More than 6,700 cyclists in the Pan-Mass Challenge will ride across Massachusetts this weekend, marking the charity ride’s 40th year. Cyclists raising money for this year’s ride are on track to bring in $60 million for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Riders in the PMC, as it’s often called, raise the bulk of these funds by sending email appeals and sharing links to their personal fundraising pages on the charity’s website. This year, PMC began encouraging riders to raise money on Facebook — and it’s paying off. As of late July, they had raised $1.6 million on the site, a big jump from the $51,000 they raised there in all of 2018.
Facebook launched its fundraising feature in 2016. Besides letting people raise money for charity, the feature lets them share appeals and receive notifications when other people donate after seeing their fundraising page. The simplicity and broad reach of Facebook fundraising appealed to many PMC riders, who must meet steep fundraising minimums that can exceed $5,000.
But the process was time-consuming for PMC’s back office. Riders had to tell the organization to expect a payment from Facebook, and the charity had to calculate how much each rider brought in through Facebook and other funding sources.
So in late 2018, as a way to simplify the process, PMC asked Facebook for access to a tool that integrates the charity’s fundraising pages with individual Facebook fundraising pages.
Syncing the two was a breeze for PMC, says Dave Hellman, senior vice president for operations at the charity. PMC’s tech team spent six weeks collaborating with Facebook engineers and activated the new system in May.
The charity prompted riders to sync their fundraising pages with the click of a button and encouraged them to use Facebook to achieve their fundraising goal. Now 1,500 riders have a PMC profile and a Facebook fundraising page that reflect the same amount of money raised.
Attracting New Donors
In addition to the boost in Facebook giving, the social network is helping riders broaden their fundraising reach. The charity estimates that almost half of the money raised this year has come from donors who have never given to PMC.
“Riders have been thrilled to see gifts coming from distant friends that they have never previously asked for support,” Hellman wrote in an email. Facebook’s fundraising pages are public, meaning that anyone with an account can donate to an appeal, whether or not they are connected to the rider on the social network.
Facebook’s fundraiser syncing tool has reduced the administrative work required of PMC’s staff.
But while the social-networking site released the tool in 2017, many nonprofits still don’t know it exists. Facebook requires them to apply and works closely with nonprofits to ensure their websites work seamlessly with the social network. For that reason, it’s not as accessible as some of Facebook’s other tools to help charities, says Roya Winner, communications manager for social good at Facebook.
What could be a down side for some charities is no problem for PMC: Facebook fundraising doesn’t make it easy to get email addresses of people who give to support riders. Less than 10 percent of PMC’s Facebook donors provide their email address when they complete the donation form, Hellman says.
But since riders are responsible for tapping their own networks to raise money for the challenge, PMC leaders are not concerned about their inability to follow up. “We are not a development organization,” says Billy Starr, the group’s founder. “Only through riders are people asked to give money, not the organization itself.”
Correction: A box in a previous version of this article said the Pan-Mass Challenge raised $58 million through Facebook in 2018 instead of $51,000.
