new media

At JustGiving, we’ve found a way to monetise Facebook by encouraging people to share their actions from our site with their Facebook friends. Specifically, when someone sponsors a friend who’s taking part in a fundraising event we will prompt them to share a link to their friend’s donation page on Facebook.

We recognise that some people don’t like sharing how much they give to charity, or that they give to charity at all, so we ensure our request makes it clear that sharing charitable information is a great way of helping others to raise more money.  After all, sharing is an altruistic act and not a way to show off generosity.

Whilst we promote sharing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and by email, Facebook is by far the most popular option and accounts for 90% of our total shares. This is not entirely surprising given Facebook’s scale compared to the other networks and that most people use Facebook to ask their friends to sponsor them.

Redeveloping our website to encourage and highlight social sharing has had a massive impact on the number of donations made, raising an extra £1 million in eight months. For every share a donor makes to a social network, a certain percentage of their friends will see it, click on it and make another donation with JustGiving. Our data shows that this means each share to Facebook is worth on average an extra £4.50. In contrast, sharing to Twitter is worth £1.80 and LinkedIn £3.30. From September 2011 to April 2012, Facebook sharing generated over £925,000, Twitter £55,000 and LinkedIn £22,000.

What has been fascinating to observe is how the impact of sharing on Facebook changes depending on the context of who is sharing and what they’re sharing. For example, if a donor shares a message on Facebook about them donating directly to a charity, it’s worth £1 per share. And if someone shares a message about donating to a friend’s fundraising page, it’s worth around £5. But if a fundraiser (i.e. someone taking part in a fundraising event for a charity) shares a text update about their event, it is worth around £12 per share. Incredibly, if a fundraiser records and shares a video about their event, the average value per share increases to £18.

In each instance, shared content appears in a Facebook newsfeed in broadly the same way, but the motivation and interest of the messages is totally different. It may be self-evident on reflection that individuals in a social network are more likely to respond to someone doing something for charity than just donating to charity, but the way we built our product and track our data proves that this is actual behaviour. We like to summarise this as ‘the greater the effort of the individual, the greater the response from their network’.

So what does this mean for charities wanting to use Facebook to raise money? Well, it proves that encouraging people to share their charitable actions on Facebook helps to raise more money and that extra care should be taken on how people are encouraged to share.

Most non-profits will have a way of accepting donations online, but very few of those processes actively encourage people to share their donations with friends. Given that each Facebook user has an average of 130 friends, just one share could help to reach people that the charity doesn’t have access to – and messages may also be more effective coming from a friend than from the charity itself.

In addition, non-profits should also encourage people to add more content to their shares, such as why the donor gave to that charity and the story behind their donation. Encouraging donors to share their motivation will make their share on the social network much more interesting and engaging to their friends and increase the impact it has.

To summarise, whether making a donation, signing up to a newsletter or registering for an event, people should be prompted to tell their friends on social networks what they did and equally importantly, why they did it.

Watch out for Facebook fundraising part three: what next for Facebook sharing?

Anyone that completes a marathon deserves a huge pat on the back – I have attempted and failed twice. The training alone is a major commitment – add in a high fundraising target and it’s easy to see why some don’t make it to the start line.

If any of your supporters are about to run a marathon, they’re on course for a major personal achievement. But they’re also probably starting to feel a bit fed up of the training schedule and are running out of fundraising ideas – so now’s the perfect time to give them some encouragement and inspiration.

Over the last 10 years, we’ve been honoured to support marathon runners with their fundraising and be a recognised force for good. Here are our top tips for engaging and motivating them to run and fundraise as well as possible:

People will raise more money online than using paper sponsorship forms. It’s faster and much easier, with less hassle for them and for your charity. What’s more, donating online via credit cards, debit cards and PayPal is more convenient for their sponsors too.

Build a separate database of your marathon runners and send targeted emails that speak specifically to them. Encourage them to send in their stories and reward them by featuring them in social media posts or on your website or blog. Putting them in the spotlight will make them feel valued and motivate them to run that extra mile.

Create a marathon team on JustGiving (here’s one we made earlier) and encourage your runners to join. They’ll love feeling part of a community and appreciate you sharing useful content. Alternatively, you could create a Facebook group or plan fortnightly meet-ups where they can share tips, offer support and help one another.

Forget about your charity and your key messages for a moment. Instead think about the kind of questions your runners are searching for online. What trainers should I wear? What’s the best way to heal blisters quickly? What music will help me keep going when all I want to do is stop? How do I fundraise while training and working a full-time job? Are there marathon training groups in London I can join? If you can provide answers to these types of question, it will ensure a positive sentiment towards your organisation.

Don’t worry if your charity hasn’t got the resource to create new and tailored content for your marathon runners. There’s lots of useful content out there already and you can help your supporters find it. Share links to interesting runner blogs and approach bloggers to write special posts just for your supporters. For example, for this year’s London marathon we asked running experts Phoebe and Nick, from coaching website RunningWithUs, to create training plans and top tips that charities can share with their runners.

Marathon training is intense, so a few well-timed telephone calls to your runners saying “well done” and “keep going” could be the difference between them being one-time fundraisers and loyal, regular supporters.

The best fundraising pages on JustGiving tell a story. Encourage your runners to share their unique fundraising experiences and give them information, photos and videos about your charity so they can let people know why they’re going to the trouble of raising money for you. Explain why your charity deserves support and how their donations will be used. For example £10 will buy a school desk, or £20 will help restore someone’s sight.

Encourage your runners to update their email signatures, business cards and anything else that regularly profiles them with a quick line about their fundraising. The more involved their friends feel in their marathon training, the more likely they are to donate.

Remind your runners to regularly update their social media profiles with training and fundraising progress. Every viral share of a JustGiving page on Facebook is worth an average of £5 in donations!

Around 20% of donations through JustGiving come in after people finish their event, so when you email your runners to congratulate them on crossing the finish line, encourage them to keep on fundraising – it’s a good opportunity for fundraisers to update friends and family on how well they did, as well as make a final appeal for donations.

Have you got any top tips that you’d like to share? Let us know by adding a comment below.

When people talk about Facebook in relation to charities, they often ask what the return on investment is. The general perception of social giving via Facebook is that it’s not a great way to raise money, but is fantastic as a communication and community building tool. This is true, but only to a certain extent.

At JustGiving, the UK’s largest online fundraising website, we have found that encouraging and enabling individual charity supporters to share their donations or updates about their fundraising events on Facebook has a great impact on amounts raised – research shows that just one share on Facebook encourages between £1 and £18 in extra donations.

To look to the future and understand the true potential of online fundraising on Facebook, it’s first necessary to look to the past.

In the summer of 2007, Facebook overtook Google to become the biggest source of web traffic to JustGiving, and then at the end of 2008, Facebook started to bring us more traffic than email. In the intervening years, Facebook has continued to grow in importance and become the primary way that people who use JustGiving to raise money for charity tell their friends about their fundraising event and ask for sponsorship.

In 2012 alone, Facebook drove over 1.8 million individual donors to JustGiving, who collectively gave £34 million, of which £5.3 million was donated by people coming to the site from the mobile version of Facebook.

One of the ways we reacted to this growth was by building an application that people could use to donate to charity or sponsor a friend without leaving Facebook – this generated over £250,000 in the first nine months of 2012. Given the continuation of this growth, we expect that by 2015, 50% of donations made through JustGiving will come from Facebook.

In a way, this growth in online fundraising reflects Facebook’s own incredible growth. As of March 2013, it has 1.11 billion monthly active users, of which 751 million users accessed the site through their mobile.

So the prospective audience is huge, and more importantly, hugely engaged. But how do non-profits make the most of it?

To start, organisations that have Facebook pages should make the most of its features and plan an approach that engages their online community.

Advice from Facebook includes setting clear guidelines about what is and isn’t acceptable to post on your wall – this will help when users veer off-topic or post things you don’t approve of. It can also reduce the risk that people will leave negative comments, a fear which puts off many first-time social media users. By having clear guidelines, you can reduce that risk and give yourself the room to ban people who don’t abide by them.

Another useful approach is to create a ‘conversation calendar’ whereby you plan the content you will share on your page in advance. This helps create consistency of communication, as well as making sure that you have a good mix of messaging. Don’t bombard people with messages about campaigns one week and only fundraising events the next – have a rich mix of topics that show the breadth of work your organisation is involved in.

Watch out for Facebook fundraising part two: share more, raise more