Oxfam America

Social proof is the concept that a person will follow suit the thoughts and actions already validated by others. On the Internet, marketers have looked to social poof as a measurement of a product or company’s value of credibility. Simply put, people care about what others think and recommend. Nonprofit organizations can leverage social proof to attract new donors and recruit a fresh cohort of supporters.
 
Here are a few ways you can increase the visibility of your organization’s social proof to harness its power in garnering new support for your organization.

The easiest way to ensure that your website and blog are mobile-compatible is to embrace responsive design. Here is a selection of 11 exceptional, responsively designed nonprofit websites. Pay particular attention to Heifer International. Its new site is gorgeous. Hopefully, your nonprofit has a new website on your to-do list for 2014-15, and you can study and learn from the websites listed below.

We all know policy advocacy and campaigning can be a wild ride. But how do we know we’re really making a difference? At Oxfam, we are constantly asking ourselves: How do we measure our reach, access and influence? I asked myself if the tools we’ve built were as good as they could be or if there wa something else we should bring in. So I invited nine leading advocacy organizations to join in a comparative review of our approaches, a you-show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine methodology, to learn what we’re all doing in practice.

A new report delves into the Facebook activity of 37 large and medium-size nonprofits, including Earthjustice, Easter Seals and Oxfam America. The organizations in the study had a median of 31,473 Facebook fans, which represented 103 fan-page users for every 1,000 people on their e-mail lists.

The report, which is a follow-up to the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, was published by M+R Strategic Services, a fundraising consulting company, and the Nonprofit Technology Network.

Check out recent posts from Nancy Schwartz and Mashable.

Thanks to a record donation of $10,569,002 to the Ressler-Gertz Foundation, actress Jami Gertz and her husband, Anthony Ressler, top the list of the 30 Most Generous Celebrities compiled by The Giving Back Fund, a nonprofit organization that tracks philanthropic giving worldwide. Although not exactly a mainstream actress, Gertz’s deep-pocketed donation has much to do with the fact that Ressler is the co-founder of Ares Capital, a Los Angeles investment firm that controls more than $40 billion in assets, which has also recently expressed interest in buying the Dodgers.

As end-of-the year giving gets under way, some charities like the American Red Cross are skipping disaster pictures and switching to gentler imagery to urge people to forgo extraneous holiday gifts and, instead, give “something that means something.”

To deliver its message, the American Red Cross has a new animated character in its multimedia campaign highlighting the seasonal dilemma of whether to please family and friends with material gifts or to give them something that betters the lives of others.

Veteran fundraising consultant Tom Gaffny provided 10 timeless keys to fundraising success that he's crafted over the past two decades during his session, "The 10 Commandments: 10 Ageless, Irrefutable, Non-Negotiable Keys to Optimizing Your Fundraising Success," at the DMA Nonprofit Federation's 2011 New York Nonprofit Conference held last month.

Relief organizations often have their biggest fundraising successes during major humanitarian crises like the famine in east Africa.

The Center on Philanthropy estimates that American nonprofit aid groups received $1.9 billion after the Asian tsunami of 2004, and $1.4 billion in 2010 after the earthquake that decimated Haiti.

But aid groups say that raising money to address the famine has been more like that for the flooding in Pakistan last year, when dollars trickled into nonprofit coffers slowly and never came close to reaching the amounts donated to address other disasters.

Ten days after the devastating earthquake and tsunamis in Japan, American donors have contributed more than $136-million for relief efforts, according to a Chronicle tally. Nearly two-thirds of the total has been raised by one organization, the American Red Cross.

The rate of donations is slower than after last year’s earthquake in Haiti and after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Nine days after the disaster in Haiti, donors had contributed more than $355-million, and nine days after Katrina they had given more than $740-million.