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I’ve always been a big fan of Facebook Causes. I’ve written about the potential for non-profits, features that I’d like to see in future upgrades, and compared it to its contemporaries. Now, I’ve been eagerly following the Causes Giving Challenge. The Challenge, sponsored by the Case Foundation, gives organizations an additional financial incentive to jumpstart their Facebook organizing.

The contest basically works like this: organizations start a new cause, and every day the cause that received the most donors gets $1,000 from Case (in addition to whatever they bring in via Facebook). In addition, at the end of the the challenge, which runs until February 1, the organizations that get the most total unique donors get larger prizes totaling $200,000.

The campaign gets a good writeup in the New York Times:

“Philanthropy shouldn’t be defined as a bunch of rich people writing big checks,” said Jean Case, who founded the Case Foundation with her husband, Steve, founder of America Online. “Small amounts of money given by large numbers of individuals can be combined to do great things.”

“We’ve always asked how we can leverage our resources to engage a larger population, how can we get the most Americans involved in charitable giving and action,” Ms. Case said.

Some thoughts on why this is a big deal for giving via social networks below the fold…

The first thought I had when I heard about this contest was how it was really every internet director’s dream - finally, you can convince your finance department to spend money organizing on Facebook, with the possibility of real money on the table, without the pressure of having to get a decent ROI from Facebook users overnight. In essence, you can focus on list growth and encouraging a few small donations, with the Case Foundation doing the heavy lifting of paying for the program.

And it shouldn’t be that hard for an organization to get involved here - the "today’s leaders" section shows that the Cause in first place currently only has 37 donors today, and I recall these numbers being lower last month (the lowest cause to win was "Fight AIDS Now" with 32 donors on December 15). Some unlikely groups have been awarded grants by Case - Bridge to TÜrkiye, Students for a Free Tibet, Inc, and the Love without Boundaries Foundation are not among the 800 lb gorillas of the non-profit sector, but they’ve all been one-day winners and are in the running for the big prizes at the end. And while some larger organizations are also doing well, like the League of Young Voters and Greenpeace, the list shows a broad diversity of organization sizes.

Ideologically, most of the organizations in the lead seem to be non-partisan or progressive - I’ll admit to being surprised to see a right-wing group in the top ten. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, given the generally progressive bent of Facebook users, but the system seems to favor a strategy of convincing donors to give in bursts rather than steadily.

My biggest question here is why we aren’t seeing more of the gigantic non-profits in the field here. With their impressive email lists, they should be able to prospect a large number of Facebook members, then convert them into Causes users, and from there into donors. Admittedly, they’ll see falloff at each step of the way, but it should be a large enough seed list to build a viral effort, the way Facebook does so well. Have large organizations tried to get in on the challenge and failed to get traction? Or have they just not messaged them members?

The latter seems more likely to me - I’m a member of a number of groups email lists and don’t recall seeing anything on this in my inbox. As a matter of fact, the only giving challenge cause I’m a member of is this one by the Humane Society, and only because I was messaged on Facebook about it. Can anyone weigh in here on why we’re not seeing more from larger organizations as part of the giving challenge? Please post your comments below and I’ll update the post.

I hope we’ll see more programs like this in the future - by my count, the top five Causes alone have seen nearly 3,000 donors already, and there are thousands more to other Causes. Every donor who campaigns like this can recruit is another person comfortable with giving online, through social networks, which lowers the barrier to future campaigns for non-profits. And even if organizations don’t win the daily or total challenge, they still get to keep the contributions solicited and the lists of new donors they’ve cultivated.

Kudos to the Case Foundation and Causes for this innovative approach to building the fundraising infrastructure social networks need to be accepted as a critical fundraising platform for non-profits.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Marketing, Nonprofits, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.