Social Fundraising 101 – Part 2: The Social Fundraising Maturity Model

By Jeremy Burton, Chief Technology Officer

This is the second in a four-part blog series.


Different causes are at different places in their online fundraising maturity.  The Fundly product architecture and approach allows causes to begin “where they are” on the maturity curve and progress to their natural state.

Basic:  Online Fundraising

 

• Ability to take donations online, across multiple web properties
• Ability to take donations inside Facebook
• Ability to run targeted email campaigns with specific landing pages for online donations
• Ability to create specific landing pages for events
• Ability to track and measure effectiveness of different campaigns and events
• All donations auto-populate a donor database

Advanced: Social Fundraising

• Individual fundraiser pages with individual goals and personal content
• Team fundraiser pages with team goals and content
• Chapter / Regional / National pages with goals & content
• Targeted messaging capability to each level in the structure
• Facebook recruitment and engagement of supporters
• Tracking of individual, team, etc. impact

Transformational: Volunteer Fundraising

• Ability to manage “give-or-get” fundraising goals for board members or volunteers
• Management of multi-level, volunteer fundraising structures
• Solution for phone-athons, pledge-drives, etc.
• Alumni management, list management, historical giving, etc
• Full engagement with social networks – competitions, virtual goods, rewards, etc

Examples

Example 1

A local Education Foundation raises $400K from parents and supporters of students, and they use direct mail, flyers in backpacks, envelopes, and spreadsheets to keep track.

They would like to be able to steer people to a website where the donation can be made securely, and no one has to worry about remembering to send out thank-yous or enter donors’ names in a database.
Target Maturity Level:  Basic

Example 2

A Cancer Charity wants to organize sponsored walks to raise money.
The Charity is organized as a national umbrella organization with regional operations and local chapters.  The national organization wants some level of control over the organization of the event as a whole and of the messaging but wants volunteers to create and join teams at a local chapter level.  It also wants participants in the walk to be able to personalize the message, communicate with other participants and share updates and experiences with friends-and-family.
Target Maturity Level:  Advanced

Example 3

A K-12 charter school needs to raise additional funds to close the funding gap caused by reduced state and city funding.

The school already has a fan-page on Facebook but to date has only made occasional posts on Facebook.  However, many of the parents are heavy Facebook users and have “liked” the school’s fanpage.  The school’s Development Director wants to use Facebook to multiply the effectiveness of its fundraising efforts by leveraging parents’ social networks of friends-and-family to spread the message and raise money on Facebook.

Target Maturity Level:  Advanced

Example 4

A University Alumni Organization wants to raise $2M for its annual fund.

It is planning a two-day phone-a-thon during which a team of 100 volunteers will call alumni for donations.  It wants to allocate prospects from its prior donor and alumni list in its existing database to these volunteers.  It wants to encourage a sense of competition between the volunteers and award prizes to those that raise the most money.  The University also wants to convert as many of the alumni called as possible into volunteers to help with the fundraising effort the following year.

Target Maturity Level:  Transformational

Example 5

A educational non-profit providing daycare services to low-income families wants to leverage the personal connections of its board members, particularly to high-net-worth individuals.

So far, board members have made many promises but generally have not delivered on personal fundraising goals.  The non-profit wants to engender better accountability and track the donation history of each of the board members’ personal networks.

Target Maturity Level:  Transformational

Tomorrow we will look at: Fundraising Using Volunteers.