Foundation Helps Nonprofits Boost Social-Media Fundraising With Expertise and Matching Grants

Nonprofits had a lot of needs during the early days of the pandemic — masks and other protective equipment, technology upgrades for employees suddenly working from home, and even counseling services for stressed-out staffs.

But most of all, they needed immediate cash to survive. Without galas and in-person donor meetings, nonprofits that were behind in their digital fundraising operations faced an especially dismal future.

Mari Kuraishi, president of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, knew that a captivating presence on Twitter and Facebook was a key part of a successful digital fundraising operation. So as part of a larger push to help nonprofits become more proficient with technology, the Jacksonville-based grant maker offered grantees crash courses in social-media fundraising leading up to Giving Tuesday last year.

“It became increasingly clear that we needed to help them shift wholesale into a digital environment,” Kuraishi says. “If they didn’t have social-media experience, if they didn’t have digital fundraising, it was a ‘you’re-going-out-of-business’ type of situation.”

DuPont worked with Lightful, a technology company that developed Bridge, a technology training program that uses webinars, sharing of ideas with other participating nonprofits, and one-on-one coaching for nonprofit leaders who want to improve their ability to attract donations online. DuPont spent about $2.3 million on the program. Nonprofits that participated were eligible for matching grants of up to $50,000 if they attended most training sessions and if they attracted higher numbers of donors. All told, the participating nonprofits raised $3.1 million during #GivingTuesday, not including the duPont match.

According to a survey conducted by duPont, 75 percent of the nonprofits that participated in the training had a better #GivingTuesday result than they had the previous year.

One of them, the Jacksonville Humane Society, saw its online #GivingTuesday results leap 40 percent, after years of single-digit growth. The society raised money from 863 donors, a huge increase from the 493 people who gave on #GivingTuesday in 2019. Donation totals surged from $62,000 to $107,000, plus a $50,000 match from duPont.

Some of the big jump can be explained because more people may have been online during the pandemic, says Denise Deisler, the nonprofit’s chief executive. Still, she credits the training with motivating people to follow through with donations rather than just scrolling through the humane society’s web page without sending money.

“We fancied ourselves decent at digital fundraising but had never really had to be as reliant on it as we had to be during Covid,” she says. “We may have had a broader audience, but I don’t think we would have converted that broader audience to donors were it not for this assistance that we received.”

Jacksonville Humane Society

Part of the reason the humane society scored big is simply because it wasn’t bashful about asking, Deisler says. Many of her peers at humane societies in the surrounding area essentially closed down fundraising during much of last year, she says, because it didn’t seem like the right time to ask for donations for pet adoptions and other animal-related services.

Through the training, the Jacksonville Humane Society developed a digital campaign called “Let Love Lead” that stressed the connection between people and their pets. It directed cat and dog owners to the society’s pet-food banks with a simple, relatable message that stressed the connection between people and animals, Deisler says.

“People understand hunger, and people understand families that are economically strapped might be facing a decision between feeding their animals. People’s pets are part of their family.”

Recognizing Digital Needs

A long-standing complaint among many nonprofits is that foundations don’t provide grant dollars specifically for technology assistance. The pandemic and the move to working remotely for many nonprofits may have gotten some grant makers to pay attention to those needs.

The Technology Association of Grantmakers surveyed its members last year and found that more than half had incorporated things like switching to paperless grant payments and streamlined, digital applications during the early months of the pandemic. However, less than one-third provide tech training and support for grantees.

Increasingly, foundation leaders recognize “digital infrastructure is a critical element of delivering on one’s mission,” Chantal Forster, the association’s executive director, wrote in an email.

The online training is only part of the tech assistance duPont has planned. With assistance from the research organization Candid, the grant maker is working with nonprofits to ensure their profiles on the Candid site earn badges that indicate they have scored high marks for transparency. With Feedback Labs, duPont is helping develop a program for nonprofits to glean insights from the people they serve. The grant maker is working with Evident Change (formerly the National Council on Crime & Delinquency) to help grantees translate the work they do to promote equity into measurable outcomes, and with Complete College America, the foundation plans to offer liberal-arts college grantees technology platforms to support low-income and first-generation students.

DuPont’s Kuraishi says she hopes the technology lessons that grantees learned during #GivingTuesday will quickly become second nature for all of their fundraising efforts, providing stronger returns well into the future.

“There is nothing better than experiential learning to really make it stick,” she says.