Three Different Approaches to Twitter Fundraising: Bees, Turkeys, and Blame

TweetsGiving 2009

If the dollar amounts from fundraising campaigns using social networks are disappointing, one response is to say this doesn't work and stop doing it.  An alternative approach is to experiment and find ways to improve results.   

Twitter for fundraising has been around for two years (read Shel Israel's Twitterville), as of 2009, there seems to be three different tactical models for Twitter fundraising approaches emerging:

1)   Sponsored Tweets/HashTags: Donors do not have to open their own check books, but instead retweet or use a hashtag to leverage a donation from a corporate sponsor to a charity.  

2)   Spreading Person to Person Asks:   This approach uses twitter and encourages people to ask their friends through Twitter to donate to a charity and spread the ask to their friends.  Successful versions of this approach tie a human emotion to the click action - blame, thankfulness, etc.

3)   Tweet Meet Give:   This approach weaves together online and offline activities and leverages "Tweet Ups."  Amanda Rose and Twestival pioneered a networked version of this approach to benefit charity:water, but it has also been used by single nonprofits.

Sponsored Tweets/Hashtags

Sponsored Tweets or Hashtags is a form of click philanthropy and has been used by nonprofits on their web sites before it was common Facebook and Twitter.   

Take for example,  The Free Rice Game, an interactive online game that donated rice to the United Nations World Food Program based on clicking.   All you had to do was click and play a word game, and that leveraged a food donation to fight hunger.  The game was very engaging for adults and children alike.  

For each click, 10 grains of rice is donated.  That may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that millions of people have played the game since its inception in 2007.   It is everyone together that makes the difference.  The Free Rice Game has generated enough rice to feed millions of people since it started in October 2007 or a total of 70,991,387,110 grains of rice as of October 2009.

In 2008, we started to see click action philanthropy on Facebook with Lil Green Patch raising over $100,000 for the Nature Conservancy.  In 2009,  it has evolved to incorporate a networked approach and there are even platforms or communities of people dedicated to click action philanthropy, including Every Wun.   And it comes as no surprise to see click action philanthropy become more common on Twitter, with the platform Twitcause.  

More and more we are seeing fundraisers incorporate Retweet This Message or Use This HashTag to leverage donations from a corporate sponsor or to simply spread the fundraising message from friend to friend.  This transition began a year ago as Twitter came into its own as a charitable gift spreader. (See my Twitter Fundraising Timeline.)   We've also seen some versions of Twitter fundraisers not do too well - take for example this follow me Twitter and I'll donate a dollar to a charity or applications that integrated donation engines in Tweets.

TwitCause, a service not unlike the popular fundraising application Causes on Facebook, only built on top of Twitter has been implementing some new interesting twists on click fundraising on Twitter.  As a basic service, TwitCause will find a cause to support (partially based on community feedback) and use Twitter to drive awareness for it. They also ask that you donate some money.   

Here's an example of a campaign to raise money on TwitCause for honeybee research. 

The fundraising campaign added some extra buzz, a sponsor, Ice cream maker Häagen-Dazs,  willing to pay for any Twitter user who tweets out the support for the cause.  The sponsorship worked liked this: Häagen-Dazs was offering to donate $1 per tweet for the first 500 people that tweet everyday with the hashtag #HelpHoneyBees. The money was donated to UC Davis research project to further look into Colony Collapse Disorder, as well as help fund the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, which aims to teach people about how to create their own honeybee farms.  

I got some of the back story form Julio Vasconcellos, VP for Business Development, for the Experience Project which operates TwitCause.  "I think the #HelpHoneyBees hashtag campaign was very effective and helped
raise $7k for the honey bee research as well as get Häagen-Dazs some great exposure around the contributions they've been making to the cause (and of course, to their brand)."

For those that want the numbers:

• 6,818 tweets sent out during the official week (several more before) by 3,294 unique Twitterers
• Total followers reached was slightly over 5MM (these are non-unique followers, basically a sum of all the followers of each of those 3kTwitterers)
• Total Twitter impressions generated 12.4MM (here an "Twitter impression" is anytime a follower is presented with a tweet - if I have 100 followers and tweet twice, that's 200 "Twitter impressions")
• Häagen-Dazs donated $7,000 to UC Davis for research into colony collapse disorder which is afflicting honey bee populations
• Participation from some celebrities and notables

Vasconcellos predicts that we'll be seeing more and more sponsored tweet programs of all shapes and sizes. There are already a number of active causes on TwitCause.  And some are building their own Twitter Fundraising Drive pages for sponsored Tweet Campaigns.   Here's one to benefit Make A Wish Foundation, each tweet will drive a 5 cent donation from LeapFish to raise $10,000 to send a sick child to Disneyland.  That's 200,000 tweets which compared to these other efforts seems like an ambitious goal.  I hope they make it for Jacob's sake or if not I hope they just donate the money anyway.

Spreading Person to Person Asks

Scott Henderson  called it "creative philanthropy" but it is really the Twitter version of person to person fundraising asks for small amounts, taking advantage of Twitter's ability to easily spread person-to-person fundraising solicitations.  He describes last Thanksgiving's Tweetsgiving campaign and Blame Drew's Cancer campaign.  

This year Stacey and her flock (I'm one of the honorary turkeys) will launch this year's Tweetsgiving, another 48-hour celebration.  They have integrated the Twestival strategy - tweet, meet, and give by organizing meetups  from different cities to help promote the drive.

I think one of the important qualities that make these and other retweet or hashtag fundraisers successful is to tap into human emotion.  Good fundraisers (and marketers) know that tugging at the heart strings can open the wallet.  Stacey is doing this with gratitude, Drew is doing it by blame (blaming his cancer).

So, the click to donate action needs an emotional lever as well as a money lever.  

Tweet, Meet, Give

Twestival has had the most success at scaling this model.  Plans for 2010 Twestival are already in the works.

Conclusion

We are all curious to see these approaches fundraising on Twitter become a standard practice both for nonprofits and  for corporate sponsors.   Some questions:

• How to set a realistic goal (total dollars = $ per retweet or hashtag) that helps the nonprofit actually implement the project or solve the need?
• What is too ambitious or too low a goal?
• How does the ongoing affinity/relationship building online and offline impact amounts raised?
• How do amounts raised compare - sponsored tweets or person-to-person asks or tweet-meet-give approaches?
• How to make a click philanthropy action on Twitter engaging and fun?
• How to best incorporate human emotion in the Twitter?
• Will this approach become so popular and so many nonprofits and corporations using it that it will create "Cause Retweet Fatigue"
• Is there value in the impressions metric?
• What's next for Twitter fundraising?

Comments

[John Haydon]

Beth,

Great post!

One thing we're stressing this year for Tweetsgiving is the expression of gratitude. That's the primary focus. We're not telling Twitter folks or bloggers to ask their followers to donate $$$ (that always feels weird for some people, like me). What we are asking them to do is to encourage their "tribes" to join a global expression of gratitude and include the Tweetsgiving URL (http://bit.ly/TGonline) - that's all!

The hypothesis is that when people feel gratitude, they'll want to give. Stacey and the gang are coming from a place of trusting the innate humanity within every person.

John

[Scottyhendo]

Glad you had a chance to read my piece. I do want to make sure my main point is clear on how I'm defining "creative philanthropy". While my first two examples have used Twitter well, creative philanthropy is platform-agnostic.

In simplest terms, creative philanthropy is the introduction of new, innovative ways individuals are using media and technology to raise awareness for causes they care about. Most of the time, these individuals come from outside the non-profit sector and bring different perspectives and approaches.

Twestival and charity:water are two other examples for creative philanthropy. Amanda Rose and Scott Harrison are using their respective expertises and employing new tools and tactics to help address social issues.

In terms of Twitter fundraising, you've done a great job of collecting a variety of samples and framing out three strategic models. I think we can continue to build on it.

[Steve Drake]

Thanks for sharing Beth.

I'm doing a presentation at the 2010 ASAE Great Ideas Conference called "Moving from Dialing for Dollars to Tweetups & Twestivals: How Social Media can Engage New Donors."

I'm using Tweetsgiving and TweetUp4Troops as case studies. Wondering if I can use some of your information in my presentation?

Steve

[Simon Kirk]

I wanted to raise awareness about a relevant initiative. TechiesGiveBack (an organization I co-founded) is organizing a fundraising effort on behalf of CampInteractive, a non-profit in New York City. Apart from organizing an event day with kids from the program, we are also partnering with Foursquare. Foursquare is opening up their leader board for sponsorship. Any company can bid to re-skin the NYC leader board for a week. Each point on the leader board will be matched to dollars e.g. one point might equal 3 cents. As people go out on and 'check in' at different venues, they accumulate points. Those points translate to dollars donated to CampInteractive, through the sponsorship of the third party. It will be one the easiest and more fun ways to give back ever used for a fundraising effort.

[Avi Kaplan]

Any idea how #HelpHoneyBees got the figures on non-unique twitter followers reached? Did Twitcause provide that data?

[Beth Kanter]

John,

Thanks for the comment and clarification. Actually, there is a request to give a donation although it is optional and the third step of gratitude.

Looks like the ask is spread gratitude, join our community, share with other how you are spreading gratitude, donate, tell 10 friends.

The ask takes people through the ladder of engagement from gratitude first, joining, donating, spreading
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/4120094204/sizes/o/

[Julio Vasconcellos]

@Avi, in response to your question about the data around the non-unique followers: the way we get that is through the Twitter API. We can query the search API and get a list of everyone that tweeted a certain phrase (in this case #HelpHoneyBees). We can then query the API again and get information about each of those individual Twitter users, including how many followers they each have. Through that we can figure out for each Twitter user that tweeted the message, how many followers they each have and sum those us to get a non-unique total number of followers (I say 'non-unique' because some followers may be double-counted if they follow more than one Twitterer). You could also do this by hand via search.twitter.com and basically clicking on each Tweet, but obviously would take a long time!

- Julio Vasconcellos (@TwitCause)

[Johnhaydon]

Beth,

I didn't mean what's on the site (I know about the ask that you highlighted).

What I meant in my previous comment was that, in terms of outreach prior to the event, we're stressing the expression of gratitude online. We're not asking them to talk about donations, just what they're grateful for and include the link back to Tweetsgiving.

John

[Syam Buradagunta]

Beth, very informative. Thanks. Hopefully, your search for various models for fundraising in Social Media are fruitful. Still, given the disappointing dollar amounts so far, one has to question whether or not the medium is suited to the "ask." I believe that it is not. I believe that to raise money online, it needs to be done with an application that is optimized and utilized solely for fundraising. People don't want to be asked for money if that's not what they are their to do. That being said, i think effort in the social media world by nonprofits is not for naught. Autism Speaks is a Facebook Cause with seemingly more members than there are people in China. Yet , their fundraising total is pennies per member. However, I have seen that the size of their community has lead to cause marketing campaigns/partnerships with some very large companies. These sorts of deals are not easy to come by and are certainly the result of having a large group on a social media site. So all is not lost. Maybe peer to peer fundraising is not the killer app for nonprofits and social media. It could just be that social media needs to be leveraged for corporate sponsorship deals.