Universities and Colleges are Using Facebook to Battle Cut-Backs in Giving

During a time that major gifts are down, many our nations Educational institutions have to rethink their fundraising strategies.

Arizona State University’s Paola Bolivn talks about tapping into a larger donor pool in this article:

“Finding a way to tap into that large alumni base – even if it means contributing a small amount – instead of simply relying on the generosity of a few deep pockets should be the course of action.”

Adding a donation button to an existing Facebook page and asking current students and active alumni to reach out their friends could give a boost to alumni donations.

Current Industry Practice #1: Assign your volunteers a list of alumni to contact on behalf of the institution.  These contacts may or may not be personal friends.

Challenges: Contact information is often out of date.  It is a time-consuming process to recruit, manage and incentivize the volunteer force.

Benefits of Facebook fundraising: Since volunteers are selecting the people they will reach out to through their pre-existing social network, the result is ‘friends’ asking ‘friends’.  Guess what?  Friends already have the most up to date contact information for people in their existing social network.  In addition, people are 10x more likely to give a donation when a friend is doing the asking.  No lists to manage.   Easily expand the number of volunteers without increasing the cost of managing the volunteers.

Current Industry Practice #2: Once a supporter makes a pledge to the organization, collecting the pledge is a manually intensive process

Challenges: requires additional mailings to the donor and a second point of contact to actually collect the donation

Benefits of Facebook fundraising: Donations are processed at the time that the solicitation is made, all inside of the Facebook environment.  Donors are also encouraged to post a badge to their own wall expressing their support of the institution and to share with their friends.

It turns out that adding a donation button to your Facebook page and accepting donations within the Facebook environment is more difficult than you would think.  This is where Fundly can help.  Fundly has a simple-to-use Facebook application that allows an organization to:
Recruit supporters to solicit funds on their behalf

1. Track and manage all the donors andthe contributions on-line
2. Allows supporters to donate inside the Facebook environment and virally spread the word to others in your community

To get started with Fundly, it will only take minutes to begin your own Facebook fundraising campaign today.