August 10, 2019 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Sydney Moondra, a recent graduate from the College of William and Mary, founded a nonprofit in 2018 called Dil to Dil, which means “heart to heart” in Hindi. The organization focuses on mental health among members of South Asian communities in the United States. Moondra planned to start raising money online, but she faced a tough choice: Pay the processing fees for platforms such as Blackbaud and Classy or rely on Facebook, which charges nonprofits nothing for gifts made using its donation button but doesn’t share donors’ contact information with charities.
Moondra went with Facebook at the recommendation of Sachin Doshi, a volunteer at Dil to Dil and director of development at Mental Health America, which uses Facebook to raise money. The savings were too good to pass up, and Moondra believes she’ll attract more young donors, which are her primary supporters, through social media.
No Access to Donor Data
But views are mixed about raising money on Facebook. Doshi says new nonprofits often can’t shoulder the costs, such as credit-card processing fees, of raising money on other platforms.
He’s also concerned about data privacy. “Although there’s been a lot of news lately around Facebook and privacy concerns, Mental Health America hasn’t noticed a subsequent decrease in Facebook donations as a result,” Doshi says.
However, Adam London, co-founder of the consulting firm Project Donor Love, warns against relying on Facebook to seek contributions.
“The convenience that Facebook is giving you, like all conveniences, comes at a significant price;” he says. “You’re not getting your donors’ data. You’re getting very little information about who gave you that gift. So having your own donation form is always going to be a better option, and it’s not a very difficult or expensive thing to implement.”
Getting a donor’s contact information is probably worth the deduction of a processing fee — generally 3 to 5 percent of the gift amount, he says.
“Fortunately I don’t encounter many organizations that use Facebook as a large part of their online fundraising strategy. This is a good thing,” London says.
Limiting Use of Facebook
Some groups, like the Islamic Medical Association of North America limit fundraising on Facebook to a fraction of their overall efforts. The organization primarily uses Network for Good to raise money online but does use Facebook for small fundraising campaigns run by supporters, says communication manager Brenda Aranda.
Today about 90 percent of its contributions come through Network For Good, though the group recently added a Facebook donation button to all of its online appeals.
Aranda sees value in making giving as easy as possible. “For some people who are used to donating on Facebook, they know how it goes, they have things set up already through Facebook, and it’s really easy for them versus going to a third party website where they may have to enter information,” she says.
The ALS Association, although it primarily uses a fee-based online giving tool, uses Facebook fundraising because of its groundbreaking ice-bucket challenge. Brian Frederick, executive vice president for communications, says Facebook officials told him the ice-bucket campaign was a key impetus for the creation of Facebook’s donation button, and he sees its potential power.
He acknowledges that at the time of the ice-bucket challenge, the ALS online donation page could have been better optimized for quick donations: “I can only imagine how big the ice-bucket challenge could’ve become had there been a donate button for Facebook at the time.”
ALS has been gradually gaining momentum with its Facebook fundraising. In 2017, it raised $179,000; that figure shot up to $2.8 million in 2018.
During the first half of 2019, the group collected $1.8 million through Facebook, compared with $700,000 during that period in 2018.
Kristi Koon, director of direct-response marketing at ALS, partially attributes the success on Facebook to a new partnership with GoodUnited, a consulting group that helps nonprofits optimize Facebook fundraising campaigns. They began working together in March 2019.
GoodUnited helped ALS attract donors by posting two messages on the wall of people who raise money for ALS through Facebook to engage them in a private Facebook-messenger conversation.
That messenger conversation is scripted and customizable to the nonprofit. “So we can really steward them and find out about their connection to the disease, offer them other resources, give tips and hints for fundraising with stats and infographics,” Koon says. Users who opted into the messaging prompts averaged 5.6 donations per campaign; those who didn’t averaged 4.2.
Over all, Frederick is confident that the power of social-media fundraising can be further optimized, despite some drawbacks, and he’s looking forward to incorporating an Instagram donation tool in the future. “I keep hoping that there’s another ice-bucket challenge for ALS and other causes. I think we’re just starting to understand how to use social media to do good and raise money for good,” says Frederick.
