What I learned about social fundraising in 2021
Sorry for the lack of posting in the past few weeks. I managed to get back from a trip to the US and get Covid at the same time. What a crazy end to the year! So to finish the year better, I thought I’d reflect on some things I’ve learned this year about social and digital fundraising in general. This is by no means a complete take - just what I’ve seen from my own point of view. Would love to know what you think and thanks for being an awesome part of my little community in 2021. See you in 2022!
Online fundraising is bigger than we all thought
In my post about PayPal I mentioned that they put through a whopping $17B in online donations in 2020. Add that to Facebook’s $2 billion, Blackbaud’s $3.2B and JustGiving’s $0.6 billion, you’re looking at nonprofit online fundraising being at least $30B (if you include all the other platforms). Probably a LOT more (think about what comes through Stripe alone for example)
Some reports suggest charitable giving is around $450B and if this is the case then online fundraising represents 15% of the total pot. This feels about right.
My thoughts are that charitable giving will exceed $1T by 2030 (the world needs a lot of help!) Let’s say by then online giving gets to 20%. That would mean online fundraising for nonprofits would be around a $200B a year. That’s a big deal.
Covid has really kicked on digital transformation. There has never been a more exciting time to be in online fundraising!
Social fundraising definition has matured and new staff are being hired
Terminology and lexicon matter. You can tell when a trend is in its early stages. People call it different things. I remember being a “new media fundraiser” and “head of interactive marketing” before it settled as “digital”.
When Facebook launched charitable giving tools and particularly the massive level of income generated via Birthday fundraisers it put “native” social fundraising on the map.
The confusion in terminology is that sometimes people think social fundraising means peer-to-peer fundraising. But stand alone peer-to-peer fundraising platforms aren’t social. They’re static. Without promotion they don’t raise anything. Whereas with social platforms people are already there and so they raise money without having to do anything.
I’ve noticed that social fundraising is now starting to be defined correctly as fundraising that happens natively on social platforms - separately to any old peer-to-peer fundraising.
This year we’ve also seen a lot of nonprofits start to hire specifically social fundraising roles, which is really exciting. Some of them are around Remote Challenges that happen on Facebook, some of them are specifically roles to help steward supporters fundraising on social platforms. This is a really healthy sign for the social fundraising space.
Social platforms continue to figure out that fundraising is great for their engagement
In 2021 we saw social platforms get in on the fundraising game. From Twitter launching Tips to Instagram feed fundraisers (ok this was really 2020 but it didn’t really get rolled out fully until this year) to more fundraising happening on TikTok.
You can now get a donation button on Linked In and I’ve seen a lot more YouTube fundraising videos.
So what is going on here? Why is this happening? The easiest way to think about it is that what these companies obsess about (generally speaking) is engagement. Keeping people engaged ON their platforms. Fundraising, it turns out, is a great way to do this. It also has the side benefit of being a VERY positive thing to do on social media at a time when social media companies are under attack about the negative impacts of what they do.
So my prediction is we will continue to see a lot more of this trend in 2022 and beyond.
Seeing social as just a way to get traffic to your website is so 2012 (not 2021)
Most nonprofits still see social channels as a way of getting traffic to their websites. This massively underplays the role of social in their engagement and fundraising strategy.
In 2021 we saw the whole “the iOS 14 issue” (or properly termed - Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency) - the result being that social platforms will try to keep every interaction “on platform” (I talk more about this in my post earlier this year “The Donor Experience Gap”)
2021 was a catalyst year for me, where nonprofits will have to start thinking less about driving traffic to their websites and more about fundraising where people are.
I found myself saying the following a lot in 2021:
Nonprofits have to meet their supporters where they are
Remote Challenges aren’t just for lockdowns (and they scale)
The very first Facebook Challenge was back in August 2018 - well before the pandemic. Since then we have seen Remote Challenges really scale. At my company GivePanel saw $226m raised on Facebook from just 300 charities in 2021 and the main reason for this is remote challenges run entirely on Facebook using Facebook Ads, Facebook Groups and Facebook Fundraising. Fitness challenges like walking, steps, running, cycling, press ups, squats etc worked especially well.
These challenges did super well during the lockdowns in 2020 and at the start of 2021. This gave some challenging comparisons - would the benchmarks ever look as good?!
The answer is that while we are not seeing the crazy, heady sums of 2020 and 2021 lockdowns the model is still producing phenomenal results with challenges regularly hitting over $500,000 and $1m totals.
Remote Challenges on Facebook don’t just work. They scale. We ask GivePanel customers who do remote challenges with us to rank how they compare with other fundraising events - the results were clear. They are the most scalable event fundraising strategy out there.
My contention is that it is still early days for remote challenges and we will see a lot of innovation in this space to support the incredible ROI at scale we are still seeing post lockdowns. In 2022 expect more challenges for different communities such as “gaming for good” challenges etc.
Brand still matters, big time
I’ve heard some people say this year that brand doesn’t matter anymore online. I couldn’t disagree more.
I literally see the impact of strong brand awareness and weak brand awareness all the time in ROI figures of fundraising campaigns. If we are working with a brand that is relatively unknown or difficult to understand quickly, we will downgrade their ROI expectations.
The main aspect of brand that matter is whether the mission can be understood easily from the name. For example. was great to see our client Clic Sargent change their name to Young Lives Vs Cancer this year. I can now understand what they do in 5 seconds in a Facebook Ad, where as before I couldn’t.
I suspect we will see more charities forced to invest in and clarify their brands so they can improve their online reach and success.
Nonprofits are starting to realise that it’s not worth sacrificing income and engagement on the altar of “having all the data”
It’s pretty ironic (don’t you think?) that many don’t like Facebook because it has so much data about everyone and yet not getting enough data about supporters is the #1 reason nonprofits give for not using Facebook fundraising more.
But this year I’ve spoken with many senior fundraisers at nonprofits understand that getting less data is not the end of the world if you get way more income and engagement.
I called this the social fundraising “data trade off”.
And here is the interesting thing - at GivePanel we’ve worked out how to radically reduce the impact of this trade off by:
increasing the amount of data you do get from social fundraising (see our 2021 year in review)
increasing the amount of income and engagement you get from social fundraising
Essentially we have bought the data trade off to a point where now any unbiased fundraiser can see that the trade off is worth it.
It’s ALL about the newsfeed
I’ve realised this year, more than any other year the power of the newsfeed (on any platform). Without content entering the newsfeed, nothing happens.
This is why stand-alone apps don’t raise a lot of money, why LinkedIn groups suck, why some social networks are better for fundraising than others.
It’s why Facebook Groups are so unique on the web - something I wrote about in detail in my last post.
If you want to have breakthrough in social fundraising you have to answer the question “how will X increase what people see in the newsfeed?”
I believe this - more than any other factor - is what makes great social fundraising really generate engagement and therefore income and ROI. It’s something we will continue to focus on at GivePanel and build tools and expertise around.
Great fundraising depends on great people
I see a growing trend amongst our charity customers at GivePanel. Those that come onboard with us and follow our methods to radically grow their Facebook fundraising have one thing in common. Great people. People that “get it”. Sometimes it’s enough to have just one kick-ass person.
When failures happen (which of course they do) it is often down to not having the right people. It’s hardly ever the technology.
Artificial intelligence is not very intelligent yet! Obviously in specific cases AI can do great, amazing things but general purpose AI (technology IQ if you like) is still ways off. Most technology and tools still need smart (human) operators. Automation does not result in great fundraising. Great people result in great fundraising.
I’ve never been more convinced of this than in 2021!
That’s it from me in 2021. My goal with this newsletter for 2022 is to get to 1,000 subscribers so please share this around to folks in the sector that may interested. I’d really appreciate it.
Have a blessed New Year folks!