them this year, says Ms. Stanionis. “People who received a phone call gave at a higher rate than they had in previous years.”
Her clients used paid telemarketers, she says, “but you could have a group of volunteers come into your office and make calls and sit around with hot cider. It’s an easy thing to do without hiring a firm.”
Even though the economy is still fragile, Ms. Stanionis and other fund-raising experts are advising charities to expand their online holiday solicitations this year, particularly in the last two weeks of December.
“Online giving is a procrastinator’s medium,” Ms. Stanionis says. “What was successful for us last year was being really aggressive on December 31. We sent out two e-mail reminders that day,” the second to online supporters who didn’t respond to the first.
“There are still a lot of organizations who stop their online fund-raising program around December 20, thinking that people spend time with their families,” Ms. Stanionis says. “But the truth is that people have more time then and you can get their attention.”
