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Category Archives: Social Media
September 19, 2012, 3:11 pm
Nonprofits Hope for Holiday Fundraising Boost on #GivingTuesday
What comes after Thanksgiving? Black Friday. Cyber Monday. And now, perhaps, Giving Tuesday.
This holiday season, a group of about 60 nonprofit organizations and businesses are hoping Americans will mark a new tradition by opening their wallets one more time after their post-Thanksgiving shopping ends. But instead of buying, they want them to give to charity.
The new national campaign is called #GivingTuesday, an idea the group hopes will spread largely through social media. On November 27, the campaign will urge people to donate or volunteer to causes and charities they care about. They can also participate in events #GivingTuesday organizers are holding that day.
Organizers hope nonprofits across the country will tie their fundraising appeals to Giving Tuesday or schedule their volunteer projects and campaigns on that day.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting to take a page out …
June 11, 2012, 4:34 pm
Tips on Great Web-Site Design With Donors in Mind
The problems with most nonprofit Web sites today are too much text and not enough great visuals, said Ann-Laura Parks at last week’s AFP TechKnow conference in Orlando, Fla., hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Charities can go a long way to make their Web site more reader-friendly so potential donors can scan a page and quickly pick up whatever information they need.
For example, instead of using a lot words, Web sites should contain strong visual cues to guide donors. “You can use design to move a reader’s eye,” she says. “Good design means never having to say, ‘Click here.’ ”
As a graphic designer and artist—and director of development and communications at South Arts, a nonprofit arts group in Atlanta—Ms. Parks constantly monitors how her organization’s Web site comes across to visitors and often looks at other charity sites….
March 20, 2012, 1:48 pm
Fundraisers Share How They Began Their Careers
Share your #fundraisingstory in the comments below or on Twitter.
You can also see a Chronicle video in which fundraisers describe how they got started in nonprofit work.
December 8, 2011, 2:40 pm
Holiday Drive Honors Good Deeds, With a Social-Media Twist
The Case Foundation is asking people who witness random acts of kindness this holiday season to capture those moments in photos and post them on their favorite social network. They may get a nice reward for that good deed: up to $500 for themselves and up to $5,000 for their favorite charity.
The goal of the program, called #GoodSpotting, is to honor “little acts of good that go unsung” by recording them with pictures, much like the popular foodie Web site Foodspotting does with restaurant dishes, says Allyson Burns, a spokeswoman for the Washington foundation started by the AOL founder Steve Case and his wife, Jean.
Organizers say the kinds of photos they have in mind might show people volunteering at a food pantry or giving clothes at a coat drive. Photographers who upload their shots to social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter must label the image with the…
December 7, 2011, 5:51 pm
Charity Creates 250 Videos to Thank Donors
For two weeks, employees of the nonprofit Charity: Water baked cakes, donned climbing gear or tutus, got on stationary bikes, and undertook a range of other stunts—all with the goal of mimicking the efforts the group’s supporters have made in the past five years to attract donations from friends, relatives, and others to bring clean and safe drinking water to developing countries.
The charity captured those efforts as it created 250 videos to mark the organization’s fifth anniversary and send a personal thank-you to each of the 250 supporters.
The 250 people honored with thank-you videos were picked to represent the 250,000 people the charity estimates have helped it raise money. But instead of emphasizing those who gave the most, the charity focused on the people who showed the most creativity in spreading the word about the nonprofit and its mission.
In all, two dozen staff …
December 2, 2011, 10:07 am
University Thanks Big Donors With a Rap Video
To thank donors who paid for a new $32-million sports center, Bowling Green State University produced a video featuring some of those very same supporters.
The donors were game. They wore basketball uniforms and tried to bounce and spin a basketball, while acting tough on camera. The video, which was shown at the dedication of the Stroh Center in September, also featured a college student rapping about the donors’ big gifts, while showing the buildings and the basketball court named after them. Watch how the student, Mikey (Rosco) Blair, raps “philanthropy”:
“It tells a story and it entertains,” says Mary Ellen Gillespie, associate athletics director for external relations. “It has become the ‘wow’ that we wanted it to be.”
Now the university is showing the video to potential students and donors in off-campus events.
Here’s how the video came…
November 15, 2011, 9:01 am
Penn State Alumni Seek to Raise More Than $500,000 to Fight Sexual Abuse
Penn State University alumni and fans have donated $360,000 in the past few days to a child sex-abuse group to demonstrate their support for the youngsters allegedly molested by their alma mater’s former football coach, Jerry Sandusky.
The grassroots fund-raising campaign seeks to raise more than $550,000, or about a dollar for each of Penn State’s 557,000 alumni. Organizers say it hopes to meet that goal by the end of this week.
The money supports the Internet hotline for victims of sexual assault managed by Rainn, the acronym for the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, a Washington nonprofit.
The campaign got its start after some Penn State alumni suggested the idea to Rainn on Tuesday of last week.
By Wednesday, organizers had built a Web site—ProudToBeAPennStater.com, and supporters immediately turned to social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, to spread…
October 3, 2011, 5:54 pm
A Low-Cost Way to Thank Supporters
Amara Poolswasdi wanted to thank friends who supported her participation in a race to raise money for Dress for Success Worldwide, a charity that supplies business attire and training to women who are job hunting so they can get off welfare. But she didn’t necessarily want to shell out a lot of money.
So Ms. Poolswasdi whipped out her iPhone and downloaded Postagram, an application that allowed her to send a postcard of her run at the Disneyland half-marathon to each of her friends who donated to her cause. The cost for each postcard was 99 cents.
“I really wanted to give back to my donors,” says Ms. Poolswasdi, a longtime Dress for Success volunteer who works for a Los Angeles technology company. “I needed to find a way to reward my donors without a lot of out-of-pocket costs but still have a lot of meaning.”
She had asked her friends to donate at least $13.10 (13.1 miles is a …
August 4, 2011, 8:54 am
A Can of ‘Nothing’ Supports Food Banks
Nothing can end hunger.
That’s what people in Rhode Island said when hunger advocates asked them to support food banks, giving the advocates an idea: Maybe nothing can end hunger. Nothing, that is, in the form of an empty can—one made to look like a can of soup with a “Nothing” label.
With the help of local marketing firm Nail Communications, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, in Providence, sold the cans in May last year at Dunkin’ Donuts, Whole Foods, and other stores.
For $3, customers could buy a can, and the full purchase price would go to the food bank. They could also use the cans to collect money (they have slots on top) and drop them off at the food bank when they were full.
“People filled them to the brim,” says Andrew Schiff, chief executive of the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. The average can contained about $50, he says. The Nothing campaign, which ran…
July 1, 2011, 12:00 pm
Charities Use Amazon’s Wish List for Needed Goods
In late May, Jennifer Roccanti wrote a message on a friend’s Facebook post: “So cool! I think I might steal this for Miriam’s Kitchen!”
What Ms. Roccanti, an assistant director for development at Miriam’s Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Washington, saw on Facebook was the solution to a problem she had been facing for months: how to make it easy for people to donate goods online.
Her friend had helped Lucky Dog Animal Rescue by buying $25 worth of flea medicine on an Amazon Wish List the animal-welfare organization had created.
The online wish list enables people to make a donation that pays for one or more products listed, including shipping and handling.
Inspired, Ms. Roccanti and her colleagues went to work building a wish list for Miriam’s Kitchen.
For the past month, the charity has sent out e-mails letting supporters know about the list, which requests food and sundries.
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