Guest post by Mazarine Treyz, Author of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising, Speaker, Consultant
Mazarine helps people get money for the causes they care about. She also helps businesses and people with their online reputations. Give her a shout on twitter, or email her at info@wildwomanfundraising.com.
@wildwomanfund
WildWomanFundraising.com
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You have one lick, and then you want more and more! It’s so delicious that you wonder why everyone isn’t eating it.
You get totally inside of it, and then you remember, oh, snap, I can’t create a whole fundraising meal out of this!
It’s, like, fun, but, like, lacks nutritional value.
And by nutritional value, I mean that you wouldn’t want to make every meal out of ice cream. You’d want to include it once in awhile.
What DOES have nutritional value? Appeals. Grants. Events. Major Gifts. Phone-a-thons.
Speaking as someone who has done just about everything you can do in a fundraising office, everything from appeals to events, from grants to e-newsletters, from volunteer management to phone-a-thons, I have learned about the place that nonprofit tech has in the fundraising world. It’s not a main dish. Not yet, anyway.
At first, back in 2007, when I started to pester my old boss about Myspace and Twitter and making a facebook page for our cause, she was really not into it. At all. And yet. As I’ve worked at learning more about online fundraising, I’ve realized how it’s becoming less like ice cream, and more like a staple of the fundraisers meal.
It’s becoming just as essential as direct mail. People check their email more than they check their mailboxes. It’s becoming as essential as grants. In 2010, people responded to the crisis in Haiti with millions in text donations. Sure, the Red Cross was ready to take those donations. But it’s not hard to find a company to help your nonprofit accept text donations. But what if disaster relief is not your cause? What if you don’t have the media focusing on your cause 24-7 for several weeks?
Last year, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine came out with a book called “The Networked Nonprofit.” This book goes into detail about how nonprofits can use online fundraising to get lots more visits to their websites and donations to their programs. I bought this book and I’m so glad that I did. I’d like to share one story in particular with you. It’s from page 141, in case you’re curious.
There’s a nonprofit called WildlifeDirect. WildlifeDirect was established by Richard Leakey in 2006 to provide support to conservationists in Africa directly on the ground via the use of blogs, which enables anybody, anywhere to play a direct and interactive role in the survival of some of the world’s most precious species. They started seven blogs in 2007 for different kinds of animals that they helped. In 2009, they had more than 70 blogs about each different animal in each different area that they helped. The visits to their website quadrupled, and SO DID their donations. Why? I think it’s because they consistently helped people connect with particular animals. They have made educating their donors their number one priority. Once their donors get a clear and present picture of what’s happening on the ground, they are much more likely to give.
I don’t know many American nonprofits that do that for programs that people could walk down the street and see. But imagine if you could do this for each of your programs. Help people who care about a particular thing that you do immediately find that thing, and then go there and read or watch and give.
If we had kept up our online fundraising efforts and blogging efforts from 2007 to now, if we had treated online fundraising less like ice cream and more like a staple, who knows how much money we could have raised?
How much money are YOU leaving on the table by not getting involved with online fundraising right now? I’ll tell you. A lot. If you can get more people to come to your website, and connect with particular pieces of who you help, you can get more donations. Even if you’ve got a cause that is giving to animals far away from where the donors are. Even if you’ve got a mission that is not as urgent as a natural disaster.
Now, I know you can’t create 70 blogs on your own, and nor should you have to. Check out what CauseVox is doing. They save you money, and time, by helping you have a page that helps people get a clear connection with your cause.
