pledge4good nonprofit strategies blog

If you maintain your organization’s Facebook page, you should know that Facebook just announced that they will be transitioning all nonprofit Fan Pages to the new Timeline design. To make your life a bit easier, we thought that we would quickly summarize the major changes: 

• Facebook is starting to roll-out the new Timeline design on Fan Pages today and intends to complete the roll-out by the end of the week
• Facebook will give nonprofits 30 days to “clean up” their Timeline profile (while Facebook users continue to see the older design)
• Your Facebook Fan Pages will now have a “Cover Photo” that you can use to showcase your most important photos, murals, graphics, etc.
• You can now “pin” a single post to the top of your Page for 1-week at a time to highlight the most important news to Fans
• Users can now send your Fan page a private message, similar to Friend-to-Friend messaging, that you can similarly respond to privately
• Visitors to your Fan Page will be provided a more personalized experience. With Timeline, Visitors will be able to see how Facebook Friends have interacted with your nonprofit (e.g. if a visitor’s Friend had shared one of your posts, this post will be featured on the Timeline for the visitor to see)
• The admin panel has been simplified to (1) make tracking your fans’ interaction with your Fan page simpler and (2) help you track all your Facebook activity

For readers that have transitioned to Timeline on their personal Facebook profile, you may know that Facebook is looking to emphasize the “story” on the Timeline over the content on an “Info” tab. Following this transition, it will become ever more important for your organization to carefully curate content on your Facebook Fan Page in order to provide existing and potential donors a rich feel for your organization, mission, and impact. 

Questions or comments on the content? Email us at  lenny@pledge4good.com or vik@pledge4good.com or add a comment below.

If you visited www.pledge4good.com on any of the previous Sundays, you would have noticed on our activity feed several pledges tied to the success of the New England Patriots and New York Giants. In this way, each of these teams’ tremendous postseason success has translated into meaningful donations as their fans celebrate each victory. Below, we are including very brief interviews with two pledge heroes, one a Patriots fan, and one a Giants fan, that created pledges tied to their favorite football team’s success.

David Glattstein (Philadelphia, PA by way of Swampscott, MA):

• p4g: Please tell me about your decision to create a pledge tying donations to wins by the NE Patriots?
• David: I thought it was a great opportunity to be able to donate to a great cause and support something I love. pledge4good just really combined two things that I would be doing anyway, so now as I cheer for my favorite team I know I’m supporting something positive in the meantime. 
• p4g: Has having such a pledge changed how you feel as a fan of the team? 
• David: I don’t know if it has changed how I feel, but now in addition to being really happy on Sundays when the Patriots win I’m also happy to have supported an organization that I care about. 
• p4g: What is it like to have donating as a part of your regular routines?  
• David: It’s really just very convenient for me to donate this way. After a game, I just go to pledge4good on my phone, check-in to update my pledge, and then share my pledge on Facebook. It’s almost like a much more fun monthly giving program for me. 
• p4g: Prediction for the game?
• David: 31-14 Patriots and Aaron Hernandez is going to be the MVP

Michael Matejek (Boston, MA by way of New Jersey):

• p4g: Please tell me about your decision to create a pledge tying donations to wins by the Giants? 
• Mike: Born in raised in New Jersey, I’ve been a NY Giants fan my entire life.  Almost five and a half years ago, I moved to Boston.  One of my fondest sports memories is watching the Giants beat the then undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII while living here in Boston, right in the heart of Patriots country.  When I made my pledge in support of the Giants, it seemed questionable that they would even qualify for the playoffs, let alone set themselves up for an epic rematch against Tom Brady and the Pats.  Now, the G-men are just one win away from earning both their fourth Super Bowl championship and $50 for the Young Scientist Research Fund.
• p4g: Must be interesting to be a Giants fan right in the middle of Patriots county. So why did you pick the Young Scientist Cancer Research Fund to donate to?
• Mike: Everybody who supports science and believes that the children are our nation’s future are rooting for Eli and the Giants.  All opposed, the Patriots.  Don’t hate our country’s children.  Root for the Giants, and join my pledge.
• p4g: Prediction for the game?
• Mike: Giants, 24-19.

So there you have it: two great teams playing on Sunday, with two great fans, David and Mike, using their team spirit to support two great causes in the Young Scientist Cancer Research Fund and St. Jude’s Childrens Research Hospital.  And it is not too late to create a big game pledge of your own. In fact, you can do so here.

Enjoy the game!  

Questions or comments on the content? Email us at  vik@pledge4good.com or  lenny@pledge4good.com or add a comment below.

pledge4good co-founder Lenny Fishman recently moderated a panel on social online fundraising at the Wharton BizTech Conference with Brian Fujito (CTO, Razoo), Patty Huber (Director, GroupOn’s G-Team), Missy Sherburne (Chief Partnership Officer, DonorsChoose), and Alec Rieger (Director of Communications & Transparency, Pencils of Promise). Although we were live tweeting—see @pledge4good—during the conference, we are providing some brief highlights here on our blog.  As the panel covered multiple topics, there is no common theme to this post other than that it highlights online fundraising strategies of two successful nonprofits—Pencils and DonorsChoose—and two highly successful fundraising platforms—Razoo and GroupOn’s GTeam deals. 

• Donor activation: Brian Fujito noted that Razoo has seen significant growth in new donors on their platform by leveraging content such as “giving days” and by offering “story telling” profiles for nonprofits to explain exactly where donations are going
• Donor demographics through social fundraising: 75% of donors on DonorsChoose are women and over 50% of these women have children. 80% of donors on Razoo during recent “giving days” were women, the majority over the age of 40
• Interplay between corporate and individual donations: Missy Sherburne noted that corporate grants significantly influence individual donor decisions, as the validation a nonprofit receives from the corporate halo influences employees of that corporation and other individuals to give. Alec Rieger noted that he views Charity Water’s fundraising effectiveness as arising out of Charity Water communicating to donors that 100% of donations go to water-related causes since all Charity Water administrative expenses are funded by corporate donors
• Moderating content social fundraising portals: Pencils has not found the need to moderate content on social networks or through social giving sites, though DonorsChoose and GroupOn did note that they moderate community content
• e-commerce merchants integrating philanthropy into checkout: Patty Huber noted that 25% of those that bought a GTeam deal never purchased from GroupOn previously, implying that integrating philanthropy into e-commerce can actually enhance revenues and profit (!)

Questions or comments on the content? Email us at  vik@pledge4good.com or  lenny@pledge4good.com or add a comment below.

The “influentials” model—that a select minority of people can disproportionately influence others to adopt behaviors or purchase products— has increasingly come into focus following the publication of Malcolm Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point and Edward Keller and Jonathan Berry’s The Influentials. However, does the “influentials” model imply that your nonprofit should abandon broad-based marketing efforts and instead examine your donor rolls, volunteers, and management to identify “influentials?” Not necessarily.

Professor Jonah Berger of the Wharton School, notes that the “influentials” model is dependent on four assumptions: 1) “We can identify people who 2) will influence more people to buy our product than a randomly selected person and 3) get them to talk about our product and 4) it is cost-effective to target them.”

Citing significant research, Berger argues that these assumptions have significant weaknesses. In terms of identifying “influentials,” (#1) Berger cites a few major problems, including: (A) people typically overestimate their own influence; and (B) an individual’s influence is situation specific and can change form topic to topic.

With regards to whether certain people have a disproportionate influence (#2), Berger cites several counterpoints. In a May 2010 eMarketer survey, 55% of individuals stated the recommendations of friends or similar people most influenced purchase decisions compared to 51% for experts and 26% for influential bloggers. Berger also cites a study that found that Facebook likes stayed nearly constant for a post (around 40), even as friend size increased from 400 to 1,500.

Professor Berger notes that even if the first two assumptions of the model hold, identifying and then compelling an “influential” to talk about one’s product (#4) is likely to be prohibitively expensive. For example, brands pay Kim Kardashian $10,000 per “sponsored” tweet.

Professor Berger’s conclusion is to “Ignore ‘influentials.’ Craft contagious content.” For the nonprofit sector this suggests that, while certain individuals might generate disproportionate levels of word of mouth awareness and donations for your organization, the difficulty of cost-effectively identifying and then quantifying these individuals’ impact outweigh the benefits. That is, your organization should focus on a broad-based marketing effort whose messages are both sticky and contagious, and which naturally encourage broad dissemination without relying upon the “messenger’s” influence.

In a future blog post, we will discuss how to craft sticky and contagious messages that encourage word of mouth.

Questions or comments on the content? Email us at  vik@pledge4good.com or  lenny@pledge4good.com or add a comment below.

We recently came across a slide from a lecture by Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader regarding the value of word of mouth marketing to companies.  Professor Fader notes the following studies:

• Villanueva, Yoo, and Hanssens, 2008: “Customers acquired through Word of Mouth (“WOM”) have two times the lifetime value of customers acquired through traditional marketing… [and that these] Customers … bring in twice as many new customers.”
• Villanueva, Yoo, and Hanssens, 2008, and Trusov, Bucklin, and Pauwels, 2009: “Referrals through word of mouth have longer carryover and higher response elasticities.[1]”
• Schmitt, Skiera, and Van den Bulte, 2011: “The average value of a referred customer [in the banking industry] is at least 58 Euros higher than [that] of a non-referred customer with comparable demographics. For the bank, this represents a return on the reward[2] given to the referrer of nearly 130%.”

Although the studies Professor Fader cites evaluate the impact of word of mouth at for-profit entities, these studies’ findings are pertinent to nonprofit organizations. The empirical research provides a compelling argument that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media represent yet to be fully tapped tools with the ability to generate valuable word of mouth for an organization’s work and cause. In turn, this word of mouth can then be leveraged to improve future fundraising efforts.

[1] Longer carryover means that the customer stays with the firm for a longer period of time. Higher response elasticity means that the customer is much more receptive to marketing messages from the firm with regards to purchasing the product.

[2] Return on reward means the return generated on the bank per referral bonus or referral gift given to the referring customer.

In our last blog post, we promised to continue our discussion of quantifying the value of a Facebook Fan, focusing on how your organization can calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a fan taking into account maintenance of your Facebook Fan page and acquiring new Fans. However, we will postpone that analysis so that we might discuss an interesting article we controversy we recently came across on the Chronicle of Philanthropy website: Charities to Lose Postage Subsidy.

The article highlights the renewed attention being brought to legislation introduced by politicians, including Senator John McCain (AZ, Republican), that call for the elimination of the postage discounts nonprofits receive for U.S. Mail. 

To many, the discounts this legislation is going after is quite significant, as Nonprofit Standard Mail rates on Basic, Carrier Route letters are 28% lower than comparable undiscounted rates.[1] Therefore, if such contemplated legislation is passed, many nonprofits argue that they can expect to see an immediate and significant impact to their development expenses via direct mail.  However, as direct mail accounts for 80% of nonprofit donations, $1.7 billion increase in postage costs for nonprofits only marginally increase overall fundraising costs for a nonprofit: less than 0.75% of total dollars raised.[2]   

However, postage IS NOT the root cause of the high cost of direct mail, but rather it is the costs of the mailings themselves. In The Complete Guide to Fund-Raising Management, Stanley Weinstein estimates that nonprofits spend $0.30-$0.42 per dollar raised on direct mail renewal, and $0.16-$0.37 per dollar donated on overall fundraising expenses.[3]   This low fundraising efficiency is entirely the results of the high cost of paper, packaging, and ink going into the mailers themselves, the staff time required for preparation, and the extremely low response rates: 3.42% for house lists and 1.38% for prospect lists in 2010, per the Direct Marketing Association.[4]

As such, nonprofits should focus on looking to eliminate expensive mailers or substitute alternative fundraising methodologies altogether.  While our expertise is in technology and this is not a discussion of technology strategies per se, we highlight the postage controversy because it truly underscores one of the most important advantages of online fundraising: lower cost per acquiring new donations. Further, with most online fundraising sites charging fees at half the level of the lower end of Weinstein’s estimates for direct mail renewal, the rationale to transition from traditional, offline fundraising methods to online fundraising tools only becomes stronger.

Questions or comments on the content? Email us at  vik@pledge4good.com or   lenny@pledge4good.com or add a comment below.

[1] Rates refer to Letters weighing 3.3 oz. or less. http://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#1092607

[2] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/17/nonprofits-oppose-measure-wiping-out-their-mail-discounts/

[3] Weinstein, Stanley. The Complete Guide to Fundraising. Wiley, 2009: New York. 819-826.

[4] http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispannouncements?article=1451

On the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s excellent LinkedIn Group, a user recently asked: “How would you suggest a new non-profit increase traffic to their Facebook page to increase people who “Like’ What they are about?”  With over 20 responses in only a few days, this topic certainly is popular.  However, none of these responses questioned a crucial premise of the question: whether acquiring Facebook Fan offers any true value or return on investment to a nonprofit.

With over 20 responses in only a few days, this topic certainly is popular.  However, none of these responses questioned a crucial premise of the question: whether acquiring Facebook Fan offers any true value or return on investment to a nonprofit.

Nonprofits have certainly focused considerable effort in acquiring Facebook Fans.  In fact, the 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study found that in 2010 the average nonprofit had 15,053 Facebook Fans (though this figure is clearly distorted by large outliers), with this figure growing 14% monthly.  However, the study also found that on average every bucket of 1,000 Fans generated only 1.7 comments or “likes” to posts the nonprofit made on its Facebook page.[1]

  So, what is the value of Fans? And, what should a nonprofit consider paying to acquire new Fans? As it turns out, recent literature from media consultancies is either divided on the answers to these questions, often measuring the return on investment of acquiring a Fan differently. For example:

• Using data for retail websites, Experian Hitwise estimates that a Facebook Fan generates 20 additional page views to a brand’s own website during the year following a users liking the brand’s Facebook page[2]
• Virtue, a social media specialist, estimates that a Facebook like is equivalent to $3.60 in free advertising impressions for a brand[3]
• Synapse, another media specialist, estimates that a Facebook like is worth $136.38 on average for a brand. This value assumes that a Fan spends on average $71.84 more than a non-Fan over a two year period, and also that a Fan is both more likely than a non-Fan to remain loyal to the brand and also to recommend the brand to friends and family[4]
• A Millward Brown survey of 24 brands and 3,600 brand Fans found that while 85% of brands viewed a Fan as increasing brand loyalty, only 45% and 15% of brands saw Fans as increasing long and short-term spending on the brand, respectively[5]

So, what do these hugely divergent studies, primarily focused on the retail and consumer sectors, imply for nonprofits? The value of a Facebook Fan is entirely specific to your particular organization. Hence, your organization should carefully measure the exact return on investment (ROI) of all organization investment into maintaining your Facebook page and acquiring new Fans. 

 In our next blog post, we will discuss ways in which your organization can calculate this ROI and better understand the value of acquiring Facebook fans.

Questions or comments on the content? Email me at  vik@pledge4good.comor add a comment below. 

[1] http://www.e-benchmarksstudy.com/

[2] http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2011/06/1_facebook_fan_20_additional_v.html

[3] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/value-fan-social-media-360-102063

[4] http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/question-a-facebook-fan-worth-marketers/144437/

[5] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/true-value-facebook-126137

Without question, the “Donate Now” button is the most important item on your website as it drives prospective donors to your donation page. Today we offer some tips on the design and placement for the “Donate Now” button on your website.  While several tips may seem self-evident, we wanted to highlight the full lists as many organizations employ alternative approaches that may not prove as effective:

1. Amazon and other top e-tailers always put their shopping cart checkout button at the top right of all pages. As web users have grown accustomed to this norm, nonprofits should adhere to this standard and also place the “Donate” button at the top of the screen. For the avoidance of doubt, place the button above other items in the navigation bar (i.e. bar including “About Us,” “Programs,” “Contact,” etc.).
2. Place the “Donate Now” button on every page of your site (with the sole exception of the actual donation page itself since this could cause confusion) 
3.  Also place the “Donate Now” button on your blog, as part of the signature in your organization’s emails, and in your newsletters
4. Make the “Donate” button LARGE
5. Shade the button with a color that provides high contrast to the rest of your page so that a prospective donor’s eyes are naturally drawn to the button.  As a frame of reference, Google shades the first few search results – these are paid search results – in yellow in order to drive traffic to its paying customers’ websites.
6. Test the look of the “Donate Now” button across browsers and mobile phones.  Remember that all browsers render pages differently, so test the look in Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, as well as on the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, at a minimum.
7. Periodically check that the link to your organization’s donation page works. This is especially important if your organization hosts its donation page on a third-party website because third-parties may occasionally modify their website, potentially rendering the link your organization uses as stale. 

Questions or comments on the content? Email me at  vik@pledge4good.comor add a comment below. 

We have spent the prior two posts discussing how to keep your donation form as simple and streamlined as possible to follow the best practices of the best e-commerce players and lower checkout abandonment rates.  This post continues the series by discussing how your payment acceptance technology, and even how you display your payment acceptance technology to your prospective donors, can have a significant influence on your donation rates.   

Do: Consider Using Trusted Third Party Processors to Collect Donations

Amazon is the dominant player in the e-commerce ecosystem because consumers do not deem their personal and credit card information at risk of loss or corruption when stored with Amazon.  While most nonprofit and for-profit entities alike may never achieve the level of trust Amazon has, nonprofits do have the option to make donors feel more secure by leveraging Amazon’s reputation and the payment services it offers, such as Amazon Payments.  Similar alternatives include EBay’s PayPal, Google Checkout, and nonprofit-focused payment [processor] Network for Good.  pledge4good recommendation: The use of these well-known payment providers will help your organization overcome trust barriers between you and your donors.

Don’t: Send Your Donors to a Third Party Page to Collect Donations

Notwithstanding the donor-trust benefits of well-know third-party payment acceptance solutions, be careful how your organization implements solutions that direct your members to a third party’s website to collect donation information. A number of nonprofits whose website we have visited utilize these third party providers in such a way that the organization’s donor is redirected to a webpage branded by the third party provider and without any clear, visible association to the nonprofit. Redirecting donors in this way can confuse and / or frustrate donors—often because the donors are asked to create or provide credentials for an account with the third party payment processor. To be sure, this process goes against the rule of donation form simplicity. Almost certainly, such a redirection will lead to extremely high donation form abandonment. pledge4good recommendation: Only implement third party payment solutions if they provide a widget that directly is placed on a donation page hosted on your webpage or if they provide an offsite donation page that has a customized design that exactly matches that for your own website. 

Do: Display Credibility Indicators

Another way to build trust with your donors is to display credibility indicators such as a link to your privacy policy, and certificates from McAfee Secure, TrustE, and your site’s SSL provider (provider of data encryption technology such as Verisign) near the “Process Donation” button.  The ecommerce software provider Fortune3 found that 22% of consumer’s abandoned shopping carts due to trust issues with the retailer whose site they were visiting.[1]  pledge4good recommendation: Providing evidence to donors that your site is validated by trusted third parties will help lower donation form abandonment for your organization.

Questions or comments on the content? Email me at  vik@pledge4good.comor add a comment below. 

[1] “How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment.” Fortune 3. http://www.fortune3.com/blog/2011/07/how-to-reduce-shopping-cart-abandonment/#more-1366

            As noted in the first post in this series, a majority of shopping carts are abandoned at online retailers before the checkout process is complete.  In continuing our series of blog posts, we discuss how the best e-tailers such as Amazon have devised a number of techniques to significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment rates, and their pertinence to the shopping carts of nonprofits: their donation forms.  

Do: Keep Your Donation Form as One Page

            Along the lines of keeping your donation form simple,one page checkout forms for e-commerce providers lead to significantly lower abandonment rates (or conversely, higher conversion rates). As an example, the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store saw conversion rates that were 21.8% higher for a single-page checkout form versus a two-page checkout form. [1]

            While a number of e-tailers do spread their checkout process over multiple pages, this is principally because the retailer is looking to cross-sell or upsell additional products, hoping that the increase in revenue offsets the lower conversion rate from multiple pages. Since cross-selling and upselling do not apply to nonprofits, P4G recommends that you keep your donation form to one page since a donation form that spans multiple webpages will lead to higher donation form abandonment for an organization.    

Don’t: Put Unnecessary or Distracting Content (Especially Links) on the Donation Form 

            Go to Amazon.com. Add a product to your shopping cart, and then click on the “Proceed to Checkout.” Notice a change in the page? The upper and lower navigation headers, containing a link to a variety of pages on Amazon.com, have disappeared!

   Why? Because Amazon knows that once you have a user in the process of checking out, you do not distract them from completing the transaction by providing links to outside pages (whether on or external to your site) on the screen. Far too many nonprofit organizations have donation forms where their standard site headers and footers are still visible, providing users with the option to abandon the donation and click elsewhere. Worse yet, sometimes a donor clicks the outside links accidentally and leaves your donation form all together. P4G’s recommendation: Remove all unnecessary content and links from your donation page and ensure that the donor’s attention is solely focused on completing the donation. 

Questions or comments on the content? Email me at  vik@pledge4good.comor add a comment below.

[1] “A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkout.” GetElastic. http://www.getelastic.com/single-vs-two-page-checkout/