Social Media

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.

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.

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.

For all of the opportunities that social media brings to fundraisers, the ability to establish and develop long-lasting supporter relationships has not been one of them — at least not yet.

If the 2008 election was about hope and change, the 2010 midterm campaign, judging by its direct mail, was mostly focused on anger. That's the most obvious takeaway based on a review of the fundraising appeals and campaign fliers that we've seen during the year. Whether directed at President Obama, or at congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, this emotional touchpoint dominated political mail like it hasn't since the days of Bill Clinton.

Blackbaud announced that Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation selected Blackbaud Friends Asking Friends® as the online and offline event management solution for its newest fundraising event, Road Hockey to Conquer Cancer. The Foundation, which supports Canada’s leading cancer research institution, Princess Margaret Hospital, is using Friends Asking Friends combined with an innovative social media campaign to expand its supporter base and raise money for cancer research.

Wednesday is World AIDS Day, and many celebrities will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.

It’s all part of the latest gambit by the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to raise money for her charity, Keep a Child Alive, which finances medical care and support services for children and families affected by H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa and India.

Here are two of the tools that I have found to be the best time-savers in my social media day-to-day listening, communication and analysis of online activity.

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, has spent the past year working on a new social network. This time, for good deeds. With Jumo, set to launch on Nov. 30, Hughes hopes users will bring the same enthusiasm they do to Facebook status updates and fan pages to issues such as women’s rights in South Asia, child trafficking in Eastern Europe, and the fight against Aids.