This week the charitable world saw a record-breaking #GivingTuesday, wherein its 6th year the worldwide giving day hit a record of $177M donations to charities across 98 countries, according to the latest numbers on givingtuesday.org.
But that wasn’t the only big news to drop on Tuesday this week…
One Day. Two Major Announcements
On this momentous day, Facebook and Blackbaud announced that the companies have teamed up to integrate Facebook’s online fundraising capabilities with Blackbaud TeamRaiser, a peer-to-peer online fundraising platform. Several of today’s leading multi-affiliate organizations (including JDRF, National MS Society, and Susan G. Komen) use TeamRaiser to power their event and social peer fundraising programs. Facebook is opening up its Facebook Fundraiser API and some of these organizations are the first to pilot this integration between an online fundraising platform and Facebook’s fundraising tools.
Additionally, in true drop the mic fashion, Facebook also announced that it is going to drop the 5% fee associated on its fundraising platform, and match up to $50M each year to charities fundraising through its fundraising application.
3 Ways Facebook’s Announcement will Impact Fundraising
Facebook’s announcements are a huge game changer for online fundraising and nonprofit technology. The obvious impact is that it provides a way for nonprofits to better connect the dots between their online fundraising platform and the world’s largest social network. But the more significant impact is that this announcement is evidence of a major shift for how we as humans want to experience community, social impact, and the meaningful difference we make through the nonprofit organizations we support.
How will these announcements impact your organization and fundraising landscape as a whole? Here are three predictions:
1. The floodgates will open up for online fundraising innovation.
Blackbaud was the first to work with Facebook to develop this integration and launch a pilot program with named charities above. But because the program is built on an open API this opens up the door for other online fundraising platforms and provides increased opportunity for nonprofits to harness the power of integration between their online fundraising engine and the community their donors have on Facebook. Eventually, online fundraising platforms of all different pricing ranges will be able to integrate with Facebook so that every nonprofit can plug into the power of the Facebook fundraising API, regardless of size or technology budget. The door just needed to be opened.
2. Online and peer-to-peer fundraising will improve to match today’s user experience expectations.
The incredible user-experiences of companies like Facebook and Amazon have impacted the expectations of today’s donors. Donors expect to receive the same kind of personal, relevant, and timely experience from the organizations they support. This announcement is another milestone for nonprofits looking to provide better donor experiences and truly reaching and engaging people where they already are every day of their lives (online, on social media). In addition to solving the mobile-first shift, we may actually see this to speed up the adoption of mobile wallets into online fundraising campaign efforts for peer-to-peer/social fundraising.
3. Nonprofits will now have access to better data to create more personal connections.
A final benefit of this announcement is that the nightmare of managing two systems (an online fundraising platform and trying to figure out who is crowdfunding on what sites…Facebook, Crowdrise, etc.) may actually have a chance at becoming easier. This will hopefully provide nonprofits with a better viewpoint into their donors (i.e. their behaviors, interests, etc.) and therefore create more tailored messages and more personal engagement strategies for the long haul. Better data for nonprofits provides an opportunity to engage donors with the right message at the right time, which ultimately leads to stronger and longer-lasting relationships.
Are You Keeping Up with Changing Landscape of Fundraising?
At Pursuant, we’re constantly keeping an eye on the changing trends and how our clients can leverage them to create deeper, more meaningful relationships with their donors. Facebook’s latest announcement is another example of how quickly the fundraising landscape is evolving and how our donors’ ability to create social impact becomes more integrated into their daily lives.
This is exciting for the industry and quite frankly some innovation that the sector has needed. Kudos to the two companies for their partnership on making this happen, and to my friends over at Blackbaud who have persevered and are seeing the fruits of their labor come to life.