E-Philanthropy

Here are six more online fundraising communications takeaways gleaned from the 2010 elections.

Based on the findings from The Online Giving Study, Network for Good offers four tips to maximize online fundraising.

As you plot your fundraising strategy for 2011, it will become important to give some thought to how and if mobile giving might fit into your overall planning.

Ever wonder how you can ramp up your charitable-giving efforts? Monica Oxenreiter, a 16-year-old in Pittsburgh, might provide some inspiration. People who give $100 to the nonprofit Oxenreiter started can “buy” their ZIP code — and, on a bright-yellow map on her website that details donations nationwide, that ZIP code turns lime-green.

That’s the ingenious idea behind Oxenreiter’s Zip the Cure, a nonprofit she created to generate contributions for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, or JDRF. See ZiptheCure.com.

Charities raise far more money from their own Web sites—or those that prominently bear their name—than they do from social networks like Facebook or from other sites that channel donations to many causes, according to a new study of donor behavior over the past seven years. The study was conducted by Network for Good, a Bethesda, Md., organization that will send donations to any charity in the United States.  Its site—and other online portals—received 66.7 percent less in donations than sites charities created to seek donations on their own.

Chris Ulmer turned his passion for running into a fundraising drive for Teach for America, asking supporters to donate money for each one of the 250 miles he plans to run from Penn State to his home in Willow Grove, Pa., upon graduation.

On Nov. 16, 2010, GiveMN shattered our goal of 40,000 donors in 24 hours by engaging 42,596 unique donors who donated to their favorite nonprofits using the GiveMN.org platform on Give to the Max Day. All told, Minnesota nonprofits collectively raised $10,041,021 in one incredible day.

Since our outreach efforts focused on providing nonprofits with social media resources, email templates and content such as a video PSA for use on their homepages, it would seem those efforts paid off when it came to driving traffic.

The Association of Fundraising Professionals unveiled its new wise giving website, Change the World With a Giving-and Wise-Heart (http://www.afpnet.org/GivingHeart) designed to help donors think proactively about philanthropy and how they want to improve their communities through giving and volunteering.

The website contains a variety of information on how donors can make smart choices in their philanthropy. Donors can learn about different ways they can support charities and how to spot legitimate organizations.

United States Artists, a nonprofit group founded by foundations and wealthy art donors to broaden support for working artists, will unveil a new Web site on Tuesday that solicits small donations from regular people to help underwrite specific artworks.

Part social network, part glossy brochure, part fund-raising mechanism, the site seeks to democratize arts patronage as government support for the arts continues to decline and private sources of financing also shrink.

The Online Giving Study: A Call to Reinvent Donor Relationships, from Network for Good and TrueSense Marketing and sponsored by AOL, reveals important insights about digital philanthropy: People seem to give more when the online experience is intimate and emotionally coherent, and they also give online for reasons of convenience, especially at the end of the year and during large-scale disasters.