Fund Raising Via Personal Web Sites Grows, but So Do Risks of Misuse

The Internet is making it simpler — and less painful — than ever for people to raise

money on behalf of the charities they support.

Charities are giving their supporters the ability to create personal fund-raising pages, not unlike the Web pages participants in charity events use to raise money, to solicit gifts from family and friends. Some organizations also offer their supporters fund-raising buttons — often called charity badges or widgets — that they can use to raise money on their own blogs, Web sites, or social-networking pages on sites like MySpace and Facebook.

“Asking somebody for money for a cause you care about — even if it’s a worthy cause and you care passionately about it — can be awkward in a face-to-face encounter,” says Bill Strathmann, chief executive officer of Network for Good, the charity giving site, in Bethesda, Md. “Hiding, if you will, behind the Internet and these fund-raising tools makes it easier.”

But even as charities are excited by the possibility of tapping into their supporters’ social networks, they are struggling to figure out the best ways to harness the new techniques and deal with the potential dangers as fund raising moves out of their hands.

In December, the American Heart Association, in Dallas, quietly added the ability to create memorial pages in honor of people who have died from heart disease to its Web site. The pages allow visitors to post remembrances about the deceased and, if they wish, to make a donation.

To date the only thing the organization has done to publicize the option is a message on its donation page, yet more than 230 pages have been set up, which have brought in more than 1,500 gifts. Donations made through a page that honors a toddler who died from a heart defect have surpassed $100,000.

Christian A. Caldwell, a Web specialist at the organization, admits that he had misgivings about whether the option to build a memorial would be viewed as opportunistic on the part of the charity. But he says the touching pages that have been created have proven him wrong.

“People really responded to becoming fund raisers and turning that sorrow into something bigger,” says Mr. Caldwell.

Potential Donors

The new tools for creating charity badges usually let supporters customize them with their own message, photographs, and video.

In a little more than four months, 5,000 people have created charity badges at Network for Good, and with them have raised more than $650,000.

The organization expects that figure to hit $1-million by the end of the year.

The new techniques offer a way to reach out to new audiences, says Madeline Stanionis, chief executive officer of Watershed, a consulting company in San Francisco that focuses on Internet fund raising.

“The people who are contributing to a personal fund-raising pitch on a Web site are probably people who are not going to get into the rest of your response stream,” she says.

Introducing supporter pages or badges is an opportunity to invite donors who have already shown their dedication to the organization to get more involved, says Ms. Stanionis.

She recommends that organizations examine the data they have been collecting in their e-mail systems to identify candidates. Someone who frequently forwards the organization’s messages to others or who has written a note replying to something the charity has sent could be a good contender.

“You can send it out to 50,000 folks, and you’ll probably get a good number who will participate,” says Ms. Stanionis. “But I think an interesting way to approach it is actually to identify those folks who are most engaged and reach out to them personally with a phone call.”

Easter Seals, in Chicago, has started to offer its affiliates the technology to make personal fund-raising pages available, and the charity hopes to be able to introduce charity badges that supporters can use on their own Web pages this summer.

“It’s a great big Web out there,” says Shirley Sexton, an assistant vice president at the organization. “It would be very egotistical to think that everybody’s going to come to our Web site.”

Fraud Fears

While Easter Seals is working hard to make the new tools available to its supporters, Ms. Sexton worries that the proliferation of fund-raising badges will open up the potential for fraud.

Companies are springing up that allow people to set up widgets to collect money, and she thinks their services will make it easy for people to pretend they are raising money for charity online, when they’re really trying to line their own pockets.

Ms. Sexton says that, as an experiment, she used the ChipIn service to create a widget to collect donations for a nonexistent charity, whose name she made up, and send the money to her PayPal account. She says that she was able to make it the whole way through the process and came out with a functioning badge that she could have posted to a Web site.

Carnet Williams, chief executive officer of ChipIn, in Honolulu, says that his company is very concerned about the possible misuse of its service.

“We’re obviously extremely concerned because it goes to the credibility of our service, so we do what we can,” says Mr. Williams. But he goes on to say that people who are intent on defrauding the public online have many ways to do so, “by setting up fake Web sites, setting up fake blogs, even creating their own fake widgets.”

In the event that his company receives a report of suspected fraud, says Mr. Williams, ChipIn would disable the badge to prevent it from collecting any more money, and investigate the allegations. He says donors who suspect a scam could also contact their credit-card company to contest the charge.

What’s more, Mr. Williams says that he doesn’t think the scam that Ms. Sexton imagines — someone setting up a fake badge and then collecting the donations for themselves — would be successful, because it would require the perpetrator to have a blog or Web site with readers who trust the operator enough to donate the money.

“It just seems counterintuitive to us,” he says.

Monitoring the Internet

Letting go and giving supporters the ability to raise money for an organization online does have its risks, says Mr. Strathmann, of Network for Good, but he says the benefits outweigh the possible negatives.

Mr. Strathmann has set up an automated Google alert that lets him know whenever Network for Good is mentioned on the Internet. That kind of strategy, he says, would allow an organization to keep tabs on where its charity badges appear, so it can take action if one ends up on a site the group finds objectionable.

“There’s an element of monitoring that you have to do as a nonprofit,” he says, “but fortunately the tools are available to do so.”

While some cautionary notes have been raised, the overall attitude toward the techniques is one of optimism.

“This taps into the networks of donors who really want to do more,” says Tanya Zumach, senior director of online strategy of the Metropolitan Group, a consulting company in Portland, Ore., that works with nonprofit clients. “The reach of those individual donors’ efforts is pretty small individually. The power is going to be when they really become aggregated.”