Which is Better: More Donors or More $$$?

The Minnesota Community Foundation has their second annual “Give to the Max Day” last week and once again it was a spectacular success.

The first giving day was last year. I had a chance to talk to the chief architect at the Minnesota Community Foundation, Jennifer Ford Reedy, a few months ago for my Social Good podcast for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

It was a terrific example of a foundation forming partnerships with dozens of local nonprofits and a dozen other funders, creating an open source platform for giving (it was open source to enable and encourage other foundations to replicate the effort.) And at the end of the day, that first go round, the day generated 38,000 donors giving $14,000. I remember seeing those numbers on Beth’s blog and thinking that there had to be a typo. In the depths of the recession it was astounding to see that Minnesotans had given that much money to charitable causes. But, then, again, it’s Minnesotans, the most generous people in the world.

Jennifer posted a summary of this year’s event on the Council of Foundation’s blog last week. Jennifer outlined a key difference between this year’s event and last year’s. They decided this year to focus on increasing the number of donations not the size of the donations. They were successful in doing this, their bottom line this year was 42,000 donors pledging a total of $10 million.

As Jennifer writes, “we created an incentive system that rewards organizations for turnout.” The incentive were grand prizes of $20,000 and $10,000 to the nonprofits that raised the largest number of donors during the day.

This all raises a very interesting question: should nonprofits be aiming for more donors or more money?

Smart people like Kim Klein have been arguing for years that building a broad base of supporters is critical to long term sustainability for nonprofits.

But what if the needs are so great, winters in Minnesota are brutal after all, that losing $4 million hurts local people and communities in the most need right now?

I think part of the answer has to be what happens to these donors after they give on the big day? Blackbaud reports that donors who give online give more over time than their traditional counterparts. However, we reported that after the first America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation that the winners didn’t know what to do with their online donors once they had them. That was three years ago, maybe we’re collectively getting better at learning how to build relationships with our online friends and turn them into long term donors now.

Maybe. At least I hope so! Katya, Kivi and Rebecca provide hopeful insights here on how to retain online donors.

This is, I suppose, the heart of our biggest challenge for the next few years; creating online friends, building stronger ties with a portion of them, asking them to give in real, authentic ways — and getting them to give again.

Final Reflections on America’s Giving Challenge

Beth and I posted our final reflections on America’s Giving Challenge on the Case Foundation blog yesterday. You can read the post here. It is a summary of what we learned in our assessment of the second round of the Giving Challenge.

Some of the themes that we learned about and discussed online with participants and others were:

1. the advantages to small organizations in online contests
2. the need to have joyous funerals by understanding and appreciating failures
3. the importance of relationship building
4. the intersection of community organizing and online fundraising, and
5. how to decide whether to participate in a contest.

And we proposed a special sauce for winning online contests that includes personal appeals, thankfulness, transparency, spreading out the work, the use of video storytelling, and on-land activities.

But, far and away my favorite part of the reflections post is this video that Beth did with Ashley Boyd of Moms Rising on the importance of reflecting on efforts through “joyful funerals.” Enjoy!

Is there a “Special Sauce” for Social Fundraising?

Our third Conversational Case Study for the assessment of America’s Giving Challenge has been posted on the Case Foundation’s blog today.  The topic of today’s discussion is whether there is a “special sauce” that makes some groups or individuals successful social fundraisers.

In the post, the pattern that we saw in the Giving Challenge and in other contests is some combination of personal appeals, thankfulness, transparency, crowdsourcing, visual stories and face-to-face engagement that make groups successful.

But, still (naturally!) we have more questions.

Our questions to readers, doers and thinkers are:

• In your experience does a concoction, some blend of activities and tasks, exist, that makes some groups or people more successful than others in fundraising contests? And if so, what are they?
• Under what circumstances does some combination of activities work best?
• Is there a tool or action you think might work well in the future that you’d like to test next time (e.g. a geo-location service like Foursquare?)
• Are we trying too hard to be prescriptive in discussing sauces, and should we just let people create their own recipes?

Tell us what you think on the Case site.  Thanks!

Mindful Social Media Strategies for Contests

The sector has been awash in contests the last two years. Here is a list of public contests compiled by the White House recently – it’s huge!

Beth drafted our second Conversational Case Study for our assessment of America’s Giving Challenge. This case study is about the experience of one of the winners, Students for a Free Tibet.

The first decision point for this group is to decide whether to enter the contest at all. Their decision oints include:

They determine whether the contest has value by asking:

• Do we have the bandwidth?
• Do we have enough members who will volunteer to reach out to their friends and family?
• Will our participation in the contest help us grow our network of people who we can educate and engage about political freedom in Tibet after the contest is over?
• How does the contest fit in our overall fundraising plan for the year?

In addition, like Darius Goes West, Students for a Free Tibet also personalize their appeals for help.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences by commenting on the blog post on the Case Foundation site.

Conversational Case Study for America’s Giving Challenge

I’m cooking up some fun with Beth and the Case Foundation again. We are engaged in the evaluation of the second America’s Giving Challenge contest that the foundation sponsored last year. We did a survey and we wanted to do some in depth case studies to better understand the experiences of some of the winners. But rather than do it behind closed doors we decided to do it networked style!

So, here’s the lowdown. Beth has posted the first of what we’re calling a Conversational Case Study on the foundation’s blog.  This first one is about Darius Goes West – they’re a small nonprofit that did a great job of using videos and personal appeals to activate their network to become a winner in the Challenge.  Read their story, it’s really fun and exciting. But their story also raises a couple of interesting questions that Beth outlines in the case study:

• Whether you’re participating in an online contest or implementing a fundraising campaign using social networks, you’ve got to engage your fans and make it easy for them to share your organization’s story with pride and joy. What techniques are you using?
• How have you used social media to personalize your interactions with potential supporters?
• If you are with a small organization, how have you used social media successfully without a big marketing budget?
• How can we put to rest the assumption that large organizations have an automatic advantage using social media?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please comment on that post or share your insights on a tweet using the hashtag #agc2.

We’ll be posting two more Conversational Case Studies in the next two weeks.  Thanks for participating!

Contests, Competitons and Prizes

I attended a symposium last Friday hosted by the Case Foundation and the White House on promoting public innovation through prizes and contests. The Case Foundation blogged about the purpose of the event prior to it here.

If anyone had told me two years ago that two hundred people in DC, mainly from federal agencies, would get together to talk about using social media for innovation through prizes and contests I would not have believed it. And yet, there we were – at HUD no less!

A few takeaways for me were the array of agencies interested in working this way. They aren’t all able to do it because of the layers of red tape that prevent prizes from being given. But the gravitational pull outwards to openly sharing innovation and good ideas, lessons learned and processes for innovation is happening. It’s spearheaded by amazing people like Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck who are working from the inside of government outwards.

I was also struck by the amazing array of contests taking place right now funded by federal agencies and foundations. Of course, I’m well aware of the high profile contests like America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation, Chase Facebook Challenge, and Pepsi Refresh Project. What I didn’t realize was how may contests and challenges were being sponsored by the feds.  Here is a report that provides an overview of the types of prizes and contests offered.

We’re living in interesting times!

Beth’s Birthday Party

Today is Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday. I wouldn’t have shared the number with you, but she already has here and here and here on her blog! My friends Amy Sample Ward and Stacey Monk organized an effort by bloggers, a surprise bloggy birthday!, today to wish Beth a happy birthday and help her to reach her birthday goal of sending 53 Cambodia children to school. I’ve just donated $25, I hope you’ll do the same here on Facebook.

But, Amy and Stacey also asked us bloggers to do one more thing for Beth’s birthday. They asked that we share how Beth has impacted your work. Well, that’s might sound like an easy thing to do, but for me it isn’t easy at all. The problem is that Beth has impacted how I think about social media, what I know, who I know and what I do in so many profound ways it’s hard to capture it all! I’ll just highlight a few so you get an idea of how important she is to me as a friend, teacher and partner.

• Beth was the first blogger to review my first book, Momentum. That’s how we met, and I was so struck by her humanness then- she wasn’t an aloof reviewer, she was a full person who just told you what she liked and why without any pretense, and certainly without any snarkiness (unlike yours truly, too often, I’m afraid!)
• We partnered on the assessment of the first round of the Case Foundation’s Giving Challenge last year. We had fun doing it, and I learned so much from her about how Causes and fundraising using social media. But, again, Beth doesn’t just watch from afar, she is a passionate doer and user of social media and her first hand experience as a participant in the Giving Challenge on behalf of the Sharing Foundation was invaluable to our efforts.
• And, finally, Beth is my co-author and partner for our book, The Networked Nonprofit, that Wiley & Sons will be publishing this year. Her insights, experiences, thoughtfulness, and practices are central elements to making the book what I thought it finally became: an important and useful work that perfectly captures this moment in time for nonprofits and social media.

So, my friend, happy birthday, many, many happy returns, and thanks for everything that you have done with me and for me!

Nonprofits Compete and Collaborate for Funds

A few readers of this blog and listeners to the Social Good podcast have asked why I am in favor of online funding contests, like Chase Bank’s Facebook Challenge which I wrote about last week.

However, at other times I have written about the cannibalistic effect of nonprofit organizations competing with one another for funds. And others, like Peter Dietz, have written compellingly about power of social media to support collaboration that is mutually beneficial rather than competitions that are a zero-sum game.

So, A. Fine, they asked, which is it: competitions or collaboration?

It’s both.

The contest are important because: 1. The contest deadlines and matching grants create a sense of urgency that small dollar donors can respond to in great numbers; 2. Organizations are competing less with other organizations and more within themselves to spur their own networks to action; 3. Being successful in these competitions requires organizations to work in open and connected ways that are counter-intuitive for organizations that view fundraising only through a competitive lens.

From the America’s Giving Challenge Assessment report that Beth and I wrote for The Case Foundation, we found that many organizations used the challenge as an opportunity to collaborate. Two organizations working on the same cause or in the same issue area often joined forces for the Giving Challenge. What these organizations knew intuitively was that bringing old proprietary attitudes and actions to these competitions would not serve their organizations well during competitions. This is particularly true since success in fundraising efforts using social media hinge on friends reaching out to friends to create a viral effect.  Trying to look “unique” or increase “market share” are counter productive in contests where winners built momentum based on the trust and relationships that they built with their online networks.

Hope that clears up any confusion about competition and collaboration.

Chase Community Giving on Facebook

Chase Bank is sponsoring a $5 million giving program for the holidays. Yup, that’s $5 MILLION they’re giving away on Facebook to nonprofits. Voting ends this Friday, December 11th.

What is so fun about watching the giving challenges and contests unfold is that there are constantly new wrinkles that folks are adding. My Social Good podcast this month was on the proliferation of these kinds of giving contests.

The Chase effort builds on America’s Giving Challenge and the Target’s Bullseye Gives Facebook giving effort had similarities and differences. The Giving Challenge provided matching grants to causes that raised the largest number of friends using Facebook and the Parade magazine site. The winners during both rounds of the Giving Challenge were small, often unstaffed, nonprofits. Bullseye had Facebook users vote for nonprofits to receive part of their $1 million prize based on a pre-selected group of nonprofits.

Chase has taken the level playing field of the Giving Challenge and combined it with the voting of Bullseye. But, Chase has also added an interesting twist by having over 500,000 local nonprofit organizations eligible for the voting. All of these eligible nonprofit organizations are all small, local organizations. One chooses an organization, or searches by zip code. The goal, for Chase, is to concentrate their giving on local communities. This is also part of their business strategy of developing stronger personal relationships in communities with branches of Washington Mutual Bank that they absorbed last year.

Go on over to Facebook and vote for a few of your favorite local nonprofits today, and then let’s see what comes next in terms of contests and giving.

America’s Giving Challenge Reflections

America’s Giving Challenge concluded last week. The event, the second such challenge, was sponsored by The Case Foundation ($150,000), The Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy & Social Innovation ($20,000) and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($75,000). Nonprofit organizations competed to raise the largest number of friends online using the Causes application on Facebook and on Parade Magazine’s site. The winners received matching grants from the funders mentioned above.

Although there will be a much more thorough assessment conducted by The Case Foundation, I thought I’d capture a few reflections immediately upon the competition’s completion.

This is one few online competitions to happen a second time, so it’s a great moment to reflect on what stayed the same and what was different. I’ll base these reflections in part on the assessment report that Beth and I wrote for The Case Foundation on the first Challenge that took place from December 2007 to January 2008.

There were a few changes from last time.

• A shorter competition time, down from fifty days to thirty days.
• An intensive effort by the Case Foundation prior to the Challenge to provide technical assistance through a series of videos calling Giving Gurus series (I participated in one.)
• A crushing recession.

So, what happened? According to the Nonprofit Times, the total giving was up from last time. The first Challenge round resulted in nearly $1.8 million from more than 71,000 donors. This time, 106,000 unique donations generated more than $2 million. In other words, many more people gave slightly more in total over twenty fewer days.

Here are my initial thoughts about this:

• It looks like the recession may be depressing the average amount given. Nonetheless, a lot of people gave.
• The nature of the Challenge is that friends are likely to give to friends for a cause. That would explain the large numbers of givers even if they are each giving a little less.
• One of the most interesting findings from the first round was that the winners were a collection of very small, relatively unknown nonprofits. Beth and I had a concern that given the success of the first round that this one could be dominated by the biggest and best known nonprofits that would have far more resources to throw at the competition. But that doesn’t appear to have happened. Again, the winners are small, relatively unknown groups. Overseas China Education Foundation, in Houston, Texas; The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF: Food for People), in Los Angeles, Calif.; Overseas Save Chinese Children Foundation (Save Chinese Children), in Toledo, Ohio; Fitness Challenge (Ride 2 Recovery), Calabasas, Calif.; and, Atlas Service Corps (Atlas Corps = International Cooperation), in Washington, D.C.  Only Atlas Service Corps was a repeat winner from the first round.

Questions I’d love answers to now include:

• Did the participants have a great comfort level with social media, particularly Facebook, than the first round of participants?
• Is the assumption that the average gift size per donor was lower than the first round and can this be attributed to the recession?
• Did participants use other social media tools like Twitter to help get the word out?
• Did the big large nonprofits participate and fizzle out, or did they choose not to participate? And if they chose not to, why not?

Those are my thoughts for now, can’t wait to learn more!