Causes on Facebook: An Update and Lessons
Posted by Allison Fine on July 10, 2009
The latest edition of my Social Good podcast was posted yesterday. The topic this month is the Causes application on Facebook, where things stand and how to be successful using it. My guests were Joe Green the co-founder of Causes and Amy Eldridge, the founder and executive director of Love Without Boundaries. I first heard about Amy’s group through the research that Beth and I did for the Giving Challenge assessment effort for The Case Foundation.
Causes just had its two year anniversary. To date about 200,000 Causes have been created, and about 50,000 of those have been created for a specific nonprofit organization. And this just in from the Causes folks today, they surpassed $10 million in total donations using the application.
As you’ll hear Amy and Joe caution, uses Causes takes the same persistence and elbow grease that all fundraising efforts require. In addition, here are a few lessons learned from their experiences:
- As I mentioned Causes and Facebook are not ATM machines. Successful efforts have built relationships with their supporters.
- Successful efforts have been time limited, urgent campaigns that have engaged people — and then let them go when the campaign is over.
- Causes augments, doesn’t replace, your other fundraising efforts.
- It’s important to know when to lay fallow and spend your energy building your community and raising awareness of your Cause rather than trying fruitlessly to fundraise.
