Social Fundraising

Excerpts from Brady Josephson's Social Fundraising Presentation shared at the Social Media For Nonprofits Conference in Vancouver on how to empower supporters to become heroes. 

The Social Fundraising Roadmap:

   
1. Start with Story

You (the organization) are not the hero. You are the mentor and your job is to call people to adventure, help them become heroes and give them a special gift they can use on the adventure and through it all they will find something bigger, more meaningful on their journey.
 
2. Define Success

Choose your 1 main goal, no more than 3 objectives and select 1 – 3 things to measure per objective to show success. So at most you should measure 9 things (tops). Also, choose One Metric That Matters which is the ONE measurement that is most important out of those 9. 

3. Provide Structure

What are people doing, for how long, to do what and how do they do it? That’s your job in terms of providing structure from a communications standpoint. Choosing a platform or tool that can facilitate a social fundraising campaign is also key and I recommend Peer Giving Solutions (a peer fundraising integrated site) or Chimp (a third-party site that’s easy to use and cheap). You can see a bunch of tool options in the Charity Express Tool Kit for Charities.
 
4. Give Support

Send reminders, encourage people fundraising, say thanks all the time, think about customer service, give examples of others and share the fundraisers stories. If you get 20 people signed up, most likely 2 will be successful and 1 will be a superstar. Your job is to get those 2 successes and hopefully more and that comes with support.

That was the “roadmap” for a social fundraising campaign and I avoided getting into too many technical things or too drilled down for two main reasons:

1. You can figure a lot of that stuff out yourself

You can quite easily find the best times to send emails, how to use social media channels, which platforms have lower transaction rates, etc. Ultimately, if you can’t create a great opportunity for people to fundraise than getting all the finer print stuff down pat will not help that much.

2. Your supporters can figure a lot of that stuff out themselves

Do you have to tell people how to share on Facebook? Should they? Your job is to fire up people to take action and hold their hand but let them have enough freedom where they can communicate their way and do what they want to do. The one exception is they must send emails if they want to raise money (often more than one).

Source: Brady Josephson, re:charity