Social Fundraising 101 – Part 4: The Engagement Funnel

By Jeremy Burton, Chief Technology Officer

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

Fundly is built around an engagement funnel in which the Fundly platform provides tools to encourage a person to become more deeply involved in the cause, perform specific actions (e.g. donate) and recruit additional supporters and volunteers.

• Awareness – the individual becomes aware of the cause
• Interest – the individual demonstrates interest in the cause, typically by reading some material
• Engagement – the individual shows real engagement with the cause, typically signing-up for an event or to receive information
• Support – the individual donates to the cause or performs another action for the cause, e.g. participating in an event
• Spread the message – the individual spreads the message to others – reaching out to his or her Facebook friends, posts content on their personal page, etc
• Volunteer – the individual actively volunteers to perform additional actions on behalf of the cause

Problems for Fundraisers

Individuals responsible for fundraisers face a number of key challenges:

• Limited time – people doing fundraising often have to wear other hats, especially in the non-profit world
• Limited budget
• Lack of technical skills – setting up websites, Facebook applications, etc is not a core skill set
• Traditional fundraising channels are losing their effectiveness – direct mail, events, etc
• Maintaining engagement of supporters over time is hard – including donor fatigue and information overload
• Economic recession has significantly impacted (reduced) fundraising sources – particularly federal, state and city grants

These factors and others mean that fundraisers are clamoring for solutions that let them multiply the effectiveness of their time and effort.

The Fundly Product

Fundly is a volunteer and social fundraising solution offered online on a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) basis.  Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can use Fundly and many aspects can also be used through smartphones such as the Apple iPhone.


Fundly provides the following major components:

• Campaign Dashboard – The Campaign Dashboard is where campaigns are defined, launched, tracked and managed.  It is designed for a non-technical marketing manager.  From here she can access all the most powerful capabilities of social fundraising, optimized for her user base.  Wizards within the Campaign Dashboard help her plan out her fundraising year by “scheduling” campaigns and events on an annual calendar.  As a specific campaign approaches, she can define it more specifically, including timeframe, objective, vehicle, messaging, and rewards structure.  From the Campaign Dashboard she can monitor ongoing campaigns and make adjustments as needed.  She can also use the more technical “Management Dashboard” to look at social, viral, and fundraising metrics.

• Messaging Tools – allowing messages to be created, customized and targeted.  The Messaging Tools enable the cause to craft messages, select which channels to send them through – email, Facebook, Twitter, etc – and measure their effectiveness.  They also allow the cause to target certain subsets of its supporter-base, e.g. volunteer fundraisers who are not meeting their targets.  They enable causes to provide “pre-canned” messages to volunteers and supporters, which they can use to solicit donations and recruit additional supporters.

• Hosted, customizable pages – allowing supporters and volunteers to personalize pages and post user-generated content within templates created by the cause. Fundly Content Management tools let the cause create a hierarchy of web-pages, hosted on Fundly’s website that drive supporters and volunteers to perform actions, including donating, signing-up for events, recruiting other supporters, posting progress updates and uploading pictures.  The cause has complete control over the hierarchy and structure, allowing it to create, for example, pages for a national organization, local chapters, teams and individual supporters.  Pages are assembled from a collection of individual “widgets”, allowing flexibility in what information is displayed on which pages but at the same time ensuring that best practices are followed.

• Customizable widgets – which can be embedded in any website, allowing a cause to seamlessly integrate Fundly’s social fundraising functionality into its existing web presence. The cause has broad control over the style, color-scheme and layout of all Fundly widgets, including donation widgets.

• Facebook application – allows a cause to leverage its supporter’s existing “social graphs” and fundraise and communicate within the familiar Facebook environment.  The Fundly Facebook application allows volunteers and supporters to perform most of the same functions that can be performed on the Fundly website without leaving the Facebook environment, including collecting donations, soliciting friends, recruiting friends as additional volunteers and monitoring progress in real-time.

• Incentives and Rewards – helping to engender a sense of accomplishment and competition, and rewarding supporters and volunteers for performing certain actions.  Incentives include matching donation management and fundraiser competitions.  Rewards include virtual goods such as buttons, ribbons, cups, etc which can be posted on Facebook “walls” and help to spread the cause’s message virally.

• Fundly Platform – a scalable and secure hosted platform with an open API.  The Fundly Platform has already processed over $200M in donations and provides secure payment services, a donor database, transaction logs and auditing information.

• Customizable integration – including support for data sharing with common CRM and donor systems such as Salesforce.com, Blackbaud and Convio.  This allows causes to continue to use their current “system of record” while still benefiting from the social and volunteer fundraising functions provided by Fundly.

Try out our product at www.fundly.com!