May 23, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
With an ever-expanding array of online tools available to help charities reach supporters — e-mail, Web sites, blogs, text messages, videos, and social-networking sites — small charities often struggle to decide which ones to use.
Yet the payoff for small groups can be great, says Vinay Bhagat, founder of Convio, a Web-based software company and one of the six panelists at a recent meeting on online fund raising.
Mr. Bhagat offered the example of one of his clients, a small charity that fights a rare disease. The Trisomy 18 Foundation, supports families whose infants are born with Trisomy 18, a rare chromosome abnormality similar to Down Syndrome but usually fatal. The charity was created a few years ago, after its founder, Victoria Miller, lost her son, Isaac, to the disorder just 11 days after his birth.
The group created a Web site and began using it to link parents with local help and offer them a way to share their experiences and create lasting memorials to their children. “They used the Web as a mission tool,” said Mr. Bhagat.
Some time later, the charity began to raise money, adding an online giving feature to its Web site. Online donations from grateful parents, family members, and friends quickly enabled the charity to grow from a one-person office with a $50,000 budget to a $250,000 budget with several more staff members.
The key was using the technology to provide a valuable service people needed and were grateful to receive at a very critical time on their lives, Mr. Bhagat said. By the time the charity got around to asking for donations, he said, “they had generated a ton of good will.”
