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Self Funded Causes: Putting the “I” in Mission

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

The other day, a client asked me about using DonorPages as a way for artists in their programs to “self-fund” their residencies with personal online fundraising pages. We discussed strategies on how to do so, then afterwards I began thinking about how our clients have been very creative in using DonorPages in ways well beyond our original concept. Back in early 2008 when we released DonorPages, we thought it would be used for event fundraising (walk/runs, thon events, galas, etc), online campaigns, board fundraising or similar, standard fundraising activities.

But in addition to so called “normal” fundraising, it turns out that online friend-to-friend fundraising really has it’s own special niche which is growing by leaps and bounds. I think of it as “self-funded” fundraising, where an individual or group raises funds to support their own mission or project. Here are a few examples (Please note that these site were active at the time of this posting, but may be deactivated when an associated event or campaign is over):

Mercy Ships is an international organization that uses their fleet of ships to send doctors, nurses, educators and other volunteer specialist, along with medical and developmental aid, to areas of the world that need them most. Their volunteer crew members self-fund their multi-month missions with personal DonorPages:

Mercy Ships Canada: mercyships.donorpages.com/MERCYGIFTS

Mercy Ships USA: mercyships-us.donorpages.com/crewmates

The Lambda Literary Foundation supports LGBT writers and causes by offering an annual Writer’s Retreat. They provide a site where up-and-coming writers can create personal pages to raise funds for tuition, travel and housing costs:

lambdaliterary.donorpages.com/EmergingWritersRetreat

Flower City Habitat for Humanity (read more about their successes here) creates a DonorPages site for each housing build. Volunteer builders self-fund their build sites by creating personal and team fundraising pages:

Flower City Habitat for Humanity Women Build

Volunteer habitat builders self-fund with personal fundraising pages.

rochesterhabitat.donorpages.com/WomenBuild11

rochesterhabitat.donorpages.com/VeteranBuild2011

And MS Cure Fund was able to provide personal fundraising pages for MS and Parkinson’s Disease to self fund their team expedition to climb Mt. Kilamanjaro*:

mscurefund.donorpages.com/ClimbingExpedition

These examples all have one thing in common – the purpose of the fundraising is not to raise funds for research, cover operational expenses or directly advance the cause of the organization (though there was certainly an indirect awareness-raising element). The purpose is to empower and enable the participants and fundraisers to achieve their own personal mission or goal.

And not surprisingly, the personal fundraising projects of these self-funders dovetail nicely with the stated missions of these organizations (helping emerging writers, providing medical care, building homes). Self-funding is a rising trend that helps marry someone who has a personal cause with the tools, backing and guidance of professional nonprofits. This helps build relationships and awareness for organizations that recognize the opportunity this trend presents.

*The Kilamanjaro Climb was led by Lori Schneider, an amazing person who was keynote speaker at our just-completed DonorPerfect Community Network Conference. You can read more about Lori and her inspiring adventures on her website, Empowermentthoughadventure.com.

Posted in DonorPages, DonorPerfect, Fundraising, Fundraising & Nonprofit Social Networking, online donations, Online Fundraising, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Ask your mom or dad to make an online donation!

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Are you struggling for ways to increase online donations? Do you think your online donation process is clear and simple?

If it isn’t, you are almost certainly losing potential gifts and the truth is — you’re probably too close to the process to judge for yourself.

So why would I suggest asking your parents to test your online donation process? Well, hopefully they’re willing to do you a favor, but they’re also less likely to be computer-savvy and won’t mind having you observe them while they make the donation. Okay, it doesn’t really have to be your parents — anyone in your family or circle of friends who you think is a little “technically-challenged.”

So here is how I suggest you perform the test:

The next time you’re at their house, ask them to sit down at their computer and go to your organization’s website to make a $50 donation (more if you think you can get away with it . Tell them you just want to watch them go through the process. Encourage them to verbalize any thoughts or questions while they’re doing it, but make it clear that you won’t be able to answer their questions until after they are done.

Now the hard part — stop talking and watch. Take notes about your observations and their questions and comments, but avoid the temptation to guide them or answer their questions. You can’t be there to help other donors so you won’t get a realistic view of the donor experience if you interfere.

Here are a few things you should try to notice:

Do they have trouble finding your website?
Do they have trouble getting to the correct page to make a donation?
What steps seem to take them a long time?
Do they seem to be confused by the donation options they are offered?
How long does it take them to complete the process?

After they are done, you can ask for additional feedback and ask questions that occurred to you while you were observing them. Obviously repeating this exercise with other family members and friends will give you the broadest insights, but even one or two experiences will probably uncover things that you didn’t realize were problems.

Most importantly, improve your website and donation form based on these insights. Change your call to action link if they didn’t immediately find the donation page because the link said, “Give your support” and they were looking for the words “Donate Here.” Reduce the options and text if they felt there was too much to read. Increase the font if they had to put their reading glasses on. Small changes can make a big difference — not just for your parents, but for all your potential donors.

Posted in fundraising basics, online donations | No Comments »

Help for Haiti

Monday, January 18th, 2010

The tragedy in Haiti is horrific and the outpouring of financial support to aid in the relief efforts demonstrates, once again, the compassion and generosity of Americans. As with other recent disasters, much of the support is coming via online donations, but there has also been much press attention paid to substantial sums being raised by the Red Cross and a few other charities via text message initiated gifts.

The approach is simple: just text a simple keyword to a “short code” to donate a fixed amount (usually $5 or $10). The donation is added to the donor’s cell phone carrier bill and the funds go to the designated cause. So if giving by mobile phone is so easy, why hasn’t this caught on before?

When we last looked into mobile giving, the cell phone companies wanted to keep a huge percentage (40-50%) of the funds collected, which made it a very costly fundraising method. I don’t know the details, but Mgive, the company facilitating the donation process, seems to have convinced the cell carriers to provide the service at much more reasonable fees — by funneling the donations through a nonprofit foundation they have created. That’s great, but I think there are still several major issues that are likely to confine text message giving as a worthwhile technique for only relatively large nonprofits.

Here are some issues to consider:

Significant fixed costs – Mgive is charging a minimum of $5000/yr. ($500 setup plus $399/mo.) and up to $18000/per yr. plus transaction fees. That may be fine for the Red Cross, but will be prohibitive for most nonprofits.

Timeliness of payments – Although several of the mobile carriers have agreed to transfer a portion of the donated funds to Haiti faster, the standard arrangement is that it can take up to 90 days for the donation to reach the nonprofit. That is far longer than a typical online donation where the funds get deposited into the nonprofits bank account almost immediately.

Publicity – The success of a text message really requires two things: free publicity and a social network viral effect. Of course if you can get Hillary Clinton to mention your cause at a nationally televised news conference, or Ryan Seacrest to give you a plug on American Idol, you can drive a lot of visitors to your online donation page as well. The same viral effects can come from people passing on a donation link.

Very limited gift flexibility – The relatively small gift amounts associated with the text message gifts is certainly part of the success, but a basic tenet of fundraising is to tailor the “ask” amount to the donor’s ability to give. A good online donation form makes it very easy to offer donors a choice of giving levels or to encourage an ongoing monthly pledge instead of a one-time gift. That’s one of the reasons the average online donation is much larger — roughly $120. Perhaps equally important is that an online donation form allows you to build your constituent list by collecting at least some information from donors, such as their name and email address.

Other potential issues include questions about fraud risks, extra challenges of donation receipting and how much of the current success is driven by the novelty effect.

I hope my comments are not interpreted as a criticism of the current efforts to use text messages to raise money for Haiti. These campaigns seem to be generating absolutely wonderful results and rebuilding Haiti will certainly require every dollar that can be raised, but at least for now I don’t see text message giving as a panacea for most nonprofits.

Posted in credit card processing, online donations, social networking | 1 Comment »

Fundraising Lessons from Barack Obama

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Over $600 million dollars, with a record breaking $150 Million raised in September — in the midst of a steeply declining stock market and widespread economic worries. What is the Obama campaign doing right and what can your non-profit learn from this success?

Small donations can really add-up – Consider this quote from a recent LA Times Blog post:

“The Wall Street crisis appears to have had little effect on Obama’s small-time donors. He expanded his fundraising base by 632,000 individuals in September to a record total of 3.1 million — most of whom gave in small amounts. Roughly half of the $605 million Obama has raised has come from small donors, and nearly all of them give over the Internet.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/barack-obama-to.html

Reduced response levels from direct mail and the allure of major gifts can cause nonprofits to focus less effort on small donors, but ignoring smaller donations is a mistake. The Internet can provide a remarkably efficient and effective tool for collecting large sums in small amounts.

But what is bringing all these donors to the Obama website to give?

Great content – Check out Obama’s website. There is lots of real information for visitors to learn about the candidate’s positions on important issues, but even more importantly many calls to action to get involved, not just by making a donation, but volunteering, sign-up for email, etc. Giving people a reason to visit your website and multiple options for becoming involved is certainly lesson #1.

Effective email list building – Its pretty hard to go anywhere on the Obama website without providing your email address and the campaign has collected millions of them and used them very effectively to solicit financial and organizational support.

Leveraging supporters for personalized donation requests – The Obama campaign has not only mastered the use of social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, etc., but they’ve provided supporters with simple tools to solicit friends and family to get involved and make an online donation or sign up for a mailing list. These personalized donation requests have been another critical piece to the growth of Obama’s email list and online fundraising success.

Creative use of technology – If you think personalization only applies to soliciting donations, read this wonderful post about someones experience after making an online donation to Obama.

http://authenticorganizations.com/harquail/2008/09/23/obamas-website-made-me-cry/

Compelling message – Certainly a critical aspect of the Obama campaigns successful use of technology wouldn’t be possible without his strong and motivational message. Fundraising success always requires communication that inspires people to action and Barak Obama has proven himself a true master of this. Although you and I may not have Obama’s gift for communication, we can still apply this lesson (Inspiration = Motivation) when crafting email donor solicitations and website messaging.

Doing it well takes time and energy – The Obama campaigns online fundraising success didn’t just happen, they have clearly spent lots of time and money developing and refining their website, emails, and messaging. Undoubtedly each of their successful efforts was proceeded by numerous less successful ones with their ultimate success the result of continuous testing and refinement.

Posted in donor email addresses, fundraising basics, online donations | No Comments »

Credit card fraud against non-profits

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

A few months ago I wrote a paper entitled Demystifying Credit Card Processing for Non-profits. The document has a lot of great information to help not-for-profit organizations understand the types of processing solutions available, merchant account and processing fees, etc., but I have to admit that I was wrong when I said, “I can’t imagine someone who has stolen a credit card going online to make a fraudulent donation to their favorite non-profit, but the credit card companies don’t see it that way.” I was commenting on the higher processing rates (based on greater fraud levels) that are charged for MOTO (the acronym is for mail order/telephone order but also applies to all not face-to-face) transactions .

Well recently I learned that a client of ours that uses our Weblink system for collecting online donations had a spike in their form activity with lots of rejected transactions. It turns out that online donation pages are sometimes targeted by credit card fraud criminals since the forms usually make it very easy to make a card payment — without the complexities of ordering something. That’s perfect for someone who needs to test a lot of stolen cards to see which ones are still valid and can be used.

Often an automated system is used to rapidly make sequential attempts, testing each card in a stolen file. Therefore one solution is to use challenge codes, where the person completing the form has to type in some hard to decifer letters that can’t easily be interpreted by a computer. The problem is that this also creates an impediment (although a small one) to anyone who legitimately wants to make a donation. Nonprofits certainly don’t want to make it harder for someone to give, so instead we implemented a system that monitors form activity and blocks suspicious activity. It has been active for several weeks and has successfully protected at least one other fraud attack.

Needless to say however, I’m revising that section of the whitepaper. Live and learn!

Posted in credit card processing, online donations | No Comments »

Want to raise more money online?

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Sure it’s a rhetorical question. But are you really encouraging online donations in your direct mail solicitations? Not just by mentioning it as an option, but making it clear that it is the fastest, easiest and most cost effective way for the donor to give to your cause. Why not even offer an incentive for those who make their donation online?

Why push donors to give online?

It generates larger gifts – As much as 30% more according to studies I’ve read!

Collects email addresses – Virtually 100% of online donors will provide their current email address vs. much lower rates when you ask for the email address by other means.

Increases website visitors – Giving you an opportunity to tell them more about your programs and achievements.

Potential to promote recurring gifts – A well-designed donation page can present donors the option and encourage them to make a recurring monthly pledge, instead of one-time gift. By doing this via an online (vs. paper) form it’s easier to step the donor through providing the necessary information and authorization.

Encouraging donors to make their gift online might take a little initial effort but I can assure you that the long-term benefits will make it well worthwhile.

Posted in donor email addresses, online donations | No Comments »