An online charitable fundraising tool dubbed “Facebook birthday fundraisers” by the internet giant has generated more than $300 million in one year for nonprofits, Facebook said Wednesday.
St. Jude, the Alzheimer’s Association, the American Cancer Society, and Share Our Strength — No Kid Hungry are some of the groups that have pulled in the most money from the fundraising feature, Facebook said.
It was a rare public disclosure of donation data from the company, which has released scant numbers on how many charitable dollars are being transacted on the site even as Facebook has unveiled a series of increasingly sophisticated digital fundraising tools in recent years.
While $300 million is a tiny share of all giving — nonprofits raised $410 billion last year — the fast growth of Facebook’s birthday tool is mounting evidence that the company is poised to make an indelible mark on charitable fundraising, especially as more donations are made online rather than by the yet-dominant check.
“Facebook can really rewrite how online giving is done,” says Braden Lay-Michaels, chief development officer at the Trevor Project, which has taken in more than $100,000 per month in Facebook donations.
Personal Connection Plus Good Timing
Facebook has been testing charitable fundraising features since 2013. In June 2016, it began allowing people to raise money on the site on behalf of verified nonprofits. In late 2017, Facebook eliminated transaction fees for charitable donations, a move that puts millions of additional dollars into charities’ coffers and one that has generated a dose of goodwill among nonprofit leaders. Also last year, the company began experimenting with nonprofits, including Susan G. Komen, to integrate its fundraising tools with their proprietary fundraising software.
Currently, 750,000 groups are registered to receive donations through Facebook’s payment system, according to the company.
But it’s the Facebook birthday fundraising campaigns that have proved a potent accelerant for giving on the site. Introduced by the company one year ago, the tool works by prompting Facebook users to create digital fundraising events on the site in the days leading up to their birthdays to benefit nonprofits they want to help. People can post a photo on Facebook or write a few sentences about why a specific group or cause means something to them. That mix of personal connection and optimal timing — birthdays already brought loads of traffic to individuals’ Facebook pages as friends and families communicate well wishes — has proved to be fundraising gold, say nonprofit fundraisers.
“I don’t think we really could have predicted how it would have taken off, but I think Facebook just made it so easy for people to donate,” says Jennifer Cheang, digital marketing manager at the nonprofit advocacy group Mental Health America.
Invitation to Raise Money
In late July 2017, Mental Health America received a message in its Facebook business-manager account. Did the organization want to add a “donate” button to its page and accept charitable gifts generated from the site?
While the group was not actively raising money on the social-media site, it did have a about 155,000 Facebook followers, Cheang says. The nonprofit had invested in getting to know who those followers were — mostly women ages 18 to 34 who live in urban areas — and posted specific types of content to its page at three times each day.
“We might as well turn it on,” Cheang and her colleagues agreed of Facebook’s charitable fundraising feature. “There is nothing we can lose out of this.”
Mental Health America took in $166 in the closing days of July 2017, Cheang says. The next two months generated $5,000 in Facebook donations. The contributions climbed to $28,000 in November, including $10,000 on Giving Tuesday. With the exception of a small dip in December, the numbers accelerated from there.
In June, 12 months after Cheang clicked “yes” on that original invitation from Facebook, Mental Health America received about $100,000 in donations transacted on the site. In July, the nonprofit drew $109,000, Cheang says.
“That puts us on track for about $100,000 a month of unrestricted giving through the end of the year,” she says. “It’s an exciting time for us, and we are looking to invest new giving into programs that we haven’t previously been able to secure funding for.”
Little Effort Required
Lay-Michaels of the Trevor Project says the nonprofit, a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youths, has been consistently taking in more than $100,000 a month from Facebook birthday drives. In June, which is LGBT Pride Month, the charity received more than $200,000 channeled through the site.
Most of the birthday campaigns benefiting the nonprofit range from about $200 to a few thousand dollars each. The activity level has been so high — sometimes hundreds of birthday fundraisers are running at once for the Trevor Project — that he is considering creating a new digital-giving team to manage it, Lay-Michaels says. While he wishes the nonprofit could take credit for spurring the giving, the donations have come through with very little action or work by his team.
“That is what is so interesting for the fundraising profession,” he says.
Lay-Michaels described the dollars passing through Facebook as a “new world” for nonprofit executives. Organizations and nonprofits leaders have spent years trying to figure out how to make donating online welcoming, meaningful, and effortless, he says, and Facebook has created a platform that does exactly that.
The fundraising executive says that Facebook has been generous and open in its working relationships with nonprofits like his but also notes serious limits and stumbling blocks as Facebook’s footprint in the online fundraising world grows.
For one, Facebook retains much of the control. Company executives could decide to tweak charitable fundraising features on the site at any time, with huge consequences for nonprofits. It’s hard to know if groups can count on charitable dollars to come through Facebook consistently for the long term, he says. Additionally, he doesn’t know if donors making gifts through Facebook are new or existing supporters.
“We don’t have access to who those donors are. That is the most frustrating thing. While it is great to get these checks, and I might be able to interface with the person doing the fundraising, what about all their friends who are giving? How do I get access to them? That is not something that has been worked out.”
