Right now, Facebook fundraisers are less than 2% of online giving per M+R Benchmarks; online giving is 7.5% of total giving per Steve MacLaughlin of Blackbaud.

Given this, why focus on Facebook?

Because unlike many forms of giving, this one is growing.  And it’s growing in the right ways, helping generate leads for monthly giving and bringing new people into philanthropy.  There are still pitfalls, but these tools are well worth a look.

Getting leads for sustaining giving from Facebook.  An Agitator from Down Under wrote in after Monday’s post about where to find monthly donors to ask about phone conversion after a lead generation campaign.  She said charities in Australia were using this successfully – did we do that in the United States?

Yes, although not probably to the extent we could or should.  We’ve seen with clients in the UK and US that not only can leads be generated cost-effectively (e.g., see our anonymized American Hangnail Society example), but they can be converted to monthly giving at a respectable rate.  While this is a smaller portion of monthly giving (about 10% of conversions are done on the phone and conversions are about one-third of all new monthly donors), it is a tactic that can be used by big and small organizations alike.

That’s why we’re offering a free webinar on September 18^th about using Facebook advertising testing and lead generation on September 18^th.  You might also be interested in a free white paper talking about this new form of acquisition.

Breaking Facebook data out of the walled garden.  I’ve talked about the dangers of using platforms where you don’t get donor data.  Extensively.  And frequently.

What if you could get data out?  Part of this is my push for lead generation above – you get the data of the leads you generate.  But there are some ways to extend your culture of philanthropy into the Forbidden Palace of Facebook.

No Kid Hungry reported on their efforts at the May Nonprofit Alliance Pivot and Prevail conference.  They were only getting contact information from 2.5% of Facebook fundraisers.  At first, they used their internal team to manually message new fundraisers, thanking them and asking for contact info.  Alas, this messaging landed them in Facebook jail and the job was overwhelming.

They then tried a social media firm to manage the process.  It increased their contact info receipt up to almost 5%, but had no impact on revenue and carried with it a high cost per contact.  They are currently testing GoodUnited and Messenger automation.  This has brought their cost-to-acquire contact info down to $2.  They are able to express gratitude to all fundraisers and build a Messenger list for future contact.  Time will tell if this increases average value, but this is a promising way of building some of our normal cultivation process into the Facebook cultivation tundra.

One other interesting point: 96% of the people for whom they have gotten contact info were not already on their file.  That makes that this effort is bringing new people into giving.  I have been and, assuming no major course corrections, will likely continue to be hard on Facebook, but that’s a pretty neat accomplishment.

Facebook’s optimization for donations: suboptimal?  For those working to go with a straight donation acquisition route with Facebook (instead of or in addition to lead generation), Facebook has an option to optimize for a Donation conversion event.  But before you try it, check out this case study from NextAfter and Heritage Foundation. They tried the same ad with the same audience.  The only difference was that one was optimized for “Purchase”; the other was optimized for “Donation.”

Using the “Donation” optimization decreased results by 91%.

Let’s pause for a moment for a thought experiment.  What would you have to do to reduce your ads’ effectiveness by 91% if you were trying to do so?  Bear in mind that Facebook would likely ban any ads where you swore at or insulted the people seeing the ad.

My point is I’d think you’d have to try pretty hard to reduce results by 91%.  And yet that’s what happened with Facebook’s “optimization.”  Caveat emptor, because the venditor is apparently not caveating.

From Facebook…  This one is just news with little nonprofit content, so feel free to stop here if that’s not of interest…

Instagram and WhatsApp are rebranded as “Instagram from Facebook” and “WhatsApp from Facebook.”  This is interesting because (allegedly) Facebook’s internal marketing studies find that both brands suffer when they are explicitly tied to the mother ship.  As the WSJ reports:

“The effect wasn’t subtle: When Instagram users were told of Facebook’s ownership of Instagram and asked their opinion of Instagram, they rated the platform lower than when Instagram’s connection with Facebook wasn’t made, the person said.”

There have been a couple reasons floated for the change.  One advanced in the WSJ article is that Facebook is trying to help its image by associating itself with its more popular, less democracy-subvert-y brands.

The other is that Facebook is under investigation for potential antitrust violations.  One of Facebook’s logical arguments against a break-up would be that Instagram and WhatsApp are integral to their core service offerings.  Since that’s a hard argument to make when many users don’t know they are using a Facebook platform, the renaming could be arming against that potential threat.

What are your thoughts?  Are you using Facebook in interesting ways?

Nick

P.S. Please be sure to let your friends know about this post on Twitter and LinkedIn!