Facebook Fundraising and the power of a ”thank you”

Fundraising on Facebook is having a growth spurt. As of March 2021, more than 7 million people in the UK had donated to a charity through Facebook and its donate button, raising money in birthday fundraisers, virtual challenge events, and tribute fundraisers.  

 

But, with more than 50 million monthly active users in the UK (more than double that of Twitter), Facebook still presents a fairly unique challenge to charities – how do you channel those user numbers into support for your cause? 

 

One charity that has been tackling that challenge is Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity (GOSH Charity). In 2020, like many organisations, GOSH Charity found itself pivoting to virtual fundraising, including via its events.

 

Prior to this, its experience with Facebook Fundraising was mostly limited to organic birthday fundraisers and those celebrating anniversaries, but when everything moved online during the pandemic, GOSH Charity saw its income through Facebook increase.  

 

That’s when the children’s medical charity started running Facebook challenges. The charity decided to give it a go after speaking to lots of other nonprofits about their experiences running challenges on the platform, and utilising the knowledge from employees who had done the same in previous organisations. And it’s never looked back. 

 

“We did our first Facebook Fundraising challenge in March 2021 and it was a pilot for us,” explains Emily Martin, Senior Fundraising Executive at GOSH Charity. “We’ve been really pleased with the results and, from there, we’ve continued to take advantage of the momentum and use all the things we’ve learnt from that test.” 

 

The first challenge asked Facebook fundraisers to walk 62 miles in March – two miles a day for an entire month. All of GOSH Charity’s challenges are a month long and require a commitment to do a certain amount of something during that time.  

 

“It’s important to get that balance of it being achievable and being a stretch,” says Emily. “The beauty of these Facebook challenges is that it’s a challenge for everyone, not like a marathon which is a really big target. These challenges are for people who want to do a little something every day."

 

 

Stewarding supporters 

 

From this initial challenge, GOSH Charity has continued holding many hybrid and virtual challenge events, including the upcoming Running Off Christmas, where fundraisers commit to running 31 miles over the month of January.

 

The possibilities for such events are seemingly endless – but their success has certainly been assisted by data and, in particular, the help of social fundraising power tool, GivePanel. 

 

GOSH Charity started working with GivePanel towards the end of 2020 to help with the birthday fundraisers they were already benefitting from. GivePanel works behind the scenes of Facebook Fundraising to help charities build lasting relationships with their fundraisers through personalised thank you’s, customisable email journeys, and analytics that tell organisations if these measures are working. 

 

Thanks to GivePanel’s many capabilities and features, GOSH Charity has been able to enhance its challenges and can process the requisite data from Facebook more easily. 

 

Data from Facebook can be unwieldy – there’s a lot of it – and with compliance rules like GDPR to contend with, it can be hard to know what data you can use. “The data we get from Facebook isn’t necessarily very consumable and can be quite hard to interpret,” says Emily. “What GivePanel’s really good at is taking that report and formulating the data into something that we can use.” 

 

Using GivePanel, Emily and her team understand how many fundraisers they have, send special thank you’s directly to their Facebook pages, and collect marketing consent through registration forms.

 

“Before we used GivePanel, we weren’t really able to steward our fundraisers that were on Facebook because it was hard to find them and get data,” says Emily. “We would get these payments through Facebook but because of GDPR and things like that, a lot of the data we got through there we couldn’t do anything with. Through GivePanel, we can steward people much more easily.” 

 

This stewardship is, according to Emily, vital to keeping supporters committed. Each organic post on Facebook may only reach 5% of supporters – a post’s engagement rate on Facebook is lower than on Twitter, despite the difference in size of audience.

 

But GivePanel found that fundraisers raise a higher average amount (up to 149% more in some cases) when the charity they’re raising for engages with them – it’s just the process of doing so that needs to be improved. 

 

“With all of our products, not just Facebook fundraising, we know that stewardship is such an important piece,” Emily adds. “Even if it is just a really quick thank you, no matter how much that person has raised.”  

 

“Personally, that’s why I love community fundraising. It’s all about recognising people’s generosity.”

 

 

Valuing Facebook Fundraising 

 

Once the all-important Facebook data has graduated to GivePanel, it can then form a report that can be imported into a CRM system, allowing for further stewardship of fundraisers in the long-term.  

“GivePanel’s ability to make our data more useable means that we can use it in the future as well,” says Emily.

 

“We want lifetime value out of our fundraisers; we want to try to encourage them to continue to support GOSH Charity for as long as possible, whether that’s doing more events or becoming a regular giver.” 

 

Emily says that new features and changes have been brought in even since she started using GivePanel in March, including fundraiser matching. This automatically matches users directly to an event once registered, and saves charities a lot of time and effort than doing so manually. “They are always changing and trying to improve,” she adds. “I think they are listening to what we as fundraisers need and want.” 

 

And what fundraisers want is pretty simple – the time-saving aspect is great, but the most important advantage of Facebook Fundraising is the audiences it can reach. Emily acknowledges that initially the team at GOSH Charity didn’t realise how well it could work, but the results speak for themselves – not just in income, but brand awareness too.  

 

“It’s the same with every new fundraising channel - there’s always a bit of skepticism but the proof is in the pudding at the end of the day.” she says. “If you look at the ROI of Facebook, it does really well compared to some of our other products, because it’s digital so it lowers costs, and it’s all on one platform. We’ve seen great results, so I think everyone’s really excited about it now.” 

 

Ultimately, for GOSH Charity, fundraising on Facebook is about creating a community. “We’re speaking to a whole new audience, people from all over the country are taking part, and I think we’ve learnt that Facebook is such a valuable channel for that. I help moderate some of the Facebook groups where people share all these amazing stories, and you realise how many people have been directly impacted by the amazing work of Great Ormond Street Hospital.” 

 

Indeed, more than 600 children arrive at Great Ormond Street Hospital every day and with an increased focus on digital channels as fundraising channels in light of COVID-19, Facebook Fundraising and GivePanel have come into their own.  

 

Next time you’re updating your status or sharing a Minions meme, why not don your running shoes for charity too? Fundraising just got more fun.