Are Facebook, MySpace and Twitter wise choices for fundraising?
Samantha Prestia, Account Executive, Schultz & Williams

The buzz seems to be focusing around social media sites and how they are the future of fundraising—a revolutionary phenomenon that every organization must either dive into or else lose out on a huge cash cow of free fundraising.

Maybe you’ve felt a little of this, too. Perhaps a member of the board or the president of your organization wants to know you why you aren’t Tweeting? After all, if you could be using a free social network site to reach new people and raise money, why are you wasting all that money on acquisition mailing?

To be fair, there are a lot of great opportunities in the world of social media right now, and the future of fundraising might indeed be inextricably linked to this medium. But before you launch pages and feeds and find yourself spending more time updating your status than working on your individual, major, corporate, foundation and planned giving programs, we recommend you take time to evaluate your options as you would any other opportunity on the marketing and fundraising table.

First, let’s look at the potential gains of investing in social media:

• Access to a new arena to establish your brand and create awareness: 83% of the Internet population is now using some form of social media, and more than half are doing so on a regular basis, according to new research released by Knowledge Networks.
• High-touch engagement with prospects: people are seeking engagement in social media, giving you an opportunity to develop two-way relationships with prospective donors.
• Free advertising: Friends, Fans and Followers are the most likely prospects to become mouthpieces for your organization by posting and tweeting to networks of individuals that otherwise may not have come into contact with your cause.
• Fresh prospects: social sites provide arenas to drive individuals to your website for data harvesting, cultivation and solicitation.

Now consider the successes shown in this medium to-date, and the investment needed:

• Out of the 25,000,000 users who have joined a Facebook Cause, less than 1% has ever made a donation—and that’s cumulative over the past 5 years.¹
• Most Causes have received no donations at all.¹
• All of our research to date has unearthed only a handful of Twitter success stories—all reporting giving in the range of $100-$3,000 total. This may change with the new "Twollars"function, but given Facebook’s record of success (or lack thereof), it’s not looking likely.
• Effective social media pages and feeds require a sizable commitment of staff time and energy—we recommend at least 25% of a staffer’s time—to create frequent, relevant, timely and valuable updates, posts, etc. Fresh information and engagement opportunities are crucial to gathering and maintaining a following.

Because money isn’t really being made yet within the social media outlets themselves, the most powerful outcome of investment in social media right now is the ability to contact new prospects in hopes of pulling them into proven fundraising streams outside of the social networking medium.

If your long-term goal is raising dollars, then your short-term goal should be to develop strategies to capture individual e-mail addresses (remember, you’re not allowed to copy & paste personal e-mail addresses off social media profiles and solicit them!), and then to cultivate and convert prospect interest into a donation through proven online and offline programs such as e-mails and mail.

Social media makes reaching the audience easy—we can all agree on that—the challenge is getting the contact information and converting Friends, Fans and Followers to donors.

Your website—complete with a robust data-harvesting strategy and communication and solicitation stream—must be ready to do all this for you. If your website and e-communications streams are not strategically sound and technically seamless, then the investment made reaching new prospects will be wasted.

Then next question is: How do you know if you are ready?

• Your website is up-to-date, reflects your mission and branding well, and looks professional.
• The site is fundraising-driven: there are multiple prominent links to the donation page, and the donation page is easy to use. You’ve tested this page with Google Optimizer to confirm this.
• There is a persistent field on the site to enter your e-mail address.
• Multiple opportunities to take some kind of action are offered on the site—sign up for a newsletter, donate, sign a petition, watch a video.
• Specific, appropriate follow-up communications to all actions taken on the site are ready to be deployed automatically.
• New e-mails captured receive an automated conversion series to solicit that critical first donation.
• You send out frequent, engaging cultivation communications—quizzes, surveys, updates.
• Your communications are extremely timely—you have broken down any cumbersome internal review process allowing you to react within hours to a relevant news item.
• Your communications are authentic and personal—you have removed any internal insistence on formal, insider-speak.
• You provide opt-in/opt-out choices allowing individuals to tailor what kind of updates they receive from your site.
• Strategies are in place to capture mailing address and phone number allowing multi-channel fundraising.

If your organization’s website meets all of these criteria, then you are certainly ready to jump into the world of social networking!

But if you’re not quite there yet (and most organizations aren’t) focus your time and resources on developing your website and e-communications first, and then welcome the networked world to your online home.

¹Does Social Media Have to Generate Donations to be Successful?

Samantha Prestia is an account executive with Schultz & Williams. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Sam manages the day-to-day activities of accounts for S&W Direct, including direct mail campaigns, website development, and online communications. She manages the full scope of each project from creation to fulfillment and is the lead contact for all of her clients, maintaining quality control and ensuring timely implementation of each phase of every project. Her current clients include zoos across the country, New York Restoration Project, The Planetary Society, and American Friends Service Committee. Reach Sam at sprestia@schultzwilliams.com.

Schultz & Williams is a national consulting firm based in Philadelphia; providing management, fundraising and marketing consulting for nonprofit organizations, along with full-service direct marketing, database and creative/production services.