Today we bring you another nonprofit fundraising Best Practice in Action from our weekly series. Each week we highlight an organization that has done an incredible job of promoting its online fundraising efforts with Firstgiving and show you how to do the same. This week’s Best Practice is. . .
Send a friendly reminder about your fundraising through Facebook.
Is your nonprofit organization on Facebook? Our friends at the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) regularly post information about upcoming events, exhibitions, and membership to their Facebook group, so it was only natural that they’d post about their fundraising, too. With just a few days left in their matching gift campaign, they sent out this message to all their Facebook group members:
With a four-person staff and a lot of things to do, the PRC used Facebook to quickly and easily connect their online community to their fundraising efforts.
So, to recap:
Use Facebook for what Facebook is good for. Facebook updates are quick and allow you to connect to many of your supporters at once. Keep your fans and groupies posted on what’s going on with your fundraising efforts.
Today we bring you another nonprofit fundraising Best Practice in Action from our weekly series. Each week we highlight an organization that has done an incredible job of promoting its online fundraising efforts with Firstgiving and show you how to do the same. This week’s Best Practice is. . .
Equip your fundraisers to make the most of their personal fundraising pages.
Our friends at Rutgers University’s Dance Marathon raise money online every year for the Embrace Kids Foundation. Their fundraisers are primarily college students, who don’t have a lot of money to donate themselves, but who are actively invested in the cause.
And where do college students spend a lot of time? Online.
To make sure all the Dance Marathoners knew how to make the most of their fundraising pages, Mike, one of the event organizers, created this quick how-to video and uploaded it to YouTube:
Dance Marathoners who needed an extra bit of inspiration or help could watch this video and learn how to use their Firstgiving fundraising pages as a tool to meet their online fundraising goals. Result? 471 college students raised almost $90,000 online for the Embrace Kids Foundation.
So, to recap:
Identify where your fundraisers live online, and use the most appropriate medium to reach them. You know your community best–communicate information about your event using email, Facebook, Twitter, or all of the above.
Happy fundraising and best wishes for success!
Share your own success stories of fundraising Best Practices in Action! Send us an email at bestpractices@firstgiving.com.
Last week we hosted a sold-out webinar on using Facebook for community building and nonprofit fundraising. Well, technically it wasn’t sold out because it was free, but the session was completely full! If you missed it or couldn’t get in, you can see slides and audio for the session here.
During the session, we talked about Facebook Pages (aka fan pages) and why they’re good for nonprofit organizations. A Facebook Page is your nonprofit’s official presence on Facebook, and you can use it to send an unlimited number of messages to your fans, add applications, and track metrics (like how many people visit your Page). For more on why you might want to have an official presence on Facebook, check out our webinar.
One thing we didn’t get to in the webinar was the topic of adding “Favorite Pages” to your nonprofit’s Facebook Page. People who like your nonprofit’s Page on Facebook can become your fans, but did you know that you can connect to other nonprofits and organizations on Facebook through your Facebook Page? Here’s how:
1: Find a Page you want to add to your Favorites:
2. Select where you want to have the Page appear (if you have more than one Page on Facebook, you’ll need to choose one of them from the drop-down menu):
3. Voila! The Page now appears in the “Favorite Pages” box on your nonprofit Page:
In addition to the Elizabeth Peabody House (pictured above), we just added Will Work for Social Change, an organization dedicated to accelerating positive change by serving the talent-related needs of social entrepreneurs, to Firstgiving’s Favorite Pages. Visit our Facebook Page to see more of our favorite Pages or to become a fan!
Today we bring you another fundraising Best Practice in Action from our weekly series. Each week, we highlight an organization that has done an incredible job of promoting its online fundraising efforts with Firstgiving and show you how to do the same. This week’s Best Practice is. . .
Tweet updates about your fundraising.
Are you on Twitter? Our friends at Basset Buddies Rescue have been Tweeting about all things Basset Hound for some time (you can follow them @BassetBuddies). It was only natural, then, that they’d Tweet the good news about the first fundraising page created for their Basset Fest fundraising event:
As you might expect, the link in their Tweet goes straight to Basset Buddies’ Firstgiving nonprofit page, where participants can register for the event and start fundraising.
Basset Buddies Rescue is using all of their online tools to get the word out about their event and connect fundraisers to their Firstgiving page. Remember, non-profit organizations like yours are successful in fundraising when they generate excitement about their events!
So, to recap:
If you have a Twitter account, use it to tell your followers about what’s going on in your organization, including your fundraising milestones!
Happy fundraising and best wishes for success!
***Follow Firstgiving on Twitter @firstgiving
***Share your own success stories of fundraising Best Practices in Action! Send us an email at bestpractices@firstgiving.com.
We’re hosting another free fundraising webinar one week from right now, on Wednesday, June 17 at 3:30pm East coast time (12:30 West) all about fundraising with Facebook. Every time we talk about social media fundraising, there are always Facebook fundraising questions, so we decided to put together a whole session on using Facebook to build your communities and fundraise online. We hope you can join us.
As you can see, we’ll talk about the basics a bit and then get right to the meat of how to raise money and build community on Facebook. Since about 75% of our usual webinar audience already has at least a personal presence on Facebook, we’ll be sure to leave some time for your questions. You can register now here: http://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/694448243 All are welcome but space will be limited.
They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but these days on the web, it seems that a little knowledge is all you really need. One of the big challenges for any nonprofit organization, but especially for smaller ones, is managing a good website. It used to be that a website meant expensive consultants, but more and more nonprofit organizations seem to be making it on their own, with the help of some smart volunteers or interns and a raft of free software and services. Specifically, we’ve been seeing more and more nonprofit organizations building their website with blogging tools like WordPress. In fact, we might even be a little behind the times on this one, as the Non-Profit Tech Blog broke the WordPress for NPO story back in December.
Last month, we did a survey of the participants in our webinar, SEO for the NPO, and found that over half are making their website go with staff they already have who also do other jobs. Add to that the 14% running on intern or volunteer power and you get over two thirds doing it their way. Additionally, 19% are outsourcing their websites and a mere 13% have dedicated web staff in their organizations.
We’re curious, have you taken the WordPress plunge? Besides this very blog, Firstgiving is also using WordPress for our new help and support site. Take our poll below and see the results.
How does your organization manage its website?
We use a specialized Content Management System (CMS) (43.0%, 3 Votes)
We use web editing tools like dreamweaver (29.0%, 2 Votes)
Our web person does it all, we don't know how (14.0%, 1 Votes)
We use blogging tools like wordpress, blogger or typepad (14.0%, 1 Votes)
Our website doesn't change very often (14.0%, 1 Votes)
Summer’s almost here; have you customized your Firstgiving nonprofit page yet?
It’s easy to do and you can edit it anytime you like by logging into your nonprofit account.
We’ve put together an 8-minute video tutorial to guide you through editing and customizing your branded Firstgiving nonprofit page, including uploading your banner image, left image content, right content customization, and your nonprofit page text:
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