BRIGHT IDEA: Bucking a downward trend for peer-to-peer events keyed to physical activity, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s emotionally charged Light the Night walkathon saw an 8 percent fundraising gain last year.
For most charities, online fundraising remains a small slice of revenue. But every year, that slice gets larger: Online support grew by a median of 23 percent in 2017, according to a survey by M+R, a consulting company.
For our May cover, the Chronicle looked at nonprofits’ successes using Facebook, crowdfunding, giving days, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more. Here, we highlight groups that had success with social media and peer-to-peer fundraising.
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The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
BRIGHT IDEA: Bucking a downward trend for peer-to-peer events keyed to physical activity, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s emotionally charged Light the Night walkathon saw an 8 percent fundraising gain last year.
For most charities, online fundraising remains a small slice of revenue. But every year, that slice gets larger: Online support grew by a median of 23 percent in 2017, according to a survey by M+R, a consulting company.
For our May cover, the Chronicle looked at nonprofits’ successes using Facebook, crowdfunding, giving days, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more. Here, we highlight groups that had success with social media and peer-to-peer fundraising.
Walkathons, bike-athons, and other events in which volunteers raise money online from friends and family are losing their punch. But a few are bucking the trend. Light the Night, a walkathon for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, raised $74 million in 2017, up 8 percent over the previous year. David Hessekiel, president of the Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum, says the event creates an emotionally charged experience. “They’re the only program I know of that occurs at night,” he says.
The torch each person carries is key. “It makes the event itself not an afterthought. It makes it dynamic and real.”
Playing Dungeons and Dragons for Good
The Extra Life program at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals represents a new frontier in peer-to-peer fundraising. Volunteers stage video or tabletop-game marathons (think Minesweeper and Dungeons and Dragons) to earn donations for the charity from friends and others. In 2017, Extra Life fundraisers generated just over $11 million, up 15 percent from the previous year, says Michael Kinney, senior director of digital fundraising.
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Among the program’s keys:
Donor choice. When participants register, they select which local Children’s Miracle Network facility will get the money they raise.
Embrace of technology. Volunteers get an online tool kit that includes stories about kids helped by the charity, media talking points, and branded graphics. Many participants livestream their events, creating mini “telethons.”
Relationships. The charity has volunteers in 70 major cities, thanks in part to gaming companies and communities that have become stalwart supporters and helped spread the word. They promote the competition to local news stations and hop on podcasts, which helps cut marketing costs.
“Gamers tend to be more social than the average social-media users,” Kinney says.
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A consistent vision. Extra Life staff regularly swap ideas with the team that runs the charity’s dance-marathon fundraisers, which saw revenue grow nearly 20 percent in 2017 over the previous year.
“Our job, across the board, is empowering our supporters to do what they want to do,” Kinney says.
A Performance Artist in the YouTube Era
Mark Fischbach — better known to his more than 20 million YouTube subscribers as Markiplier — does gaming videos, freewheeling comedy, and charity fundraising. Roughly once a month, Fischbach devotes his YouTube channel to raising money for organizations, often with stunning results. Last year, the international aid group Save the Children approached him. It had a $200,000 match lined up from an anonymous donor and asked Fischbach to double that.
The resulting eight-hour livestream on the Tiltify platform raised more than $422,000 from nearly 10,000 donors, including the match. Gifts were as small as $2 and as big as the $10,000 that Fischbach chipped in. During the event, he and fellow YouTube personalities Ethan Nestor-Darling and Tyler Scheid played raucous games of Cards Against Humanity and Jenga, made breakfast, did yoga while blindfolded, and hunted Easter eggs while blindfolded and wearing shock collars that went off if they touched something other than an egg.
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Fischbach says he sometimes chooses beneficiaries for events because of their emotional appeal, personal connection, or low profile. “I pick a charity I believe in, that I vet through Charity Navigator,” he says. “I don’t pick a charity that’s putting all its money into fundraising.”
In March, Fischbach outdid his Save the Children event, even without a gift match. He announced that he would release a calendar featuring “tasteful nude” photos of himself to benefit the Cancer Research Institute once his YouTube channel hit 20 million subscribers. The signed, $30 calendars, available for only 48 hours, rang up $520,000.
A Facebook Rollout Pays Off
As part of a 35-day giving campaign in advance of last year’s centennial of John F. Kennedy’s birth, the Kennedy Center ran website display advertisements and “retargeting ads” that followed internet users as they browsed other sites. Initial results were disappointing — $2,200 spent for ads that grossed roughly $3,200 through direct clicks.
So the digital-fundraising team shut down those ads and redirected money to a series of Facebook promotions already underway. The course correction helped net good results for the Facebook effort: Only $7,700 spent but $45,000 raised when donors clicked to the campaign donation page.
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One of the keys, according to Myles King, director of annual and digital fundraising, was a structured rollout: As the campaign reached various milestones, his team would put up a post and “unlock” new campaign-related videos. These included footage of a National Symphony Orchestra concert and a “vertical” dance troupe performing on the side of a building.
King, who also handles direct mail, says the experience was a lesson in online fundraising’s flexibility. “If something’s not working, you can just turn it off and move the money to something else,” he says. “With direct mail, if you realize the package isn’t the best, you can’t get a refund on it.”
The Sound of Music — but Also a Visual Feast
The Lyric Opera of Chicago thrives on social media because it grasps a simple, yet somewhat counterintuitive idea: Opera is visual. So the nonprofit theater fills its YouTube channel and Facebook and Instagram feeds with video and images from performances, rehearsals, and backstage events. Its ever-changing marquee shows up in the feeds, with new signs commenting on current events.
[[video url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKMOi7e5hU&feature=youtu.be” align="right” size="half-width” class="" starttime="" caption="" credits=""]] The group also generates original online content, such as its “Ask Roger” series, in which the theater’s dramaturge, Roger Pines (“We call him Rogerpedia,” says Lisa Middleton, vice president for marketing and communications), has answered 200 questions to date, including a batch on Facebook Live. Queries come from both novice operagoers (What should I wear?) and die-hards (What opera do you dream of seeing at Lyric?).
The group’s Twitter feed is more “lighthearted,” says Middleton; the Lyric live tweets opening nights and last month treated its followers to a cheeky, GIF-filled running commentary on NBC’s live staging of Jesus Christ Superstar, reminding followers that its own version of the musical would soon open.
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Our first-ever Family Day has come to an end! Thank you to everyone who joined us for this fun-filled day of activities, demonstrations, and performances. #LyricFamilyDaypic.twitter.com/jxWmmAB6Dw
The Lyric has won praise from Americans for the Arts for its social-media savvy. It boasts more than 112,000 social-media followers and subscribers, with about 15,000 added in the past year.
Cute Kittens, Thousands of Followers, Millions of Views
The Sioux Falls Area Humane Society knows that cute animals are catnip to web surfers. “Every day, we post something live: an event, an animal story, an animal giving birth,” says Kori Baade, executive director of the South Dakota charity. But finding new ways to showcase cuteness can tax even the most creative nonprofit.
[[video url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsUH2MuY33o&feature=youtu.be” align="left” size="half-width” class="" starttime="" caption="" credits=""]] Then, after last summer’s solar eclipse, lightning struck. As the staff brainstormed how to advertise its surplus of kittens awaiting adoption, Bethany Buitenbos, the charity’s creative-services coordinator, impulsively made an 18-second video “re-enacting” the eclipse. In it, one worker held a tiny, white-and-orange feline as another eased a little black kitty sideways across the screen, blocking the pale creature.
After the Dodo, a social-media curator of animal content, shared the video from the charity’s Facebook page, it snared more than 4.3 million views — this compared with the roughly 50,000 views the charity’s website and Facebook page together average monthly.
The kittens were adopted within days. The charity followed up with social-media stories about more animals needing homes and saw product donations triple the next month; it netted an additional 7,000 followers on its Facebook page, more subscribers to its email alerts, and a surge in emails asking about pet adoption.
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Meanwhile, the video keeps making its way around the web. “We don’t even know what the long-term will be on this thing,” Baade says. “It goes on forever.”