fundraising

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve by having a spokesperson represent your issue.

Many nonprofit organizations have enlisted celebrities to help them not only to raise awareness about a specific issue, but also to support their organization’s fundraising efforts. I bet you can name a few without even having to think twice—there’s Marlo Thomas for St. Jude’s Children Hospital, Heidi Klum for The Heart Truth campaign, and Ryan Gosling who worked earlier this year with the ENOUGH Project.

For some, integrating a celebrity into your promotional model is par for the course—but should it be? While these A-list celebrities certainly draw attention to an issue, just how effective are they when it comes to enlisting the support of donors online?

Today, Geoff Livingston and Henry T. Dunbar of Zoetica released a white paper focusing on the effectiveness of celebrity spokespeople in social fundraisers. The report looked at the effectiveness of a number of online fundraising campaigns for nonprofits—including both those that did and did not— involve high-profile celebrities. 

They concluded that a celebrity “presence” does not always guarantee that a fundraising initiative will be successful. Rather, bringing on board lesser known celebrities and “weblebrities” can often times be more effective in connecting with donors. The key differences for the more successful, but less well known celebrities included the fact that they had: a personal and relevant story related to the cause; a willingness to engage and be active with the community focused on that particular issue; and an authentic tie to the cause.

The authors also found that while integration of a celebrity spokesperson can help galvanize a community around an issue, getting a star’s fans and followers to commit to a particular call-to-action—such as donating—is not always a guarantee.

“Nonprofits have turned to their celebrity partners with fans and followers in the millions to raise money. The numbers can be astounding, both positively and negatively. Save the Children just ran a celebrity campaign on social media with the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber that raised $100,000 in the first day. However, deeper analysis showed the fundraiser achieved $0.0001 per celebrity follower.”

In addition, the 2011 Millennial Donor survey (conducted by Achieve and Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates) found that for Millennials specifically, 85% responded that they are “motivated to give by a compelling mission or cause, and 56% by a personal connection or trust in the leadership of the organization.” Not surprisingly when compared to the findings from this white paper, “only 2% of Millennials were motivated to give by celebrity endorsements.”

Katya Andresen, Chief Strategy Officer of Network for Good offered Livingston and Dunbar three factors to consider when assessing whether or not a celebrity presence could help promote social fundraising efforts:

• Does the spokesperson have a personal story related to the issue?
• Does the spokesperson have a tight knit community that interacts with them?
• Can the spokesperson be considered an authentic messenger who can deliver issue related messages?

Similarly, the white paper offers suggestions for what a nonprofit manager should consider before integrating a celebrity component into their social fundraising campaign.

• Does the celebrity have a personal connections and authentic passion for the cause?
• Does the celebrity spokesperson demonstrate a willingness to ask their personal friends to become involved, and not just their public?
• Welcome the non-traditional celebrity and consider those who are avid users of social media or who have large/strong social networks

Livingston and Dunbar’s ultimate conclusion is that “the best results do not come from the most well-known celebrities and bloggers, but the most engaged ones.” Taking a page from more traditional fundraising techniques that focus on the creation of relationships, the authors conclude that in order for socially driven fundraising efforts be successful, they too must focus on the building of relationships.

Whether or not you get Lady Gaga to do a public service announcement or Justin Beiber to make an appearance at your next fundraiser—real success for any organization’s fundraising and mobilization efforts will come from connections with the creation and cultivation of relationships.

What techniques for online and socially driven fundraising have you used or seen? Have you ever engaged a celebrity spokesperson to help your nonprofit? If so, what lessons learned can you share?

Welcome to our special guest blog post series -"Millennial Perspectives: Voices of a Giving Generation." We hope you will join us each week until the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22, 2011, as we explore Millennial engagement with a variety of leading experts and practitioners.

This week, we've invited Daniel Kaufman, Co-Founder of the One Percent Foundation as well as Co-Founder of Third Plateau Social Impact Strategies, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits develop and implement Millennial engagement strategies, to provide his take on how to tackle engagement barriers when it comes to fundraising, engagement and advocacy.

If you are reading this, you likely fall into one of two categories: either you work at a nonprofit or you are a Millennial (I’m hoping a large percentage of you are both!). As such, I’m guessing one of the following two scenarios sounds familiar:

If you are a nonprofit: You are sitting around a conference room table trying to figure out how to make your budget for the year. You and your dedicated, underpaid coworkers are trying to figure out the quickest, most effective fundraising strategy so that your organization can focus on changing the world. Inevitably you realize that you can get the most bang for your buck by focusing on major donors and large foundations. It certainly doesn’t make sense to invest time cultivating Millennials who might write a $50 check.

If you are a Millennial: You care about giving back, but you either don’t think you can afford to make a donation, don’t know which organizations are effective, and/or you don’t think you can achieve impact with your small donation. Most importantly, organizations that you might care about aren’t asking you to engage in a meaningful way. As a result, much of your giving tends to be in response to friends asking you to sponsor them in a race or support them at a fundraiser.

If we were on Craigslist, both sides would be posting under the category of Nonprofit-Millennial Missed Connections. Most nonprofits need operating funds now and can’t justify investing in Millennial donor cultivation that pays off over the long-term. Most Millennials take this lack of communication as meaning that nonprofits don’t value their engagement. The two parties seek each other but don’t actually talk to one another.

The findings in the Millennial Donors Report underscore the opportunity if we can change this reality. Millennials are eager to engage, so long as they have a trustworthy partner—whether that trust comes from the endorsement of their social networks, organizational transparency, or access to organizational leadership. This begs the question: How do Millennials and nonprofits work together to build and leverage trust?

Enter the One Percent Foundation (OPF), a Millennial-driven solution to the Missed Connection problem, one that seeks to empower Millennials to give in a sustained, generous, and strategic manner. OPF runs a network of online giving circles that engage Millennials earning an income for the first time. We seek to train, educate and engage our participants to use their limited resources to fund the ideas, organizations, and innovation that they are passionate about. Ultimately, OPF is building a broad-based movement of Millennial philanthropists that challenges the status quo by democratizing giving.

OPF’s giving circle model is relatively straightforward. Participants register online, commit to give at least one percent of their annual income to philanthropic causes, and establish monthly recurring donations through our website. We aggregate participants’ giving and facilitate a crowd-sourced, participatory grantmaking program whereby participants identify, assess, and ultimately select grant recipients. The One Percent Foundation program tackles the three key barriers to meaningful Millennial participation (affordability, knowledge, and impact). 

Embedded in OPF’s grantmaking process is the notion that our process breeds trust and thereby reinforces engagement. The first step of an OPF grant cycle is a nomination period whereby anyone in the OPF community (Millennials giving 1%) can recommend an organization to the circle. During the second phase, a small group of volunteers from the OPF community are trained to conduct due diligence on the nominated organizations. This “working group” speaks to staff members of the nominated nonprofits, examines theories of change, vets the organizations’ financials, and conducts independent research. OPF facilitates a conversation with the working group to narrow all of the nominees to five finalists. During the final phase, OPF educates the entire community about the finalists and asks them to vote online. The two organizations that receive the most votes receive a grant from OPF.

OPF’s grantmaking process tackles the three fundamental trust concerns of Millennials: organizations are only considered after they are endorsed by someone in the social network, nominees are vetted by the community, and participants get access to organizational leaders.

Ultimately, OPF is nothing more than a design solution to the Nonprofit-Millennial Missed Connection problem. We have created the conditions for Millennials to be able to easily access information and interact with nonprofits so they feel comfortable giving proactively.

I invite you to join me for my session at the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22 to learn more about the One Percent Foundation and how OPF and other creative solutions can enable nonprofits to better engage Millennials.

Welcome to our special guest blog post series - "Millennial Perspectives: Voices of a Giving Generation." We hope you will join us each week until the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22, 2011, as we explore Millennial engagement with a variety of leading experts and practitioners.

This week, we've invited Anne Tillema, Director of Development for Mobilize.org to address how fundraising is evolving among organizations.

As the Director of Development of Mobilize.org, a nonprofit organization that focuses on Millennials and investing in their ideas, and as someone with six years of experience in Direct Marketing (particularly Direct Mail) working with over 20 organizations, my fundraising experience expands across almost the entire spectrum of generations. Working in Direct Mail, my target audience was often 70-80 year olds, while today my fundraising focuses on Millennials and members of other generations who want to invest in them.

One thing I have learned from my experience – both in Direct Marketing and with Mobilize.org – is that you cannot make unfounded assumptions about your target audience, no matter what generation they belong to. I was glad to see that the Millennial Donor Survey is helping to shatter some of the assumptions people make about Millennials and their giving habits. Instead, this survey is helping replace these assumptions with theories based on feedback received directly from Millennials themselves – further broadening our understanding of this unique generation.

Many believe that Millennials are most interested in, and therefore most responsive to, solicitations through social media and email. Yet, according to the Millennial Donor Survey, “91% of Millennial donors are at least somewhat likely to respond to a face-to-face request for money from a nonprofit organization, with 27% highly likely to respond to such a request.” On the other hand, “only 8% are highly likely to respond to an email request.” This tells us that we need to make sure that we personally contact and connect with Millennials in our donor cultivations and requests in addition to reaching out to them online, something that many organizations are currently not doing.

At Mobilize.org, we feel it is important that we engage Millennials in discussions about issues affecting our communities and solicit their ideas for solutions, rather than making assumptions about their perspectives and missing out on their innovative suggestions. This same idea applies to Millennial Donors. We need to continue to engage Millennials in order to find out more about why they give, how they prefer to give, their preferred methods of interaction with organizations, what types of communication they prefer, how frequently the want to hear from organizations and their preferred forms of solicitation. We will not understand Millennials’ ideas unless we ask them directly.

So what does this mean?

We need to continue the work of the Millennial Donor Survey and reach out to the Millennials who are donors, volunteers, staff members and even board members of our nonprofits. We need to engage them so that we can learn more about the Millennials involved in our own organizations and make adjustments to our communication and donor strategy accordingly.

Each organization is different and now that we understand more about Millennials and their general giving patterns, we can drill down and learn more about the specifics as they relate to each nonprofit organization. Conduct further surveys, test messages and techniques (both online and offline), segment your fundraising efforts by generation and study giving patterns to see how Millennial donors are currently engaging with your organization and their preferences for the future. The findings can only help expand the role that this important generation, with over 80 million members, can play within our organizations.

Millennials are already an essential part of our nonprofit organizations – and their roles and importance continues to grow. Moving forward, we must involve all generations connected to our nonprofits as we decide on our strategies and plans for the future.

To learn more about Mobilize.org and our work empowering and engaging Millennials, visit www.Mobilize.org.

Welcome to our special guest blog post series - "Millennial Perspectives: Voices of a Giving Generation." We hope you will join us each week until the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22, 2011, as we explore Millennial engagement with a variety of leading experts and practitioners.

To launch the series, we've invited Susan Gordon, Director of Nonprofit Services for Causes.com to share her reflections on the Millennial Donor Survey report released earlier this spring. As a leader in the online fundraising and engagement arena, Susan shares with us her insights on trends related to Millennial donors.

As a Millennial and a professional focused on online fundraising for nonprofits, I couldn’t help myself from nodding my head vigorously throughout most of the Millennial Donor Survey. Congratulations to the writers for a job well done. Here at Causes, we’ve done a lot of donor surveys, focus groups, and data collection that has provided many of the same findings. We also started building tools to help your nonprofit capitalize on these trends so I’d like to share some of those tools and how they can help your nonprofit put this survey into practice. 

If you work for a nonprofit, read the survey and are now thinking, “I understand what Millennials are looking for, but how can I do it?” you’re in luck. The survey pointed out two notable statistics:

• 82% of Millennials said they would be very or somewhat likely to donate to organizations that describe the specific purpose for which the money will be used
• 32% were very likely and 45% were somewhat likely to stop donating if they “didn’t know how the donation was making an impact”

These numbers are staggering in a world of general fundraising drives. Causes has built a Fundraising Projects tool that will help you give Millennial donors a picture of how their money makes an impact. If you go to www.causes.com/donate, you’ll find the Causes Fundraising Project directory. Since late 2010, over $3 million has been donated to Causes Fundraising Projects. Nonprofits of all sizes and budgets are taking advantage of this tool, from Homeward Trails Animal Rescue to the Humane Society of the United States, and succeeding at funding their projects through social media.

The other statistic that struck me was that “59% of Millennials gave in response to a personal ask.” Peer-to-peer fundraising, especially through social media, is a hot topic right now (just look at mycharitywater.org) but many nonprofits don’t have custom tools to take advantage of this trend. This is why Causes built out our Wishes feature. Birthday Wishes help Millennials fundraise from their friends and family by asking them to donate to a nonprofit as a birthday present. Birthday Wishes solicited by Causes (we ask everyone to start one when their birthday is approaching) raise an average of $100/wish, but when a nonprofit asks their supporters to set one up from their website with a Causes Birthday Wish widget, Wishes raise an average of $150/wish. This statistic reinforces the study’s findings that Millennials want a relationship with the nonprofits they are supporting.

Something I’d like to see from this study in the future is a more precise definition of “donating on Facebook.” That term can refer to everything from clicking from a Facebook Page to a nonprofit’s website, to donating through a custom tab on a Page, to donating on the Causes application. This distinction may not be as important for this survey, but for the benefit of nonprofits trying to make decisions about these very different methods, I think it’s important to clarify this term in future studies.

This distinction would also help in analyzing the finding that only 4% of Millennials have donated on Facebook. For now, I see this number as a sign of potential and disagree with the conclusion that “while social media and text remains a favorite of Millennials for communicating, they do not seem ready to jump into donating via those methods.” I believe that Millennials are ready to donate through social media but they are not solicited in the right way, or at all, through Facebook. How many of the respondents received a fundraising ask from a nonprofit through Facebook? I know I’m biased but as Facebook blows past the 500 million user mark and the average person spends over 55 minutes a day on the site, I see it as a huge opportunity for nonprofits. As with any new technology, figuring out fundraising through Facebook will take time and experimentation but the potential of this growing community is worth the growing pains.

If your nonprofit is interested in using Causes as a tool to do that, email our Nonprofit Services team at and we can help you get started.

A few years ago, most of us probably wouldn’t have thought to ask a Salvation Army bell ringer what impact our spare change will have after we drop it in their bucket. But this Christmas, we just might consider it. Whether we’re embracing the information age or just taking a cue from the private sector, donors big and small are increasingly curious about the impact of their dollars.

Donation decisions are generally based on an organization's ability to make a connection with donors. Since people historically give money based on religious beliefs, a desire to feel good or because of a personal ask, fundraising 101 has been focused on telling your story. We've talked at the Case Foundation about how storytelling through videos and photos can be a key to success in fundraising campaigns. We are now seeing this more traditional form of storytelling be linked to social impact measurement and transparency when it comes to how donation dollars are being used. When discussing the future of social impact measurement recently, Anthony Bugg-Levine, Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation and Columbia Business School professor suggested the greatest losers of the fundraising game might be the people who are great storytellers but ineffective problem solvers (those unable to move the needle when it comes to social impact)– a shift that would be bad for them but good for the overall efficiency of the sector.

It's not hard to make the case for measuring social impact. Especially in a time when money is tight, people want to know how their donated dollars are being spent. They want to know how many dollars were raised, how those dollars are spent - how many meals were served, houses were built and vaccines were given. But beyond that, people want information about what the real impact of their dollars are. They want to know not only the simple numbers of meals, houses and vaccines, but the "so what" which is much more difficult to measure because it is often part of systematic change.

Let’s take the example of access to water.

Measuring the impact of water programs goes beyond counting the gallons of water provided. In rural areas where women and children have to spend 3-4 hours a day collecting water, they often miss out on educational and economic opportunities. This cycle continues to impact their communities by limiting sustainable development and progress. On top of that, clean water means saved lives, reduced health care costs, and increased productivity. The links are clear, but it’s a challenge for even a substantial nonprofit organization to allocate the resources required to quantify these effects. Since the majority of nonprofits have annual budgets of less than $1 million, it’s not surprising that so far, many take a look at social impact measurement and decide that it’s not worth it.

Resisting the measuring stick.

By nature, nonprofits are very cause-oriented. In the past this has led to resistance against spending funds on other non-service items. Many nonprofits have now accepted that in the long run, it’s worth investing funds in marketing, technology and earned income initiatives. The most common argument against social impact is that adding the task of social impact measurement to an organization's list of to-dos requires the use of scarce resources - resources that must be pulled away from something else, and often that something else is service the organization provides. To continue the water example, charity:water can give one person clean drinking water for 20 years for $20; I'm sure it's difficult in the short term to reduce the number of people served to divert some of those funds into measurement. But in the long run, such an investment could ultimately bring in more money, which will have a greater overall impact.

Ok, measurement might be good, but how?

Unlike a company's financial performance, which can be easily compared through established metrics like return on equity and stock performance, social impact measurement lacks established methods and benchmarks. But never fear – there are people who are already dedicated to fixing that. For example, the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) at the Global Impact Investing Network are meant to provide common metrics for social and environmental performance. The chicken and egg part of this situation is that organizations need to adopt these metrics for them to be helpful standards, and people are wary about adopting a method before it’s a standard – especially when adopting means another budget line item.

It's all about balance.

Before you trade your old fundraising material for statistical analysis and spreadsheets, remember that both your donors and your employees are will still be human and they still like a good story. Employees who are drawn to the mission could get disillusioned when they see the individuals that were the reason they sought a nonprofit job turned into numbers that can be crunched this way and that to maximize efficiency. Even when done well and with limited reallocation of resources, there are still dangers of making social change too much about the numbers. When it becomes too much about efficiency and numbers, the people can get lost. And if metrics become more and more important in how donors allocate their numbers, we could accidentally create incentives for people to neglect the real mission or even game the system. When the goal becomes big numbers, it could be tempting to sacrifice quality.

The truth is that organizations need to be able to do both storytelling and impact measurement, and focusing on one doesn't eliminate the need for the other - kind of like how companies need both good stock performance and good ad campaigns. Bugg-Levine concluded that efforts to measure social impact "should be relevant and reliable but not reductionist."

How do you think organizations should balance storytelling and social impact measurement? What are you interested in when spending your dollars as a donor?

It's no secret that Millennials enjoy participating in the creation of programs, fundraisers, campaigns and products and want the opportunity to personalize their experience whenever possible. Innovations made possible by emerging technology have fueled the demand for creative ways to get involved - we're designing our own shoes, water bottles and advocacy campaigns, rather than waiting for an institution to tell us what our options for participation are. Empowering Millennials to support a cause or product their way has been a proven way to engage our generation, and nonprofits and businesses alike continue to experiment with new ways to give us individual options. Here are just a few of the most recent examples:

"Make It Your Own" Burgers
This week marks the grand opening of 4food, a fast food restaurant that says "meals are necessarily social events," and means it. Customers can order online, on an iPad in the restaurant, and will soon be able to do so via their mobile phones. The menu board changes based on what's most popular at the time and what ingredients are most available at that location. But 4food is not just a tech-savvy restaurant with a social media presence. Not only do they have community groups, a blog and active profiles on Facebook, Twitter and foursquare, 4food encourages and enables its burger-loving customers to become salesmen as well.

You can create your own burger, name it, and it will be saved in the system for future visits. Not only is that convenient for people who are likely to forget which of the dozens of tasty combinations they had last time, but it also gives them the opportunity to market their personalized sandwiches to their friends. Each time someone orders the creation by name, you earn a royalty of 25 cents, which is credited to your online account.

"Make It Your Own" Music
Watching music videos might be so early 90s, but music video director Chris Milk, along with the folks at Google and the band Arcade Fire, are trying to make it interesting again with music that takes you home again. No really, it takes you to your home. The new video for "We Used to Wait," from the band's new album allows individuals to personalize the video by entering their address. Google satellite images take you on a jog through your neighborhood and to your house and even let you send a note to your childhood self. It's the perfect thing to indulge a homesick student...and to introduce them to both Google Chrome and Arcade Fire's new album.

"Make It Your Own" Fundraising
Endorse for a Cause, which launched last week, is an example of one socially conscious application of our love for personalization. While there have been many experiments around giving back at the cash register, whether it's online or offline, In addition to similar donate-while-you-shop models, Endorse for a Cause takes these experiments a step further by tapping individuals to market items for stores like Target and Starbucks and rewarding them by kicking money from affiliate fees to their cause when a friend purchases the product. For now, there are a limited number of nonprofits that can receive funds from Endorse for a Cause, but the individual-friendly platform allows users to nominate additional nonprofits for participation.

If someone is too shy to ask their social media friends for money directly, they can play the slacktivist card and post something already popular like a Starbucks card or a pair of Old Navy espadrilles to their Facebook and Twitter profiles through Endorse for a Cause. Hopefully their friends will be tempted to click through, buy the product and thereby earn a donation for their cause. While some might criticize this concept as another enabling platform that leads people to satisfy their desire (or duty) to help out by clicking a few buttons, which excuses them from doing things that are actually helpful to their cause - or doing as much as they might have if this platform didn't exist.

At the end of the day, success for burger joints, bands, fundraising tools and other products will be based on their quality - not just their inclusion of user-generated and user-personalized content. But these innovative ways to involve individuals in the creation and marketing of products can draw in new users and loyal supporters for products and organizations with staying power.

Recent philanthropy news seems to have revealed a trend. Musicians, and Nashville residents, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill organized a benefit concert, which has raised about $2 million for Nashville flood relief. Artist Damien Hirst rallied 98 of his colleagues to produce an art auction that raised $38 million for the (RED) campaign's efforts to fight AIDS in Africa. Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis and New York Knicks player Tracy "T-Mac" McGrady are leaning on NBA players to raise funds to build schools for Darfuri refugee camps through the Darfur Dream Team.

It seems obvious to have artists paint, to have musicians sing and to have NBA players call on their teammates in support of a cause - but what your supporters have in common with these fundraising celebrities is that they too can and should be leveraged in a way that makes the most of their skills and network. Unfortunately, more often than not nonprofits fail to ask their partners to do what makes the most sense.

Unique Skills...
Instead of looking at the skills and extended networks their existing advocates have to offer, they ask lawyers to paint murals and they ask teachers to stuff envelopes. Yes, all of these activities may move the ball forward bit by bit. The nonprofit needs the mural painted and the envelopes stuffed, and the lawyer and the teacher may even have had fun working on those projects. But they aren't the most strategic asks that could be made of these supporters - people who could probably contribute much more value and have a more fulfilling volunteer experience if they were asked to do something more in line with their skill set and interests. The Taproot Foundation is great at matching volunteers' professional skills with projects that nonprofits badly need. While not every nonprofit is ready for a large-scale project like a Taproot grant, this principle can be applied to how they engage their networks every day.

And Unique Networks...
If there's not a task or project that matches the skills of the supporters you have, you can also be strategic about leveraging their networks in appropriate ways. While you might not have the star power available that some of these multi-million dollar campaigns tapped into, your supporters can be surprisingly influential in their networks - whether that be a sorority, a rec league softball team, a book club or a network of bloggers. Everyone has a group of people they can turn to and say (as Damien Hirst said to his artist friends) "If you do this for me, some day, when you need to call on me, I will reciprocate for you."

And That Goes for Social Media Too...
Now that nonprofits are convinced of the power of social media to fundraise and friend raise, we are going overboard at times by asking even social media resistant supporters to join certain platforms SO they can support us through those platforms. You don't need to bring all your supporters to Facebook so they can "like" your organization, join your cause and start receiving your Facebook messages. That would be like asking your supporters to become pastry chefs so you can have a great bake sale. It's a good idea for nonprofits to create a presence on social media because that's where many of their supporters already spend time and have access to a network, but it's an even better idea to be strategic about how they invest their time on social media.

While it's true that social citizens might be the perfect supporters to champion your cause online, Millennials (and other generations) have other creative ideas, talents and networks that shouldn't be overlooked or undervalued. For more tips on engaging Millennial volunteers, see Kari's recent post. At the end of the day, the real goal is to empower volunteers and supporters where they already have a presence and expertise, whether that's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or (gasp) not online at all.

Over the last couple of years, Facebook users have gone through the love-hate relationship cycle with the social media platform as its privacy settings have continued to change crumble, but the options have been limited to either sucking it up or closing your account and missing out on all the benefits of Facebook - an option now being explored by so many people that if you type in "how do I" in Google, the first autofill that pops up is "...delete my Facebook account." I should say those were the only options until now. 

Four NYU students and self-proclaimed nerds decided to take matters into their own hands and build a new social network. They're calling it Diaspora. Others are calling it the anti-Facebook. New social networking sites and platforms are cropping up all the time, but this one may be just as significant for what it is as for HOW it’s being built. The team of four 19 to 22-year-olds began fundraising on Kickstarter in late April so they could spend their summer creating Diaspora. They blew past their fundraising goal of $10,000 in less than two weeks, and now, just shy of three weeks, they are rolling past $130,000 from more than 3,500 people – and rising all the time.

It's any nonprofit or cause-champion’s dream to capture that kind of support from their networks, so what can we learn from Diaspora?

1. Pursue a cause people are dying to support.
   If you have to spend a lot of time explaining to potential supporters why your project is necessary, you may need to rethink your project. It wasn’t difficult for these guys to rally people behind their privacy battle cry because they’re meeting a need in their community. When you can address a problem people already recognize, they'll jump in to help you succeed.
    
2. Offer measurable results.
   At the end of the summer, the team promises their software will be released, and it will be free. Plain and simple. Not all nonprofit projects can offer such concrete outcomes, especially when the problems you’re addressing are mammoths like world peace, poverty or cancer, but whatever your cause, it’s important to be able to tell people what you will do and then to demonstrate whether or not you have done it. Creating deliverables in the form of SMART goals can help break large issues down into distinct steps which will help you show return on investment.
    
3. Show your passion by putting some skin in the game.
   With two members of the team just graduating from college and two others looking forward to their dwindling summer days as students, they would normally be getting jobs, taking trips or just finding a pool nearby. But they are sacrificing all of that to spend 12 hours a day writing code without pay. While I’m not advocating slave labor at nonprofits, short-term campaigns where you’re rolling up your sleeves and making sacrifices of sleep, food or pay for the common good, often make people want to get behind you and cheer you on.
    
4. Offer a chance to participate.
   The fundraising levels (from $5-$2,000) that the Diaspora team created would make any marketing department proud. And the fact that the vast majority of backers so far have given less than $50 each shows that lots of small-dollar donors want to give a little and be a part of something meaningful. The largest two levels (which are both sold out) provide the extra perk of giving sponsors the ability to check in on Diaspora's daily progress on the build server. Aside from the thoughtfully tailored levels of financial support, they have committed to release their code as free software at the end of the summer so anyone can use it, build on it and make it better. This transparency and willingness to let others participate and take some control are characteristics people like to see in nonprofit projects as well.

As with many new technologies and developments, social media is being used in surprising and unintended ways to analyze and reveal unexpected data and trends. Twitter, Facebook and Google tools have already been used for market research, sales predictions and targeted advertising. Twitter, for example, has shown remarkable accuracy at forecasting box office success, even more accuracy than the currently used (and comparably complex) Hollywood Stock Exchange method. Now credit card companies are reportedly using foursquare and other location sharing platforms to predict divorce, and therefore financial troubles, by analyzing the places people are checking in frequently - the logic being that Home Depot and Bed, Bath & Beyond check-ins demonstrate stability in a way that frequent late night bar check-ins do not.

While it seems a bit creepy to think about companies analyzing where we go and what we tweet about, you have to admit it's also pretty resourceful. As someone who thinks that nonprofits should often operate a lot more like for-profit companies, I wonder if there's an opportunity to use this strategy for good. What if nonprofits could use public data from social networking sites like Twitter and foursquare to predict which demographics and individuals are likely to be interested in their organization or cause?

The places people visit and the subjects they post about on social networks might provide clues about whether they are likely to donate or volunteer before they are asked - or even inform what type of appeal might work best. It might take extra work or expense up front, but it could save time and money in the long run by allowing development teams to concentrate their resources on the people who are most likely to respond. While each nonprofit might not have the capacity to pour over Twitter data, it could be an interesting third party business opportunity.

And once consumers are able to get used to the fact that people are checking up on their social media posts, this strategy could benefit them as well. Instead of sifting through all kinds of volunteer opportunities and donation asks from organizations that don't particularly inspire me, I wouldn't mind receiving targeted solicitations only from nonprofits that have some reason to believe I would be interested in getting involved in their work.

Is this social media research in the future of nonprofit development and recruitment? Is it an invasion of privacy or just smart? How would you respond if you knew you were being targeted by a nonprofit because of your tweets and check-ins?

Today’s guest blogger, Derrick Feldman, is CEO of Achieve where he provides guidance to organizations to help them develop new fundraising strategies. Today, Derrick continues the conversation we began last week on the importance of engaging younger donors and why fundraising isn’t just about raising money.

A personal connection to the mission

Typically, young donors are involved in organizations related to causes or issues by which they or someone close to them have been personally affected. If a woman fights cancer, she might enlist in a cancer-related organization. If a man loves to read, he might volunteer to battle illiteracy. If a young family has overcome poverty, they might volunteer at a food bank. Once connected to an organization, these people want to help shape the direction or have the opportunity to directly assist someone served by the organization.

Also don’t assume that, once you’ve made your connections, you can stop there. You must – as you would with any donor – continue to develop the relationship. Cultivate and visit with young donors to show how you admire their passion and how they can affect the work of the organization. Give them opportunities to rub shoulders with more veteran donors and community leaders. Listen to their ideas and make them feel connected to the mission. Offer them private meet-and-greets with board members before board activities, invite them to work with staff to shape a strategic plan, etc.