Today we are talking about something rather relevant in development
of modern society, one that lives in the hardest possible conditions.
And that would be fundraising, but in this article we are going to
discuss online fundraising, that should significantly change traditional
fundraising.
Before we discuss our main topic, online fundraising I will first explain a little about fundraising in general.
Fundraising or fund raising (also development) is the process of
soliciting and gathering voluntary contributions as money or
other resources, by requesting donations from individuals, businesses,
charitable foundations, or governmental agencies (see also crowd
funding). Although fundraising typically refers to efforts to gather
money for non-profit organizations, it is sometimes used to refer to the
identification and solicitation of investors or other sources of
capital for for-profit enterprises.
Traditionally, fundraising consisted mostly of asking for donations
on the street or at people’s doors, and this is experiencing very strong
growth in the form of face-to-face fundraising. But new forms of
fundraising such as online fundraising have emerged in recent years,
that are far much better than mentioned traditional fundraising
techniques, in many different ways.
Now you understand the concept of fundraising, we shall turn to our main topic, which is online fundraising.
Online fundraising is a way to gather funds or other necessary tools
for various occasions. Nowadays famine in Africa is recognized as a huge
problem and many online fundraisers are for that certain purpose.
Except for that people raise money online for causes such as research in
some health disorders, gathering money to build a health facility,
fundraising to keep some projects or websites alive (like wikimedia
foundation whose main goal was to raise 16 million dollars to keep
wikipedia.org online, or wikileaks.com that need around five hundred
thousand dollars to keep their project alive), or simple asking for
donations as a sign of gratitude for someone’s work.
The last one is the most common cause actually. Everyone who has a
relatively successful website adds a Donate button to their site to get
some more profit of their site. Researches have also shown that those
kinds of donations bring more money than the actual advertisements.
Imagine that a site has 100 000 (satisfied) visitors a day, and every
tenth of them donates a single dollar to that website, we are talking
about 10 000 pure easy profit! But enough about that, let’s discuss
whether or not online fundraising is better than regular face-to-face
fundraisers.
This is how regular fundraiser works. Event starter calls number of
people (depending on the financial needs and reputation) that are
somewhat wealthy to parties, concerts, dinners, balls and similar. Those
invited people have to pay for entrance, pay for stuff they are going
to consume and later on if they really have a lot of money, donate some
to the cause. In the end when all is over event starters have to use
gathered money to pay for expenses and they give the rest (or at least
they should if they are not thieves) to a cause.
This is where online fundraising beats
regular fundraising. Nowadays you literally have no expenses to start a
cause and ask for money (donations). And the number of people that
could donate is not limited by space or time. Online fundraisers give
donators freedom to donate how much they want/can, whenever they want.
Only possible expense is site upkeep (paying few dollars a month to have
a space online).
But now when there are sites like facebook with almost a billion
users, and twitter around 200 million, that allow you to create accounts
or groups for free, there are literally no expenses. Every single cent
fundraisers get is possible to give to the cause. That’s a win-win
situation, donators can be sure all of their money is going to those who
need it and those who need it get the most money.
Thanks for taking time to read this and I hope you now understand why
I think online fundraising is far more effective than traditional one.
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