Why Facebook Connect is 100 Times Better

How do you capture information about your donors and supporters?  Most non-profits collect email addresses on their donation forms or newsletter subscription forms.  This is good practice.  Now you can stay in touch with those supporters digitally, send them updates on new initiatives or campaigns, and encourage them to take action on the Web where they spend most of their time anyway.

This is good practice, but it is not best practice.  Far from it.

Consider the following:  When a donor shows up on your donation form, it is over 60% likely that she is simultaneously logged in to Facebook.  That means she has 135 friends in tow as she approaches you.  If you simply ask her for her email address as part of the donation, you are surgically disconnecting her network of friends, collecting only her email address, and tucking it away for future use.  Effectively you are closing the door behind her and shutting her 135 friends out.  To make up for this, maybe you put “share” buttons on your form, hoping she will share back to her friends who are still waiting outside.

Facebook connect changes all this.

With Facebook Connect, you give her the option to “register using Facebook.”  She then gives you a few permissions–permission to use her email address, permission to read her profile information including likes and interests, and permission to see who her friends are including likes and interests.  This is easier for her (one click registration), and MUCH better for you.  Now you have a lifetime email address that is and will always be current (as long as it’s current with Facebook), you have her demographic and likes / interest information, and you have the same information about 135 of her friends who are more likely than not to share some of her views.

Wow.  Why would we EVER pass up the opportunity to make this deep connection?

I think it’s just because very few people understand the power of Facebook Connect yet.  Maybe they believe a donation form is a commodity and that collecting an email address and asking someone to share on Facebook is the same as getting a Facebook Connect.  It is not.

So how do you get a Facebook Connect from your supporters?

One option is to hire a development team to build a Facebook Connect application for you.  This will cost between $15,000 and $250,000, depending on how involved you want the application to be.  You then have to keep it up to date and maintain it–figure spending the same amount each year to keep it current.  Another option is to sign up for a free Fundly account.  We’ve already built a state-of-the-art application and you can use it for free.

With Fundly’s donation platform, we get email addresses 89% of the time and we get a Facebook Connect 25% of the time (and climbing).  The people who Facebook Connect with non-profit organizations through Fundly have an average of not only 135 friends, but 550 friends!  Once you’ve built this social database, you can send out a single message to your supporters that they can forward on to their friends with a single click.  Think about the amplification!

So to summarize: 550 friends vs. 1 new supporter; Lifetime valid email vs. “hopefully valid” email; Demographics, likes, and interest data on all 550 friends; Amplification channel for all future initiatives and campaigns.

What’s not to like about Facebook Connect?  Fundly is the only donation platform that is built as a Facebook Connect application.  No wonder it is the largest and fastest growing social fundraising platform.  Thanks for spreading the word and raise money on facebook with Fundly today!