Is there a better option that Facebook Groups for nonprofit fundraising events?
A deep dive into comparing group functionality across all platforms and why Facebook Groups are so perfect for fundraisers
Such is the wonder of the modern world I am writing this to you 10,061m up in the air going at 976km per hour (I love flight stats) on the way to San Fransisco. Palo Alto to be exact - the home of some amazing tech companies a lot of which feature in today’s post. The poetry!
Facebook is not one thing. (I’m not talking about the company - Meta - but the social network that is Facebook)
A good way to think about Facebook, the social network is as a set of products. Marketplace, newsfeed, watch, groups - even charitable giving tools. They are products. Each one has a Product Manager and a Product team behind it.
Groups is a key product for Facebook. One they have been really building out in the past few years and months. I think it’s a key reason many people have not left Facebook for good.
In this post I wanted dive deep into what makes Facebook Groups so uniquely powerful and why I think there isn’t really anything out there that compares.
For this post I am particularly thinking about Groups/Communities where thousands of people can be gathered for fundraising activities (ie in the way we do it for Facebook Challenges)
Let’s start with Chat Apps. Can they be used for Groups?
Yes - let’s call these “Chat-based groups”.
WhatsApp is fine for small groups but if you’ve ever been part of large groups it’s a pain. Every comment is a notification on the same level of importance as your Mum! There’s no posts, so no comments under each post. No reactions. It’s a bit like having a conversion (that’s the point) and it’s fine having a chat with 1 person or even up 5 - but having a conversation with 50 people at the same time just doesn’t work. You can do it technically but you loose a lot of engagement and a lot of people.
Apps like Telegram have designed a bit more to cater for larger groups. There are some very large crypto communities (hint: future post coming) that use Telegram for tens of thousands of users. But similar to What’s App it’s a mess with a LOT of noise (think Wild West) and you have to be super interested in what the community is about to put up with it.
So this is a key point. As a nonprofit - if the community you are looking to build is one that is deeply into what you are doing then maybe they put up with groups based on chat where it’s very noisy. However, even then moderation of a chat-based groups is much more time consuming because it’s much harder to pick apart conversations in one big chat thread.
No, for me chat-based groups are great for chatting with individuals and small groups. They are not ready to take on Facebook when it comes to large groups for fundraisers.
Owned platforms are lemonade stands in the desert
Let’s move onto another option. There are now no shortage of online platforms that allow you to spin up your own community like a Facebook Group outside of Facebook. These products all you to customise a lot more about how the community works and have more branding etc. Let’s call these “owned groups”.
Two good examples are Disciple Media and Tribe.
Let’s assume these are amazing and do everything you want them to.
There is still one massive problem. They are separate.
Whereas people already use What’s App or Facebook or many of the other platforms I discuss in this post, they do NOT already use one of these platforms. This means a new account, a new user experience and this leads to the need for (most difficult of all), new behaviour.
It’s VERY hard to change people’s behaviour. You want to avoid that at all costs. It should a last resort.
Ideally you want people to visit your community 2 or 3 times a day when they are fundraising. To change their behaviour and get them using a whole new app would mean having to keep pushing them back there. They only way to do that is notifications (which people either turn off or don’t so they have so many yours won’t make a difference) or email/SMS alerts etc.
All this will result in annoying people and putting them off.
Every year I get approach by a company starting a separate “fundraising app” and every time my feedback is the same: “Ghettos don’t work.”
The Real Power is the NewsFeed
I often consider whether at GivePanel we should build our own mobile app for charity challenges. I always come back to the same issue above.
Another way to think about this issue is to look at what Facebook have that a separated owned group doesn’t have.
This comes down to the super power of Facebook Groups which is really the NewsFeed algorithm.
I pick up my phone (too much apparently!) tap Facebook and scroll mindlessly through the newsfeed. It’s there that the most engaging group posts attract my attention and pull my back into the group. I feel in control. I’m choosing based on posts I like - not pushy notifications.
Without the newsfeed, Facebook groups would die. Just look at LinkedIn Groups. Why do they suck? The posts aren’t part of the main LinkedIn content feed.
This relatively small thing ends up being probably the most critical factor to why Facebook Groups are so successful.
What about other platforms like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok?
I just mentioned why Linked In Groups suck. Also, we can ignore Instagram and TikTok straight away as they just don’t have a group product.
Twitter has just launched Twitter Communities. I’m part of a few. They aren’t very engaging yet. But they are new - could be promising. I’ll be keeping an eye on them for sure.
Niche Community Platforms
Perhaps more interesting than the massive social platforms are a whole bunch of less well known community platforms like Reddit and Discord. (I say small but together these two have over 500 million MAUs! (Monthly Active Users)
Reddit is basically a collection of subreddits. Reddit defines subreddits as: A powerful network of niche communities that collectively define reddit. Reddit is popular with certain types of community like tech and gaming. This is why I call these “Niche community platforms”.
Discord is probably more interesting that Reddit for fundraising potential. It’s already been used by nonprofits like Save the Children for gathering communities of streamers for fundraising.
Discord works a bit like chat-based groups except for a few key differences:
A “server” (think “group”) can have channels - this improves the user experience allowing fundraisers to be part of a specific channels for specific activities
It has better moderation tools and is easier to moderation than chat based groups.
Similar to Reddit it is mainly used for niche communities like gaming, crypto and financial trading and has a more male-skewed audience. If your fundraiser audience matches the audience of Discord then this is worth consideration.
However…
The main issue I see with niche communities is similar to that of owned groups. They are separate and for most fundraising audiences will require the fundraiser to download a new app and change behaviour. Your campaign just died.
Another thing that most group functionality doesn’t have (including Discord) is an ad platform that can drive traffic into the communities on the platform. If you wanted to drive people to a Discord server using Ads then where would you advertise? Tiktok maybe? That user experience from an ad on one platform to download a separate app is going to be an issue. Reddit has an ad platform now and perhaps if Discord launch one it would open up more for fundraising. However ads are not in vogue in tech right now so don’t hold your breath.
What about work as a niche?
A quick word about Slack and Microsoft Teams. They are definitely community platforms. These are interesting and I do think there is scope here for work-based challenges done in work-based communities. Here you don’t need ads as you have an already existing community.
Also - many employees at companies would not want to join a Facebook Group with their colleagues. At GivePanel we are excited about the potential of company/employee fundraising on these platforms.
Summary
For Groups to work really powerfully for fundraising they have to have the following characteristics:
Ability to gather thousands of people with a good user experience
Easy to moderate by the nonprofits
Not involve behaviour change by users
Attract people back to the group without annoying them
Ability to drive acquisition using ads
Facebook groups do all these things better than anything else right now and it’s pretty amazing how nothing else really compares.
And this is before we end with the big kicker. Facebook also has fundraising- baked right into the platform.
Would love to know what you think. Have I missed anything?
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