According to the research firm Inside Network, in the first 48 hours after the earthquake hit Haiti, the Red Cross had raised $35 million dollars in donations, more than half via online and at least $8 million directly from its text message campaign which was popularized in part on Social Networking sites. The New York Times reported that at one point there were 1,500 Facebook status updates a minute mentioning Haiti. The text donation campaign was organized by mGive, which was founded in 2005 and works with 200 organizations and charities. Obviously the Haiti earthquake is an extraordinary event, but so were Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and the Red Cross received donations for Haiti that exceeded the combined amount received for both those disasters. It is too soon to know if the increase in total donations is a direct result of social media and mobile giving opportunities but their impact has definitely been felt in the non-profit community with this disaster.
So, what does this mean in the future for non-profit fundraising moving forward? According to Giving USA, online giving has grown year over year. While numbers for 2009 have not been released yet, 2008 experienced a 44% increase over 2007’s online giving and accounted for 5% (over $15 billion dollars total) of all charitable giving for that year. According to research by Blackbaud, a leading non-profit software company (and finalist with Levelwing Media as one of the fastest growing companies in Charleston according to the Charleston Business Journal), it seems that online giving is not replacing offline giving – in the sense that a traditional offline donor rarely switches to giving online, while those that first give online will also give offline. So, online is effectively a new market for non-profits. Further Blackbaud research indicates that online donors are younger and have higher incomes than the traditional direct mail donor and they donate, on average, larger individual donations than the small offline donor.
But it is not just about adding a donate now button to your site and the ability to accept credit card donations securely. It is about cultivating the online donor. It is about using social media to interact with your donor base. It is about segmenting and customizing your email messages to your audience. It is about providing your base with non-traditional giving opportunities, like text donations. It is about keeping your contributors up to date with the latest news and information regarding your cause.
But beyond the various online tactics you can use, and almost every online marketing channel can be used effectively to solicit donations, at the end of the day it is about connecting with your donors in all the ways that they interact with the larger world. And as so much of that interaction is moving online, the successful 21st century non-profit must move online as well. While your charity may not have a major global disaster to catapult giving opportunities to the front page of every major newspaper and every social networking site, you can still get your message out there in effective and compelling ways, each and every day.
