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Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Reasons Why Charities Should Use Crowdsourcing

Posted in Crowdfunding, Not-for-profit Support, tagged , , , , , on December 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

86% of Canadian social networkers are on Facebook. Globally, there are over 800 million Facebook users. Twitter and LinkedIn are also being adopted by companies and nonprofits to reach out to those in their crowd. 92% of the “Top 50″ nonprofits in the US have a presence on at least one social media site that’s linked to their homepage. Today, online giving is one of the fastest growing donation channels.

Social Media: An Opportunity for Giving

Social media is a great way to refer people back to your website or fundraising pages, connect with existing supporters and gain new supporters through the networks of those in your crowd. Today, social media is a very small, but rapidly growing channel for fundraising. A successful fundraising campaign will involve multiple channels that support one another to achieve a goal or set of goals.

As the holiday season is in full swing, many charities are well on their way with annual giving campaigns and other fundraising efforts. Many of them have used social media to amplify their campaigns and create multiple revenue streams – is your charity or nonprofit one of them?

Social Media and Fundraising: Are You In?

Does your charity take advantage of online opportunities for fundraising? On November 23rd, we partnered with Koodonation to host a workshop in Toronto called “Social Media, Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding for Charities and Non-Profits“. During the presentation, Claire Kerr talked about using social media for fundraising. During the presentation, Clarie shared 4 reasons why charities should engage in social media:

  • Your donors and supporters are there.
  • Your sponsors and media contacts use social media.
  • An additional channel for brand extension.
  • Competing organizations may acquire market share in your space.
Check out the powerpoint presentation from the workshop to learn more about crowdfunding and social media for charities:
View more presentations from Ideavibes

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Update on the Fundchange End of Year Matching Challenge

Posted in Crowdfunding, tagged , , , , , on December 13, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

The Fundchange end of year matching challenge continues to move forward towards its goal of raising $100,000 in project funding for Canadian charities (including TELUS quarterly matches). Fundchange is one of Canada’s first crowdfunding – or online fundraising – websites for Canadian charities, launched by Ideavibes. As we move closer to the end of 2011,  Fundchange announced a year-end matching campaign with sponsor, TELUS Communications.

So far, the campaign has resulted in a number of new charities posting projects – all focused on being one of the first 8 to have their projects funded by December 23rd to qualify for TELUS matching funds of $2500 each. In under two weeks, 12 new charities have signed up.  Each of them posted interesting projects seeking under $5,000 in funding. On Dec. 24th, Fundchange and TELUS will be announcing the 8 organizations that successfully had their projects funded by Dec. 23rd and who will receive the matching funds early in January.

Fundchange Successes

Fundchange gives the public the opportunity to support projects in different ways: voting, liking on Facebook, Tweeting, commenting, emailing, and of course, funding. Organizations like Dress for Success, The Ottawa Mission, Pick My Class, The Toronto City Mission, etc., have joined Fundchange this fall and are using crowdfunding and social media to mobilize support from people connected to them directly or through the degrees of separation through their social networks.

With Fundchange, Pick My Class has raised funds to develop a web platform that will connect inspiring public school teachers to donors, to enhance their student’s classroom experience. Pick My Class Founder Andrew Spinner says “Fundchange is a wonderful program which has assisted us in sourcing funds, and has been integral to Pick My Class’ development”.

Fundchange Workshops

Fundchange and TELUS recently held another workshop in their series on Social Media and Crowdfunding in Toronto where additional sessions had to be added due to the demand from local charities and non-profits. Fundchange and TELUS partnered with Koodonation and Artez Interactive to make these workshops available. You can read more about those workshops in the Ideavibes blog post “A Time For Giving: Why Charities Should Use Crowdsourcing“.

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Benefits of monitoring your social media presence

Posted in Not-for-profit Support, tagged , , , , , on August 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

At the heart of a successful crowdfunding campaign, lies effective social media use. The ability to engage people online and ultimately to have people advocate on your behalf to their social networks is what will make the difference in your campaign.

Knowing the who, what, when, where, why

Being able to monitor these conversations will allow you to:

Identify who is talking about you.

Once you know who is talking about you, you can engage, converse and build a relationship. Not all people who care about your cause are your donors. Being able to identify who is talking about you is the first step in converting passionate people into donors. Take the time to get to know them a little more, then introduce your organization and invite them to support your crowdfunding campaign.

Identify what people are saying about you.

Once you know what people are saying, you can respond accordingly. Not all mentions warrant a response so fear not if you do not have all the time in the world to respond. Once you know what people are saying about you, you can address these topics in your communications. For example, maybe a few people are asking the same question. You could write a blog post answering it for them. Knowing the what will allow you to give people more information about what they care about.

Identify when people are talking about you.

Once you know when people talk about you, you can time your messages accordingly.

Identify where (ie. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress) these conversations happen.

Maybe your supporters are on a site that you aren’t currently on. You would have no idea if you weren’t monitoring your mentions. Once you know where these conversations are taking place, you can focus your energy on these channels. Or maybe you just started using a specific site and want to know if people are hearing you.

Identify why people are talking about you.

Knowing the who, what, when and where are important, but knowing why is even more telling. Being able to identify why people are talking about you allows you to gather information about people’s motivations, inspiration and experiences. Once you know this, you can tap into these insights. If you can craft your message to align with the why people will be much more likely to support your campaign!

When you are monitoring online conversations and mentions, you should not only track your organization’s mentions, but also track conversations about ‘important people’ in your organization, your cause, specific projects, places, etc. that are related to what you do. It’s necessary to broaden your search parameters because passionate people are everywhere, but they may not know you exist.

Cynthia

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Who’s talking about you?

Posted in Not-for-profit Support, tagged , , , , , on August 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Have you ever wondered who is talking about you online? Do you know what people are saying about you?

It’s important and helpful to know who is talking about you and what they are saying. But it is incredibly difficult to keep track of every tweet, blog post, or comment about your organization. You probably have a Google Alert or two set, but what is it missing? All those tweets, maybe.  

There’s this wonderful tool called Social Mention that searches the web to find out who’s talking about you. It’s only brilliant, and should therefore be a staple in your fundraising/marketing tool kit.

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

I really like the way the site looks. It’s user friendly and doesn’t use complicated techie words. If you have a question about what something means, you should be able to find it in the FAQ section.

Check it out. You’ll be hooked!

Monday, I’ll be posting on why it’s important to ‘listen’ to what people are saying about you and to know who is talking about you and how this all relates to crowdfunding. Be sure to check it out. You can also subscribe to the blog so that you don’t miss a post!

 Cynthia

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Keenan Wellar of LiveWorkPlay on Crowdfunding

Posted in Donors World, Not-for-profit Support, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

LiveWorkPlay has been really successful using Fundchange to leverage the power of the crowd to fully fund 2 life-changing projects. We wanted to share their experience, success and secrets with you and Keenan Wellar, Executive Staff Co-Leader at LiveWorkPlay, agreed.

Q1. What interested you about Fundchange and our crowdfunding model?

LiveWorkPlay was an early adopter of social media and this has resulted in many beneficial mission-oriented outcomes, from increasing and strengthening our volunteer corps to communicating our message about building a more inclusive community for people with intellectual disabilities. Online fundraising has been limited, so Fundchange offered a unique opportunity to explore and experience a crowdfunding model.

Q2. How did you approach your project on Fundchange differently than you would a normal fundraising initiative?

The key difference would be choosing a project that had the potential to be easily understood by donors that might not be familiar with our organizations.

Q3. Are you used to going after funding on a project-specific basis?

It is an ongoing aspect of our revenue generation, which is  mix of income sources.

Q4. What things did you do to build your social network? What about promoting the project?

We have 2500 fans of our Facebook page and 3000 followers on Twitter, which is a strong foundation for any online initiative.

Q5. Do you think these efforts were what made you successful on Fundchange?

Yes, there is no doubt that our pre-existing social media organizations culture was very helpful with Fundchange.

Q6. Talk about the impact your projects have had — did things happen quickly after you had the project funded?

Yes, our project was about supporting people with intellectual disabilities to experience and learn from international travel. Those who go to know our organization through Fundchange were able to follow the travel experiences through Facebook and Twitter and see the real impact of their donation.

 

 

 

 

Q8. Any words of advice for other organizations using Fundchange or considering using Fundchange?

I would think of crowdfunding and Fundchange in the context of an overall marketing and communications strategy and of course pay particular attention to interactions with existing social media channels.

Q8. What are your top 3 tips to getting a project successfully funded?

1. Choose a project that doesn’t require specialized knowledge for the potential donor to understand and appreciate it.

2. Bring together a small but dedicated team of people (could be  mix of staff and volunteer) who will champion the project.

3. Appreciate the journey of connecting with people who might contribute beyond any dollars donated.

LiveWorkPlay supports people with intellectual disabilities to have a good life! And, in my humble opinion, they are doing a really great job.

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What CauseVox learned at Chicago TechWeek

Posted in Not-for-profit Support, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2011 | 2 Comments »

and what you can learn from that.

Scrolling through my Sparks on Google+, I came across CauseVox’s blog post. They list the top three take-aways about crowdfunding from Chicago TechWeek. I think they are really useful, so here they are: 

1. For the majority of crowdfunding campaigns, you will be relying on people in the 2nd and 3rd degree to pledge or donate to you. There are outliers that happen that get major press and media, but those are very rare.

This fact reaffirms my hypothesis that crowdfunding is extremely useful for donor acquisition. Your 2nd and 3rd degree connections are not already donors, but your crowdfunding campaign converts them.

How to do you reach these people?

You do this by reaching out to your inner circle (current supporters) to kick off the campaign. A study on the geography of crowdfunding (Agrawal, Ajay, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb. The Geography of Crowdfunding. University of Toronto. January 6, 2010.) reveals that the first round of funding almost always comes from local funders.  Local funders are those people who have an established relationship with the organization. They are your current donors, friends, family, alumni, service users, members, staff, volunteers, and board members.

2. Money doesn’t magically flow to you when you put up a crowdfunding page. You have to work hard to get people’s attention and you have to tell a compelling story that gets people to fund you.

You know that just because you have a Twitter ID doesn’t mean you will automatically get 1000s of followers. You have to give people a reason to follow you. With crowdfunding, just because you post a project doesn’t mean people will give to it. First, people need to know you exist. Promote your project (for the entire duration of the campaign)!  Second, give them  a reason to give with a compelling project posting. Perhaps this order should be reversed, but you get the point.

3. Email is by far the best way to convert people to donations. Social media is a good for awareness building.

There isn’t too much to add to this point: send an eAppeal and make sure you have share functions so that your 1st connections can send it on to their networks.You can use social media to spread the word and build your list. Then send people an email.

And please remember, you are not trying to “convert people to donations.” You are the machine through which we fulfil our need to change the world.

Cynthia

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Now Appearing – The Fundchange Blog

Posted in Donors World, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

It has taken us a little while, but the Fundchange blog is now live and focused on facilitating a conversation about how the crowd can fund worthwhile projects to make things happen. The conversation will look at crowdfunding and using this method to fund change in our communities. This focus on breaking things down into small, bite-sized projects isn’t new – look at all the great work the SmallChangeFund does. Fundchange is one of Canada’s first crowdfunding sites for charities and non-profits and is quickly making its place as a viable option for groups looking for a transparent, easy to use, and social media driven way to fund  the change we need in our communities to make them more liveable for everyone.

Crowdfunding – popular word these days – funding everything from charitable projects to start-ups to artists. Our view is that the transparency this offers appeals to a new generation of donors that haven’t seen the traditional ways of doing things as consistent with their values.

This blog will work hard to tell this story – the story of those that have helped us get to where we are  - and help organizations find their sea legs when it comes to using social media to make things happen. We will get some of our favourite people much smarter than we are to post guest postings that are designed to help you make crowdfunding work for you.

Paul

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