Relationships and Engagement Fundraising

Breast Cancer awareness month (October) is just around the corner!   And here's another clever online fundraising strategy for breast cancer.  I like it because it combines education, a personal story, and a click through model for donations.   I heard about it because it turned up in one of my friends activity feeds on Facebook.

If you go to Purina Cat Chow's web site & take a test on your knowledge of breast cancer they will donate $1. to the Susan G. Komen Foundation to support breast cancer research. There are only five questions and they are not difficult. 

What's the connection between cats and breast cancer?  You'll have to read the story about how one woman who was struggling with breast cancer got some extra TLC from her cat.   As many of you know, I'm more of a dog person than a cat person, but I thought this was a great example of encouraging deeper engagement with a cause, disease education, and online fundraising.   

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has just launched a campaign to raise $100,000 in 100 days and is using a gaming platform, PledgePlay.  It's an online casual gaming platform where the money used to purchase "tokens" to play games is donated to LLS. 

What's makes this interesting?  The personal element.  The CEO of PledgePlay, Jim Carol, developed the platform while his 11 year old son, Taylor, was receiving treatment for a rare form of leukemia.  In fact, Taylor was named VP of Game Development throughout that time.  Their hope was to develop a fun way to bring families together - old and young - to have some fun while ultimately raising money and funds for those battling childhood cancers.  (Cancer is a disease that doesn't care how young you are --  as Matthew Zachary will certainly tell you)

Social Actions has a great list of links about other platform developments, resources,  and news happening in the fundraising 2.0 arena.   Here's three themes worth reflecting on.

1.  Relationship Building Is King

London Fundraising Summit took place last week.   It focuses on relationship building -- very important to any fundraising success -- both online and offline - and regardless of tools.   

Jonathan Waddingham from justgiving gave a presentation that included 7 principles for engaging donors online:

• Engagement is more than just a ‘donate now’ button
• It’s about building relationships with supporters
• Reaching out to people in their online world
• Go to where your supporters are, don’t expect them to come to you
• Hard to measure, may not reap immediate returns
• The investment is time more than money
• If you do it, do it well – be authentic

Amy Sample Ward who has recently moved across the pond gave a presentation about online engagement    She makes a point about connecting social media strategy with traditional strategy with her phrase - conversations and conversions.  For more, read her notes here.

2.   From Crowd Sourcing to Crowd Funding With A Purpose

I've been watching Dave Cohn (aka DigiDave) now for a few months now.  His project is “Spot Us” allows an individual or group to take control of news in their community by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists to write important, or uncovered news stories.   Dave is using distributed networked fund raising approach, but connecting it to specific outcome - journalism (see slide 19)   In this post, he describes the soon to be launched site.

3.  When will relationship begin online and enhance offline activism on Facebook?

Peter Deitz shared an audio clip of the debate "Can Facebook Replace Face-to-Face?" between Facebook Causes' Sean Parker and the Brookings Institution's William Galston (& moderated by Joe Trippi) . Unfortunately, there isn't a top line summary of the key points any place online.   I listened to some of the audio but it was hard for me to hear -- here's some of what I pieced together:

The debate wasn't about whether Facebook would replace face-to-face real-life interaction in terms of organizing activities.    The debate was about whether Facebook is a tool soley to maintain relationships with people you already know offline.  That is it can help you augment  your close personal connections.  Or whether it can be effective to help you find people that you don't know face-to-face who are passionate about your issue, convert them to your cause and get them to attend an event or action offline.. That is the relationship begins online and leds to offline activism.   There hasn't been a lot of that yet, but with new features integrated in Causes/Facebook more of that is in the future.

In addition there were two other blog posts providing some quotes:

The Social Citizens Blog posted some quotes from Galston for fodder for an online discussion:

• “In the old days, there were gatekeepers and some information just didn’t get out there. A world without gatekeepers is a worse world than one with gatekeepers, even though they are not infallible.”
• “Online      organizing is good for latent communities of like-minded people to      organize themselves”
• “Definition of ‘common good’ now differs greatly … so, if you’re asking me if these things are alleviating polarization or bringing unity—no, they are not.”
• “Viral      nature is good and bad … virality proliferates rumors below the radar”

The PhilanTopic Blog also shared some notes from the session.

Comments

[Jonathan Waddingham]

Hi Beth, great round-up of stories and thanks for the link.
It was a great event to do with Amy, as the people there were really enthusiastic and really keen and willing to learn - you can't beat that feeling when you explain something you're really passionate about to people and they just *get* it.