Tech Tool Helps Nonprofits Attract Supporters on Facebook — and Stay in Touch With Them

The Susan G. Komen Foundation has long been known for its fundraising walks in which participants raise money to fight breast cancer. Revenue from those events has dwindled in recent years, and the pandemic pushed it over the edge, forcing the charity to close its local chapters.

Many organizations that rely on athletic fundraising events were forced to adapt. Komen began to experiment with new ways to connect with supporters.

For years, Komen has received donations from supporters who raise money on Facebook for their birthdays, says Michelle Strong, the group’s vice president of marketing strategy. But as Facebook users shifted their attention to causes on the pandemic’s front lines, the amount of revenue from those drives dipped by 40 percent.

This year, the organization has found some success using a Facebook-based fundraising tool built by the social-media fundraising firm GoodUnited. The product helps charities create time-limited fundraising challenges within the social media giant’s existing infrastructure of groups, Messenger, and advertising.

The idea is to create a sense of community similar to the excitement generated by an in-person event.

Another major selling point? Charities that use the tool receive donor information that’s not available from Facebook’s built-in fundraising technology.

Komen and other nonprofits see the new tool as another way potential supporters can interact with the cause, not as a replacement for other types of fundraising.

“We saw the opportunity to introduce a new way to invite people to be a part of a fundraiser as a group instead of an individual fundraiser that they’re setting up on their own,” Strong says. “It’s an opportunity to really engage and touch more folks than maybe your traditional streams have been able to in the past.”

Burpees and New Supporters

Since Facebook debuted its fundraising tools for individual users in 2016, donations have flowed in passively to some nonprofits. But there isn’t an easy way for organizations to stay connected with people who raise money or give through those drives: Facebook doesn’t share donor contact information. Here’s how GoodUnited’s challenge tool changes that.

An advertisement in a user’s newsfeed kick-starts the fundraising challenges. GoodUnited helps charities identify new segments of people to target who may care about a given issue but haven’t necessarily supported that charity yet. The company uses Facebook’s ad-targeting tools to show the ads to new audience segments; the algorithm gets smarter the longer it runs.

Charities think of 30-day challenges. Komen challenged people to do 25 burpees every day in February and ask friends and family for donations to support ending breast cancer. Other groups, like Best Friends Animal Society, challenged people to walk 30 miles in a month with their pets.

GoodUnited

When people click the ad, the charity asks for their name and email to join a Facebook group, which serves as the hub for the monthlong challenge. Once in the group, they’re asked to create a Facebook fundraiser and to opt in to receive messages through Facebook Messenger.

Through Messenger, GoodUnited’s software sends automated messages from the charity that prompt participants to log the number of burpees they’re doing — or whatever the given challenge is. The Messenger bot also asks people why they decided to join the fundraising challenge and prompts them to post those reasons to the group to motivate others and build community. GoodUnited shares a spreadsheet with nonprofits that shows how much money participants have raised, why they got involved, and their email address.

Nearly 13,000 people joined Komen’s challenge in February, 90 percent of whom were new to the charity.

“There’s a lot more opportunity to connect with people who care about this cause that may not already be joining other opportunities to come on board,” Strong says.

She declined to say how much money the challenge raised but said it was twice as much as the organization’s goal. Across the top 10 Facebook challenges GoodUnited held in 2020, the average fundraising haul was more than $200,000.

“It really became an amazing support community that was just incredibly empowering for those people to just support one another, be behind each other’s back,” Strong says. “It gave people hope. It gave them something to collaborate on and root for each other on.”

Building on Facebook

Nick Black and Jeremy Berman started GoodUnited back in 2014, and the firm’s offerings have evolved along with Facebook.

The company has a product to bolster birthday fundraisers by thanking individuals who start them and giving them an opportunity to connect with the nonprofit on Facebook Messenger.

“Donors that are giving through social want to continue to engage in the channel where that initial donation took place,” says Black, who founded his own nonprofit, Stop Soldier Suicide, before launching the software company with Berman.

“We’re finding a whole new segment of people that have never given to these nonprofits, who are not likely to participate in in-person events because they’ve never done that before,” he says. “They’re choosing to continue to do it virtually because that is where they like to spend time.”

The social-media fundraising challenges picked up steam during the pandemic, and Berman expects that momentum to continue.

“I really think there’s very little risk that we see this drop because people go back to in-person” events, he says.

Nonprofits that use Facebook’s basic fundraising tools get to keep every dollar raised. But some are opting to use products that build on or integrate with Facebook’s fundraiser API tool, which the social-networking site released in 2017.

“The power that GoodUnited brings to the table is actually helping facilitate campaigns that originate on Facebook and building communities around those,” says Kendra Sinclair, North American nonprofits manager for social good at Facebook.

Charities pay a subscription fee for GoodUnited’s services plus a project fee for each Facebook challenge, based on their fundraising goal. Enterprise clients like Komen pay a per-challenge fee that varies based on the number of participants and other factors, while younger nonprofits have access to lower rates. Advertising is an additional cost and depends on each organization’s strategy.

Staying in Touch

Even with tens of thousands of new emails in hand, exactly how Komen will stay connected with these new fundraisers is an open question.

Much of the communication will likely happen on Facebook or at least start there, Strong says.

“You have to respect where someone met you,” she says. “We don’t want to just throw them into the mix of everybody else. We want to respect and maintain that relationship through Facebook and through Messenger and give them opportunities to understand all the different avenues that are available to them.”

In-person events are still an important part of Komen’s strategy. “The kind of fundraiser that joins our events tends to fundraise for a longer period of time,” Strong says.

But she sees promise in the tool’s ability to expand Komen’s reach and mission. “This isn’t just a pandemic thing,” she says. “We want to make sure that we’re carefully engaging with them and celebrating the experience that we created together in February — and then inviting them back to do that again with us if they’re interested.”