Thank you for your blog, it really is beneficiary. l am the president of a not for organisation. we opened less than a year now and the challenges we are facing is most companies and individuals who want to donate are asking for tax receipts as a new organisation we do not have the tax receipts and we are not getting more donations for our centre. We help newcomers, abused women, children, men and also victims of human trafficking. our clientele is reaching up to a 1000 including the youth we help. we are now afraid that if we don’t do anything to increasing our fundraising and make more cash flow we might have to cancel other programs or close the centre. we do not want to do this, please can you help us find more effective ways of fundraising. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you

I’m a crafter. I wish to run a ‘craft for cause’ fund…I was thinking of using ‘donate’ button from paypal…but what if the sum of donate I received could be smaller than the fee charged by Paypal? Is there any package I can use that allow me to accept donation as long as $1 or even less? Sorry, I’m a humble person…don’t expect big donation at the mean time! Thank you in advance!

Online donations for the shelter have doubled from what they were prior to July, when I started working on the site, to now. But I think it’s important to remember that this post wasn’t meant to be a case study of one shelter–four months isn’t enough time to fully gauge ROI. It’s simply an example. The fact that there was an increase after implementing some of these ideas is, in my opinion, encouraging enough to suggest that small non-profits that can’t afford a full-time site manager can see some benefit by trying one or more of these methods.

Social media is free, meaning it does not require payment to set up an account. Anything anyone does, whether a business, a non-profit, or an individual, requires an investment of time. One of the resources I mentioned, Grassroots.org, offers a program for non-profits that provides social media management, among other things–all for free–so that’s an option for those organizations that can’t spare the money, manpower, or time.

In looking at the organization’s site to which you’ve linked in your comment, I see you encourage connection via Facebook and Twitter in your blog posts, so you’re already implementing three suggestions in this post. It’s my hope that more non-profits see the value of social media as it relates to non-profits and fundraising, the same way you have.

On your organization’s contribute page, there’s a PayPal donation button, an address for people to send checks–two more things I suggested here–as well as online donation buttons for networks other than PayPal. There’s even the ability to donate through a grocery store loyalty program, which is a brilliant idea. It looks like we’re on pretty much the same page as far as how to encourage people to donate online and interact through social media.

My point was not that non-profits need to do all of these things. They don’t even have to do any of them if they really feel it will require too much time, although I think it would be a shame to not even try. But for those non-profits that are willing to try something new, there are easy–and free–ways to go about it.

Thanks for being so diligent about helping non-profits get the most benefit out of their efforts. Have a great day!

I know from experience that your claim that social media marketing is “free” doesn’t fly with most nonprofit boards, because they know that time is money, and any time they spend on social media is time they are not spending on other, potentially well-proven, methods of fundraising for them.

Another concern that I’ve heard from nonprofit boards is that, rather than creating a new fund stream, online fundraising is actually merely shifting donors from one method to another, and actually not increasing the overall donations by much, therefore making the additional effort not worthwhile (again, relative to using those resources for other fundraising purposes).

I think this post is a fantastic primer for nonprofits wanting to get started in social media marketing and I’m very glad to see that this nonprofit in particular has been so adventurous and committed to social media marketing.

The shelter actively uses Facebook and Twitter, and we’re working on building up their blog and incorporating other social media marketing methods. It’s a process. But to have seen positive results after just four months is encouraging.

I understand your point about non-profits needing supporting data before making investments online. But I think it’s important to remember that these methods come with little risk for a lot of gain because they are all free. The only investment is of time, which I also know can sometimes be hard to come by in a non-profit!

This is a great post with fantastic information, but many nonprofits need to see some cold hard facts before they make investments online.