Facebook users can now add a charitable “donate” button in live video feeds and posts, the company announced Thursday. The move catches it up with competitor YouTube, which introduced a similar feature in January.
The social network is also doing testing with men’s-health nonprofit the Movember Foundation to integrate volunteer fundraisers’ pages on Movember.com and Facebook. They will essentially be synced so that Movember’s fundraisers can share personal stories, solicit friends and family, and log donations seamlessly on both sites without less jumping between the two.
Facebook appears to be bolstering its ability to play a central role in “peer-to-peer” fundraising, or fundraising done by individual supporters on behalf of nonprofits. The company has 1.8 billion daily active users, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report. It announced the changes at an event in New York to promote the work of what it calls its social-good team.
The company introduced dedicated fundraising pages in November 2015. During a pilot period, the pages were created and managed by 37 nonprofits and functioned as a sort of modular extension of the groups’ main Facebook profiles. In June, the company expanded the feature, allowing individual users to create pages to raise dollars on behalf of nonprofits near and dear to them.
There are now 750,000 charities registered to receive donations raised on Facebook, according to the company.
A Facebook spokesperson decline via email to state how many fundraising pages have been set up by nonprofits and individual users on the site. The spokesperson also declined to provide specifics on how much money has been raised via the pages, saying only that the “Facebook community has raised millions of dollars for causes.”
The opacity is characteristic — Facebook divulges little about charitable-fundraising results and has in the past instructed partner nonprofits to stay mum as well. The firm has made public some fundraising numbers related to disaster response. In 2015, for example, it said that 754,000 users donated more than $15 million to help victims of the earthquakes in Nepal.
Earlier this year, Naomi Gleit, vice president for social good at Facebook, told The Chronicle in an interview that the charities’ fundraising pages that drew the most money were those that included compelling human-interest stories.
The Menlo Park, Calif., company is making use of the fifth Giving Tuesday on November 29 to further promote its fundraising pages. It said Thursday that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $500,000 in matching funds for money raised on the pages on that day.
The share of total U.S. giving that is done online is growing steadily but remains below 10 percent, according to multiple studies and reports.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation match was $1 million.
