News

Facebook Processes $6.8 Million in Donations on Giving Tuesday

By Megan O’Neil

December 5, 2016

Facebook said it processed $6.79 million in U.S. charitable donations on Giving Tuesday, a rare sharing of data from the company as it looks to stake a bigger place in the online-fundraising space.

More than 100,000 people gave via thousands of fundraising pages set up on the social-networking site, according to company.

An initial $500,000 matching pledge from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for donations on Facebook was reached within a few hours on Giving Tuesday, a Facebook spokesperson said, leading the foundation to increase the match to $900,000.

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Facebook said it processed $6.79 million in U.S. charitable donations on Giving Tuesday, a rare sharing of data from the company as it looks to stake a bigger place in the online-fundraising space.

More than 100,000 people gave via thousands of fundraising pages set up on the social-networking site, according to company.

“We are blown away by the generosity of our community after seeing what can be raised in just one day,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Chronicle.

The fifth annual Giving Tuesday took place on Nov. 29. Organizers estimate the event raised $168 million this year, up from $116.7 million in 2015.

Facebook has been developing and expanding a suite of charitable-fundraising tools since 2013. Late last year it began piloting stand-alone fundraising pages that functioned as modular extensions of 37 participating charities’ main Facebook profiles. In June 2016, the company expanded that tool to allow individual Facebook users to establish fundraising pages on behalf of registered nonprofits.

There are now 750,000 nonprofits registered to receive donations via Facebook, according to the company.

Facebook ratcheted up its involvement in Giving Tuesday this year, securing the Gates matching pledge while also promising to waive $500,000 in transaction fees. Shortly before Giving Tuesday, the company introduced a new feature that allows users to insert a “donate” button into Facbeook live video feeds and posts.

In partnership with men’s-health nonprofit the Movember Foundation, the social network also began testing a software integration that allows volunteer fundraisers to solicit on Facebook and the Movember website concurrently, without have to jump between the two.

The Movember Foundation said that it raised a total of $942,000 on Giving Tuesday, about $68,000 of it on Facebook.

Eden Stiffman and Timothy Sandoval contributed to this report.