I just returned from a trip to Australia, and it’s interesting to me how different countries bring their own unique cultural context to online fundraising. There are also some important lessons to learn that we can import back into our North American fundraising mix.
Blackbaud announced the launch of The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving, an online fundraising index that reports revenue trends of 1,787 nonprofit organizations, representing $399 million in 12-month online revenue on a monthly basis. The index reports that online revenue increased by 23 percent for the three months ending May 2010 as compared to the same period in 2009.
The fundraising technology "industry" is alive and well in 2010. Many of the most successful business enterprises that profit from the fundraising sector are in essence technology companies.
Fairsharemusic joins the likes of Amazon MP3, iTunes and PlayDigital in the crowded music download space, but aims to differentiate itself by donating money to charity every time a song or album is purchased from the site.
The site boasts a catalogue of more than 8.5 million tracks, with individual song prices starting from 79p, the same as many other download services. Half of the net profit from every MP3 downloaded is donated to charity, such as Great Ormond Street Hospital, the British Heart Foundation, Friends of the Earth, and the Teenage Cancer Trust.
British nonprofit groups are hoping that a new video-sharing Web site called See the Difference, which went live this week, will meets it goal to raise $700-million for charity by 2015.
Using the site, donors can watch videos and contribute to projects depicted on film by more than 100 registered charities in the UK. In return, they receive feedback from the organization by e-mail. The site encourages donors to send the videos to their friends and to post them on blogs and social-networking sites.
As a young analyst at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard Bornstein witnessed the massive philanthropic impact of the Microsoft founder and his wife. Bornstein realized his best chance to have a remotely similar impact would be to sharpen the philanthropy of others.
The idea of using the Internet to help people not necessarily give more, but give better, was a goal that Bornstein developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Business with a fellow student — now business partner — Deyan Vitanov. Given the roughly $300 billion in annual charitable giving in the U.S., "you'd only have to change 1 percent to replicate, in theory, the impact of the entire Gates foundation," said Bornstein.
The Internet has transformed whole sectors of society, but it has had a more limited impact on the world of philanthropy. A recent survey by the Chronicle of Philanthropy found that among the top 400 U.S. charitable groups in 2009, the median share of giving that came through the Internet was just 1 percent. Now, two Silicon Valley websites, Bornstein's myphilanthropedia.org, and allthis.com, have ambitious plans to change that.
Austin, Texas (June 16, 2010) —
Convio (Nasdaq: CNVO), a leading provider of on-demand constituent engagement solutions that enable nonprofit organizations to more effectively raise funds, and PayPal today announced an agreement that will enable nonprofits to quickly and easily implement PayPal to collect donations online.
PayPal will be a part of Convio’s integrated services, making it simple for Convio’s 1,300 nonprofit clients to add PayPal to their site and collect donations. PayPal’s nonprofit services include comprehensive reporting tools and discounted rates for 501(c)(3) charities.
While direct mail is still king in bringing in funds, online fundraising remains an ever-growing channel that is vital to the future of every organization. Studying the trends and understanding where opportunities lie going forward as today’s online generation reaches prime giving age are musts. To that end, nonprofit technology provider Convio recently released its Online Nonprofit Benchmark Study.
1. CHANGE TO MAKE:
Get online if you aren't already
It's 2010, and I hope you're online. If you're with the times, you're collecting donations on your website with a well-crafted, compelling and consistently branded donation page. You are using an e-mail campaign tool, not Outlook, to communicate with your community of supporters. You have a social-media strategy and are committing the time you need to achieve your clearly articulated, measurable goals. You continually assess how all of these efforts are performing against your targets. Your online and offline outreach is seamlessly integrated.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - For actor Edward Norton, philanthropy and activism are practically in his genes so launching a website on Wednesday to encourage charity fundraising seemed natural to him.
Norton, 40, joined forces with a couple of Internet savvy friends to create Crowdrise (www.crowdrise.com) that gives people a free way to create their own fundraising pages to share through social networks, winning points and prizes along the way.
