Susan G. Komen says a digital fundraising effort with Facebook has raised more than $1.7 million and counting for its marquee Race for the Cure series. The cancer charity crossed the seven-figure mark in April, eight months into a pilot with the internet company that allows for the integration of the charity’s own Race for the Cure fundraising software and Facebook fundraising tools.
A similar integration effort at March of Dimes has netted $2.8 million for its March for Babies event series since January, according to a senior vice president, with the nonprofit taking in 25 times more per day than what it previously had in donations via Facebook.
Independent of the pilot, Susan G. Komen saw a 2,000 percent increase in donations made through Facebook in its fiscal year 2018, which ended in March 2018, says Lauren Woodley, manager of social marketing at Susan G. Komen. The growth was spurred by individuals using Facebook’s “birthday fundraiser” tool to solicit on behalf of the charity. The introduction of fundraising features on Facebook has been a “game changer” for digital efforts at the organization, Woodley says, in no small part because Susan G. Komen had already invested years building up a Facebook community of about 2 million people.
“Every person that we build a relationship with on social, that is another person that is going to get a notification on their birthday that says, ‘Hey, you want to fundraise on Facebook?’ And it is going to recommend to them to fundraise for the nonprofits that they are following,” Woodley said.
Growing Presence
Facebook has been testing and rolling out charitable fundraising tools since 2013, with the work accelerating in the past two years.
The recent results at Susan G. Komen and the March of Dimes provide a window into how Facebook’s expanding footprint in online charitable fundraising could shape giving habits and charitable fundraisers’ work in the years to come. And it suggests that some of the biggest winners could be those who have already amassed large, engaged followings on the social-media site.
Woodley noted that when she started with the Susan G. Komen digital-marketing team five years ago, it was already making use of Facebook to distribute important information, connect individuals to doctors, and build relationships with survivors by sharing their stories, among other things. She describes social-media channels as “the top of the funnel” for introducing people to the Susan G. Komen mission. Fundraising wasn’t part of the organization’s original Facebook strategy, Woodley says.
The charity began to see some donations come through Facebook after the company introduced a “donate button” in 2015 that allowed nonprofits to ask for money on their own Facebook pages and posts. Donations increased somewhat after Facebook introduced a feature in 2016 to allow individual Facebook users to raise money on behalf of nonprofits. But the money really started to surge last year, Woodley said, when Facebook implemented a new tool that prompts users to host fundraisers on the social-media platform to mark their birthdays. She described it as the payoff for years of relationship cultivation on Facebook that produced nearly 2 million followers.
“Because Facebook brought this opportunity to all of our followers, it was just an organic way for them to fundraise without us having to ask,” Woodley said. “Seeing that they are doing that feels good for us because it means that we’re doing something right and we’ve built these relationships well.”
Testing a New Tool
With increasing numbers of Komen supporters making use of Facebook to raise money for the group — sometimes referred to as peer-to-peer fundraising — the social-media site approached the organization in August 2017 with a proposal. The company wanted to test the integration of its fundraising tools with Blackbaud’s TeamRaiser, the fundraising software the nonprofit was already using for its Race for the Cure series.
The Race for the Cure series grossed $60.9 million last year, making it one of the largest charity run or walk series in the country. Three quarters of the money raised stays with local affiliate organizations that host the events, while one quarter goes to scientific research.
Suzanne Fletcher, a program manager for Race for the Cure, said that many individual supporters were already using Facebook to raise money online as part of their participation in the events. But there were technical barriers.
Most notably, if an individual logged into Facebook and created what has been dubbed a “Facebook fundraiser” to benefit the group, any donated money was automatically channeled to the national umbrella organization. It did not flow to an individual Race for the Cure event or local charity affiliate, each of which establishes and tracks its own fundraising goals.
Participants could post a message on Facebook and link to the Race for the Cure TeamRaiser, and many did, Fletcher said. But that meant extra steps on the part of the would-be donor to enter credit-card information and complete a transaction.
Under the pilot with Facebook, what the company has dubbed its Fundraisers API, the Race for the Cure TeamRaiser software is synced with Facebook’s charitable fundraising tools. Now, Fletcher said, when individuals register with one of the charity’s affiliate organizations to raise money for a Race for the Cure event, they automatically get a pop-up message that alerts them that they can raise money simultaneously on Facebook.
“As long as you have a Facebook profile, it literally takes two seconds, and you are on Facebook and you’re fundraising,” Fletcher says.
Because so many Facebook users already store credit-card information in the company’s payment system, there is no need to type in credit card numbers or expiration dates. The ease of use makes it more comfortable for those who might not otherwise want to ask friends, family, and colleagues for donations, according to Fletcher.
“If you market it properly, and you get enough of participants to actually engage through Facebook, there is a chance that that affiliate can really make some incremental dollars to help with their mission in their area,” Fletcher said.
The feedback from volunteer fundraisers has been overwhelmingly positive, Fletcher said. She recalled a recent conversation with a woman in Fayetteville, Ark.
“She has been a volunteer for a really long time. And she had called me and just said, ‘Suzanne I just want to thank you.’ She’s like, ‘I have raised over $6,000, and I could have never done that before without Facebook.’”
‘Low-Friction’ Giving
Chris Maddocks, senior vice president for marketing and communications at March of Dimes, said his team approached Facebook late last year after learning about the pilot the company was running with Susan G. Komen. Facebook was not looking for an additional test partner at the time, Maddocks said, but he got executives there to agree to work with his organization, too, after hustling to get all of the internal operational logistics in order.
March of Dimes uses its own custom fundraising software for its March for Babies series. It has more than 400 events annually, and they grossed $73.9 million last year.
Maddocks said he and his colleagues are constantly working to create an experience that is as “low-friction” as possible for event registrants and donors. Because many are young families already active on Facebook — the nonprofit has 650,000 Facebook followers — the chance to integrate its proprietary software with Facebook’s fundraising tools was a “good disruptive opportunity for us,” Maddocks said.
It has improved the user experience dramatically, he said. Running a successfully peer-to-peer fundraising campaign has long meant getting volunteer supporters to send emails to family, friends, and colleagues and providing them with suggested text for their solicitations, among other things. Now they can communicate on the social media site. “Facebook is where people are, so the ability to tap into those native behaviors in a seamless and integrated way” is really valuable for his organization, he said.
“Nobody gets out of bed saying I want to be a great online fundraiser,” Maddocks said. “They have lives and jobs and things.”
Limited Donor Information
In an email, Alisa Cordesius, partnerships manager at Facebook, said that all partners who have used the new integrated fundraising feature “have seen substantial increases in the amount of dollars raised through their efforts, as well as an increase in the number of supporters.” Facebook declined to provide the Chronicle with specific numbers on how much total money has been generated for charity.
Other nonprofits that have used the tool thus far include Movember, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the diabetes nonprofit JDRF, she said.
The company is on track to expand the program, Cordesius said, without specifying when the integration tool will be widely available.
Fletcher described the working experience with the staff at Facebook to get the pilot up and running as “incredible.” Facebook helped with marketing and also kicked in some advertising dollars, according to Fletcher. And the company sent staff to a recent Race for the Cure event in San Diego, Calif., where they talked to attendees about the effort. In the fall, 14 of the charity’s affiliates used the Fundraisers API tool, she said. This year, all 70-plus affiliates will use it.
Fletcher says that the company should be commended for its move last year to eliminate credit-card transaction fees for donations to charity made on the social-media site.
Still, she cited Susan G. Komen’s limited access to donor information as a problem. A gift made through Facebook does not come with an email or any other way for the charity to contact the person, she said.
“In the fundraising world, it is all about your data and how you grow a relationship with that person and cultivate a relationship with them,” Fletcher said. “So that is the downside of it.”
David Hessekiel, president of the Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum, said there is a long-running tension between nonprofits that want to control information and the flow of communication and systems like Facebook that have been wildly successfully in drawing a mass audience but don’t provide nonprofits with such control.
“It is terrific that an experiment is being done to try and find that middle ground between control on the part of the nonprofit and the mass audience and the mass participation that Facebook has,” Hessekiel said.
