Earlier this week we took a look at the non-profit spaces on Facebook and MySpace, as part of our non-profits week. The conclusion was that both were good resources, but in terms of raising money -- they weren't quite succeeding. Which leads us to ask: is this common on the Web? Are non-profits utilizing the Web well?
You only need to read Beth Kanter's guest post today on Read/WriteWeb to discover that there is a lot of great work happening in the non-profit and charity sector, using Web tools. Beth provides an inside look at non-profit Web activity from an experienced practitioner. For example, Beth recently went to Cambodia to take part in a blogging summit there. Beth herself admitted that there is still a lot of work to be done making the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. But her discussion about blogging in Cambodia shows that there is great progress being made.
To prove there is no shortage of resources, this week Josh Catone published an excellent Non-Profits Tool Kit, a list of web-based tools to make running and organizing a non-profit or charity organization easier.
Some of the success stories on the Web include Firstgiving, which has raised $50 Million and counting for charity, and Kiva.org, which has just crossed $11 Million in microloans to developing nations.
In the comments to our opening post this week, Allan Benamer pointed out that "the three biggest success stories so far [in Web-based non-profits] are modestneeds.org, globalgiving.com and Kiva". He noted that "the biggest nonprofit social network is Project Agape's Causes with 4,000,000 users and counting." Also check out Allan's post Philanthropy and Nonprofit Top 25 List - September 2007, which lists cancer.org, aspca.org and aclu.org as the top 3 nonprofits online.
We may still be in the early stages of non-profits utilizing Web 2.0, but there are a lot of fantastic non-profit and/or charity websites with web 2.0 functionality - e.g. changing the present and Care2. Also there are lots of resources - e.g. check out NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, which supports nonprofits who are using tech and the Web to change the world. Others mentioned in our comments were Free For Today, idealist.org and NetSquared (which we've profiled before on R/WW). There are many more mentioned in the comments to our opening post.
Ben Rattray from the excellent Change.org emailed me this week with his thoughts on non-profits and the Web. He suggested that there haven't been any "home runs" yet. Ben wrote:
"I find the most helpful way to think of the space is to divide it in the following two groups:
1. organizations set up to be purely online platforms to help other organizations or causes raise money or recruit volunteers online, and
2. existing bricks-and-mortar organizations that are using the web as one (of many) ways to advance their mission.As you might suspect, most of the interesting activity using the social web has been by the first type of organization. The best two success stories are Kiva.org and DonorsChoose.org, both of which I’m sure you’ve heard much about. (Although it’s worthy of note that neither of these are actually that new – Kiva.org was founded in 2005 and DonorsChoose.org way back in 2000.)
There have been a few other marginal successes outside of these two (despite a lot of attempts), but the honest truth is that there haven’t been any real home-runs yet."
Given the list of sites above and Beth's guest post, do you agree with Ben that there haven't been any huge success stories yet? I'm sure we all agree that there's a lot of great work happening in this space, but how effective it is -- seems to be open to debate.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Non-Profits: Plenty of Web Resources, But How Much Success?.
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A recent series from the popular Read/WriteWeb blog provides a great overview of best practices and resources for nonprofits in using the web, including Facebook and MySpace. I couldn't find links to all of the articles listed in one place, Read More
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I was recently asked to suggest examples of "big online home runs" by environmental organizations. I couldn't think of any (and I work for one!). I've thought about it a lot this week, and now I'm not sure this question really matters.
I used to work for Internet-only companies, so of course we defined success by hitting online home runs. But in an environmental non-profit, we define success by laws passed (or prevented), lawsuits decided, or breeding pairs counted. Online communications are one of many tools to meet those goals. They might not be the most prominent tactic for any given problem. And that's okay, they're not the point.
I might argue that having a huge online-only success could even be a bad sign -- if something's really important, shouldn't an organization be intelligently coordinating the use of ALL the tools available to it?
It's really *hard* to integrate a new communications channel into a fairly traditional, decentralized organization (as so many nonprofits are). The bigger accomplishment would seem to me to NOT have online-only successes, but to have the online teams smoothly functioning in concert with their lobbying, press, direct mail and scientific counterparts, as just one more member of the team.
Posted by: Kira | September 14, 2007 3:44 PMWhen I reactivated the Committee to Protect Bloggers recently, I was determined to steer clear of any plans of any kind that would cost anything. (Broke it almost instantly, but came to my senses shortly thereafter.) My few attempts at fundraising on the web have been titanic failures and mammoth wastes of time. No doubt a significant part of that is me. I may not be the greatest salesman in the world. Whatever the reason, it was clear the "products" I had for sale did not find their market. I thought of trying to figure out why but think I would have better luck at hand-calculating Pi. ("...4100135112...")
Posted by: Curt | September 14, 2007 4:30 PMThe Sharing Foundation had a great success with raising $100K from a fundraising widget (actually 50K from donors plus match from yahoo). But, what I didn't mention is that we also sent out our annual snail mail appeal and raised slightly more than that amount! So, I think given that nonprofit's donors represent different generations (digital natives and digital immigrants) that nonprofits can't afford to approach this as a social media yes or social media no strategy. It's about blending "traditional" fundraising strategies (both online and offline) with social media strategies. I think we'll be in this transition phase for probably another 15-20 years. It's also why nonprofits need to start laying the ground work.
And yes it does blend!
Posted by: Beth Kanter | September 14, 2007 6:02 PMhttp://fundraising20.wikispaces.com/
Hmmm... I think a home run has been hit but for whatever reason nonprofit techies aren't willing to admit it.
That home run was hit by Project Agape's Causes app. With 4 million users and counting, I think they're poised to do some heavy duty fundraising in the years to come. I'm sure people will come up with an easy retort of "hey, they haven't raised a significant amount of money yet." I would like to point that Causes has only been around since May 27th, they haven't even begun to seriously raise money yet.
Kiva is also on the verge of greatness with nearly 95,000 visitors this month. Check out http://siteanalytics.compete.com/changingthepresent.org+change.org+sixdegrees.org+globalgiving.com+kiva.org?metric=uv
for a quick graph of site statistics for Web 2.0 microcharities. You'll see Kiva's recent highlight on the Oprah show really boosted traffic during September.
Next home run opportunity? When LinkedIn opens up their API...
Posted by: Allan Benamer | September 14, 2007 8:13 PMPersonally I think they are not "selling their message" right.
We live in a world where people tend to believe that no one really does something for free, and people aways question the "non-profit" idea.
I've seen non-profit projects vanishing into tin air, because of the lack of interest from the community.
What the non-profits need is getting a star on their side. It is lame to have to use a name to reach a humanitarian purpose, but understanding human nature is the basis of conducting non-profit businesses...
Posted by: Sia | September 15, 2007 12:34 PMI think Kira was onto something when she indicated we may be asking the wrong question. According to the initial post here on September 9, "By non-profits, we mean charities, clubs and any 'organization whose primary objective is something other than the generation of profit" (Wikipedia's definition)."
And while fundraising by non-profits, per se, is not the generation of profits, I can't help but be squeamish when I hear a discussion about the successes of non-profits online that focuses almost entirely on fundraising. The web is much, much more than a fundraising tool. And for new non-profits that grow up in the web age, they have the potential to use the web to achieve magnificent things without ever needing to raise gobs of money to support a large infrastructure.
Let's face it, when you have a large infrastructure, you need to raise a lot of money. But if you are a lean organization using a lot of virtual tools, you need far less.
As Seth Godin has been known to say, why turn off 95% of your supporters asking them for money so you can give them a megaphone when you can just give 100% of your supporters a megaphone in the first place? The infrastructure for processing donations is often the same infrastructure used for facilitating activist emails to Congress or other policy makers (I am using DiA's Salsa now and sending a request for money is as easy as sending a request to write Congress... but I will get a far higher conversion rate and lower unsubscribe rate if I do not ask for money).
When recast in this manner, an online home run for a non-profit will never be graded based on fundraising alone. It is about using online tools to advance a cause.
And while it is true that Change.org and Care2.com are for-profit organizations, they are, themselves, online tools for non-profits. And while Change.org may not have had a homerun in fundraising yet, it is young and they will definitely come...as will homeruns unrelated to fundraising.
Care2, on the other hand, has been around for many years. Its nearly 8 million members are offered as an enormous resource for the non-profit community. Care2 continuously recruits new activists interested in making a difference and then provides opportunities (especially through thepetitionsite.com) for non-profits to recruit activists from among Care2 members.
To date, more than 3 million activists have been recruited from Care2 by non-profits. Leaving fundraising aside for the moment, my own experience tracking the performance of Care2 recruits is that they are about 4 times more likely to take an advocacy action I send out than the rest of my list. If they never give a dime, I would still consider the use of Care2 as an online tool for non-profits a homerun.
In this day of online activism, supporters have far more value to non-profits than as wallets. They are voices, they are organizers, they are protesters, they are recruiters, they are the life blood of non-profits.
Rather than focusing on hitting homeruns, we should be focusing on the fundamentals. In baseball, that means getting runners on base with walks, singles, and doubles. Homeruns in isolation knock in just one run. With lots of small hits and walks, runs come in steadily without hoemruns and the occasional homerun knocks in several runs at once.
In the world of non-profits, fundamentals mean moving supporters up the ladder of engagement. Get them to be activists first and save making some of them donors for later. The reverse will only seriously reduce the number of activists a non-profit can lean on without raising any extra money.
Posted by: Alan | September 16, 2007 6:38 AMAlan's point is a good one. For the CPB, before we started there was little attention paid to the human rights/free speech issues surrounding bloggers. Now, most free speech groups cover those issues. We got huge amounts of buy-in by bloggers, then by international media. We're hardly the sole cause of this growth of interest, but we had a tangible effect. That is a huge success as it was one of our main goals: Make this an issue that gets covered. By financial terms, we make the subprime loan collapse look like an Olympic win. By the terms of our goals, it's a success.
Posted by: Alan | September 16, 2007 7:04 AMI'd like to let you know about another fundraising search engine called Everyclick.com [disclosure: I’m the CEO!], which lets you search the web while benefiting the charity of your choice.
To answer your question about whether the great work in the online charitable space is having any significant effect, we give half of our revenues to the 170,000 charities registered with our site. I've just blogged about (http://pollyclicks.com/?p=9) a letter I received from Hope and Aid Direct, who sent two lorry loads of aid to Kosovo that were completely funded by Everyclick searchers.
What’s more, it's the smaller organisations who are especially grateful of Everyclick which gives them an online fundraising presence where they often don’t have their own resources. Likewise, Everyclick is empowering their supporters to support their hyper-local and personal cause while doing nothing more than searching the internet.
When it comes to effectiveness I think we need to remember that the web is not always about generating the biggest buzz, but directly helping micro-organisations who were previously disenfranchised.
Posted by: Polly Gowers | September 26, 2007 8:45 AM