April 26, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
Fund raisers can learn some new tricks from the recent effort by Network for Good to get celebrities like Kevin Bacon to lead large-scale Internet fund-raising campaigns.
Katya Andresen, vice president for marketing at Network for Good and a driving force behind Mr. Bacon’s Six Degrees project, reports on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog that the campaign has raised $630,000 for charities during its first three months.
The campaign invites donors to join celebrities like Mr. Bacon and the actress Ashley Judd to lead online fund-raising efforts for their favorite causes.
As an incentive, Mr. Bacon is giving $10,000 matching grants to the top fund raisers who participate in the campaign.
Ms. Andresen says the effort offers lessons for other charities:
- Contests and goals motivate people to give.
- Giving people tools that help them raise money a charity’s behalf can be very effective.
- Allowing people to craft messages on a charity’s behalf can produce better results than a charity trying to control an appeal.
- Supporters of a cause can raise far more money from other people than most charities realize.
“These findings could really change how organizations envision fund raising in the future,” Ms. Andresen writes.
Do online campaigns such as Six Degrees offer fund raisers effective new tactics for their work? What other campaigns are using creative ways to enlist supporters to help in fund-raising efforts? Click on the comments just link below this posting to share your thoughts.
