Making Event Participants More Successful With Social-Media Tools

YouTube vs. a picture
While the benefit of Facebook and Twitter comes largely from their ability to enable event participants to increase awareness and reach more prospective donors, YouTube is useful because it allows individuals to deliver more powerful messages and fundraising appeal. Allowing participants to upgrade their fundraising appeals from static text and a picture to a video provides a creative, more effective way for them to:

• Make an emotion-felt, personal ask;
• Better describe the impact and mission of the organization they are supporting;
• Clearly convey why a cause is important to them; and
• Do something “catchy” to increase the viral effect of their fundraising appeals.

From our research, we learned that YouTube users are more likely to balance their use of online and offline channels to conduct fundraising activities. Also, compared to participants utilizing other social-media platforms, YouTube users performed the strongest offline.