Badge Brigade

In early December 2006, Network for Good launched the beta version of its Charity Badge fundraising widget, which allows individuals to raise awareness and money for a cause on their personal blogs, social-networking sites or Web pages.

Nonprofit organizations can create the badge — a vertical box that can be personalized with a photo, video and/or text describing the mission — and give it to constituents to put on their blogs or Web sites, or constituents can create their own. The badge includes a “donate” button; visible, real-time tracking of donations and the amount the badge has raised; and a “Create your own Charity Badge” button. When creation of the badge is completed, individuals are given the code that links to the badge, which then can be copied and pasted onto their blog or Web site, or into an e-mail.

Charity Badge is not the first widget of this kind. ChipIn was the first to offer an online community fundraising tool like this. Fundraising software providers GetActive, Kintera and Convio also have made their own badges available to clients.

Katya Andresen, vice president of marketing for Network for Good, an online charitable resource for donors, volunteers and charities that allows visitors to donate to the more than 1 million charities listed in its database, says the company’s creation of the badge was motivated by two things: 1) the general online trend toward user-generated content — YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, AIM pages, etc. — and 2) growth in the nonprofit sector of person-to-person fundraising, i.e., organizations using their strongest supporters to appeal to their friends and families to raise money.

To coincide with the launch of the Charity Badge program, Yahoo! offered a $50,000 matching gift to the Charity Badge that garnered the most donors by the end of 2006. Organizations involved included WorldChanging, Global Justice, the Anacostia Watershed Society and the Sharing Foundation.

Beth Kanter, board member for the Sharing Foundation, a grass-roots organization that helps educate youths in Cambodia, and author of the nonprofit resource Beth’s Blog, says the foundation — run solely in the United States by a volunteer board of roughly 25 people — kept its badge specific, focusing on its educational program.

Kanter created the badge and put it on her blog and the organization’s Web site; included it in e-mail blasts to constituents and urged them to pass the badge on to family and friends; pushed the badge via Internet phone service Skype; and sent it to her social-networking contacts on Flickr and LinkedIn, and to various social-networking communities of people interested in Cambodia. The foundation’s president and founder, Dr. Nancy Hendrie, a retired doctor, put announcements in her church bulletin and brought her laptop to rotary meetings to get donations. And board members took laptops to New Year’s Eve parties to net last-minute donations.

The Sharing Foundation’s Charity Badge received donations from 745 donors totalling $49,537 in just more than three weeks and was winner of Yahoo!’s matching grant.

The benefit of the badge, according to Kanter, is its ease of use and ability to be replicated and go viral. It allows individual donors to fundraise for causes that interest them and “become the messenger and the celebrity for the cause,” she adds.

Still, Kanter says organizations should make sure they have a strategy behind their badge, just as with any other fundraising campaign.

For more information, or to create a Charity Badge, visit
www.networkforgood.org.