For most charities, online fundraising remains a small slice of revenue. But every year, that slice grows 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 the success of online nonprofits using Facebook, crowdfunding, giving days, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more. Here, we highlight groups that had success with simple ideas and tools.
A Big Request for Children
For our May cover, the Chronicle looked at the success of nonprofits using Facebook, crowdfunding, giving days, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more.
Pencils of Promise, founded in 2008 to build schools in the developing world, has always emphasized social media and online giving; about 20 percent of its contributions come in online, a much higher share than for most charities.
But during the last two months of 2017, it approached online donors a bit differently, asking them to finance the education of 10,000 kids “holistically": $75 per child, or $750,000 in total, could help build schools, support teacher training, and improve water and sanitation systems.
The two-month drive raked in $1.7 million, says Susie Harrison, the charity’s head of strategic relationships. In addition to pushing the campaign on social media to its 1 million-plus followers and customizing emails to its carefully segmented donor base, the charity accepted cryptocurrency for the first time. “We always want to engage with our supporters in the best possible way,” Harrison says.
That decision proved key: After setting up the means to accept virtual currency, the charity received a $1 million Bitcoin gift from the Pineapple Fund, the mysterious grant-making entity created by the anonymous donor who goes by the name Pine.
The Power of First-Person Dispatches
Sometimes the best email campaigns are not planned as email campaigns. At the Hispanic Federation, a swiftly arranged effort to raise relief money in response to the devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico last year took some surprising turns.
When Broadway superstar Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted out a link to the federation’s disaster-recovery program, Unidos, donations poured in — a somewhat predictable result given his celebrity and social-media clout. Yet when Frankie Miranda, a less well-known top federation official, visited Puerto Rico and wrote an email to supporters about the destruction he saw around the island, another, albeit smaller, wave of support followed.
“Frankie told everyone, in the first-person, the story of his experience, what he saw,” says Effie Phillips-Staley, a federation vice president. “We saw how powerful that was.”
And that, she says, started what the organization calls its field reports — email updates from people on the ground in Puerto Rico telling supporters what is going on and how donations are being spent. The Hispanic Federation asks staff members who travel to the island and those who are working there more permanently to keep a journal. Then they might be called on to write a first-person account. The organization lightly edits the stories, then sends them as email blasts. About seven have gone out since last fall.
Phillips-Staley says the field-report emails have become a key part of the organization’s fundraising, which has netted $35 million for Puerto Rico’s relief and recovery.
“You can’t plan an email campaign for a disaster in advance, and we didn’t even formally make plans once Unidos started,” she says. “But we saw what the field reports meant to people, and we realized, this is our email campaign.”
Lights, Camera ... Burritos?
It’s been said (sort of) that a picture of kids eating burritos is worth a thousand words. At Outreach Indiana, which serves homeless youths, that image might be worth even more.
After employees from a local company toured Outreach and helped make burritos for kids arriving later at its after-school center, Mike Elliott, the charity’s director of development, sent a one-minute video to the volunteers.
“I wanted to say thank-you for coming, and I put up a photo of kids eating so they could see that they made burritos for these kids to get a hot dinner,” Elliott says. Shortly after, he says, one of the employees made a $100 first-time donation. After Elliott sent a second video personally thanking the new donor, the man responded by signing up to give each month.
Elliott estimates he has made and emailed more than 200 thank-you videos in the past year. The effort is his way to “get in front of people to show gratitude and impact.” In the videos, he thanks donors by name and tells them a short story about how their donation (he will often name the amount) was used. In a recent video, he displayed a photograph of a young man, Marate Richardson, for whom Outreach helped secure identification papers he had had trouble getting because of a mix-up about his documents at birth. He explained that the donor’s $100 donation could cover the cost for Outreach to help four others get an ID.
Elliott says he has received some nice feedback about the videos — which he makes with Vidyard GoVideo, a free online tool, and sends by email. Those videos have also contributed to recent fundraising gains. Outreach Indiana raised $1.6 million last year, up $500,000 from 2016.
A Digital-Age Rescue After Hurricane Harvey
After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston last August, Kevin Doffing, executive director of the Lone Star Veterans Association, arrived at his office wondering where the cavalry was.
But with so much of the metro area flooded, a rescue party was unlikely to show up soon. So he decided his seven-year-old nonprofit, created to build a community for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, would have to organize one.
It reached out to the cellphones of everyone in its database. “We just sent out a one-line text: ‘Hey, this is LSVA, we’re just checking on you,’ " Doffing says. Within four hours, 70 people responded with requests for help — and 270 texted back that they were ready to answer the call.
The nonprofit’s headquarters established a call center, using multiple computers to match people in need with volunteers who lived nearby. “It was neighbors helping neighbors,” says Doffing, a former infantryman who served in Iraq. The result: Within a week, 280 homes were mucked out and 5,000 volunteer hours donated.
Word of the group’s text-fueled emergency response spread. Two companies, which Doffing says wish to remain anonymous, gave the group a total of $275,000, unsolicited. Lone Star also got $50,000 from the Greater Houston Partnership’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund. The amount raised from those three gifts, Lone Star’s leader says, is close to its usual annual budget.
Doffing, previously a skeptic about the effectiveness of texts, points out that they have a much higher open and response rate than email. The volunteers summoned by text for Hurricane Harvey, Doffing says, are being trained in peer-to-peer fundraising.
“I’m a big fan of text now,” he says.
Debra E. Blum contributed to this report.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Lone Star Veterans Association.
