Join me as I chat with Brooke Richie-Babbage, Cindy Wagman, and Jess Campbell about “How to stop chasing donors and 10x your thinking.”
This episode feels a little different than past episodes not just because we’re coming to you from behind the steering wheel, but because these are some of my favorite non-profit ladies who really know their stuff when it comes to fundraising with the right mindset, the right strategies, and the right people in place. And they have the track record to prove that it works.
Grab your favorite road trip snacks and hop right in while we talk about how you can start attracting like-minded individuals who will fund your vision gladly, not because they feel pressured to do so out of guilt, obligation, or simply to get you off their backs. Discover:
- How you can change your scarcity mindset.
- How you can tell stories that your donors actually want to hear.
- How to fundraise without fear of rejection.
- How to make friends with people who have the capacity to help.
And so much more…
Buckle up, enjoy, and please leave a review if you learn something new!
Important Links:
https://brookerichiebabbage.com/
https://cindywagman.com/
https://www.outintheboons.me/
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
Episode Transcript
RHEA 0:00
Hey, podcast fans. I’m not sure when you’re listening to this episode, but since Sean and I recorded, Facebook has announced a new policy starting November 1st, 2023. Facebook is no longer covering the cost of transactions for donations on its site. They’re moving to a 1. 99 percent plus 49 cent fee structure, which may be less than other credit card processors, but you’ll have to check with your specific processing platform.
As we head towards giving Tuesday, I just wanted to make sure you had the low down now onto the show. And remember if you liked this episode or found it useful, please share and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown.
Today, I am speaking with my friend, Sean Kosofsky, who is the Nonprofit Fixer, and today we are going to talk about Facebook fundraisers.
Buckle up. Sean, welcome to the show.
SEAN 0:59
Thanks for having me.
RHEA 1:00
Sean, you and I are longtime nonprofit veterans. So before we jump into Facebook fundraisers, which we all want to know about, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey into the nonprofit world.
SEAN 1:11
I’ve been in nonprofits now for a little over 30 years. Born and raised in Detroit, my hometown, and got my early start in nonprofits at age 16 working for the YMCA. Then I came out of the closet my senior year of high school and started running the gay youth group that helped save my life. Part of Affirmations Community Center, started doing door to door fundraising for the environment, for the PIRGs, and then in college, I fell into a civil rights role at the gay statewide lobbying organization in Michigan, then called the Triangle Foundation, and then I got my first executive director role running NARAL, North Carolina, the Women’s Reproductive Access Organization, did some voting rights work, did a lot of political campaigns and ballot measures over the years, and you They ended up running a national bullying prevention organization in New York, the Tyler Clementi Foundation, and then circuitously, my husband asked me to move to San Francisco.
I did. It was tapped to run a national climate change think tank. And just wrap that up in December. So a long time, 30 years in nonprofits and served on numerous boards, raised lots of money and always worked in like sort of social justice or progressive causes but now in my consulting practice, which I’ve had for five or six years now, I get to serve people all over the country, lots of purpose driven work but I don’t have to raise money anymore.
I love to train other people, raising money. I don’t have to raise it to keep the bills paid.
RHEA 2:33
I’m going to put on the cynical hat right now, I think a lot of us feel burnt out and disenchanted with social media. And the second thing is, we see lots of Facebook fundraisers, some varying degrees of success.
So first question is why should your average nonprofit listening, think about investing in a Facebook fundraiser strategy.
SEAN 2:55
We just said is totally spot on social media has fried and burned out a lot of people. Facebook in and of itself is controversial. But I’m here to say that regardless of our personal or political attitudes towards some of these platforms, or these parent companies.
We have missions to achieve. We have money to race. We have causes that we care about, right? And Facebook, of all of the other platforms, Facebook has really cracked the code. They understand how to move money peer to peer through the 3 billion people using their platform, getting people from stranger to donor in a very quick window of time.
So I would ask people to Give social media another chance, specifically give Facebook’s fundraising platform another chance. And we’ll talk today about why that is fee free, no transaction costs. They’re now giving people the email addresses of the donors. There’s a lot of things that have changed and why people should give this another look, but every nonprofit out there who needs quick cash infusions without any restrictions should absolutely keep this as a consideration.
RHEA 3:57
You make a good case, but does that presume that I already have a Facebook presence, because I know so many of us are just inundated with all the platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads now plus Facebook. What are the prerequisites for me to even consider planning a Facebook fundraiser?
SEAN 4:15
At a minimum, anyone can use Facebook to raise money. You can raise it for your own medical bills. You can raise it for your textbook costs for college. Anyone can use Facebook in the US and some other countries to raise money in order to get the full features and to get the low costs. You should be a 501 C3 in the United States.
If you are a 501 C3 organization in the United States, the 1st thing you need to do is go to and we can provide these links in the show notes or something. Is go to the meta or Facebook fundraising tools page, you just get set up. It’s really quick. You basically, if you already have a Facebook, I guess we have to back up from there a little bit.
You have to have a Facebook page, right? Companies and nonprofits should have a page. If you have groups, if you’ve got an account, that’s great, but you need a Facebook page. Once you have a Facebook page, you need the ability to get the blue donate button in order to get that blue donate button and turn on fundraisers and birthday fundraisers and all of this power.
You need to submit some paperwork. So you go apply for the meta tools. They’ll ask you for 2 months of bank accounts. They’ll ask you for 5 or 6 pieces of information. In order to get your account set up.
The date of birth and address of the charity’s CEO, a VAT number where applicable, the charity registration number where applicable, and then a couple documents. So once you’ve got that set up, it takes, they say two weeks, but it usually takes only a few days and then you’re approved.
There’s this thing called the support inbox. So Facebook’s support is horrible. Facebook, I will admit Facebook support is worse than bad. However. Once things start working, they’re all pretty good. You get turned on for your blue donate button. You then make the actual physical change on your Facebook page to turn that button to the blue donate button.
And then all of a sudden people will be able to run fundraisers at your page. That’s how you get set up. That’s how you get started. And then I encourage folks to start practicing and playing with it. There’s lots of functionality and power and tools in there now, but that’s how you get started.
RHEA 6:11
Now, what if we don’t have a big Facebook following?
What if we’ve been super active on some other platform or maybe we have an email list, can we still do Facebook fundraisers?
SEAN 6:21
This is why I love the Facebook fundraising tool. If you are a nonprofit, you can have zero followers because you don’t need them. You don’t have to build an audience.
You don’t need to invest in any of this. When people run individual fundraisers for you, they are using their audience. So every individual comes to your page. So I have three or 4, 000 friends. If I decide to raise money for some organization, I’m going to ask my 4000 friends to give money to this organization.
So the organizations do not need to do any kind of audience building or anything like that. But you do need to recruit people to come and raise money for you. And that’s the beauty is that unlike Kickstarter or go fund me or a lot of these other. Tools out there where you, in order to do peer-to-peer, you’ve gotta bring the game, you gotta bring the audience, you gotta bring the reach.
With Facebook, they are bringing this huge audience every day. You just gotta bring the know-how, and that’s what makes this really powerful. Your group does not need any followers whatsoever to make this work.
RHEA 7:18
That’s really good news. So let’s back up a second. What are some of the things that we should think about in order to make our Facebook fundraiser a success?
So you mentioned recruit other people. I don’t know, in your audience or somehow connected to your organization or maybe their board members, but what else should we know?
SEAN 7:35
There are a couple of things going on here in the meta suite of tools. One, anyone can tag a nonprofit that they like, and when you tag them in a post, it sometimes will prompt you.
Do you want to make this a fundraising post? So there’s just adding a donate button to all of your posts. You can do that year round. There’s also the idea of birthday fundraisers. So I’m a big advocate of encouraging nonprofits to know the month of the birthday of their followers. You can put out an email.
I just did a training this week on this, put out an email, asking everyone on your audience to click a button saying the month of their birthday, and that tags their record 15 days before your birthday or 14 days before your birthday. Facebook asks you, do you want to run a fundraiser? For your birthday.
So you reach out to your members 15 days before their birthday and say, choose us. Choose us. When Facebook prompts you, choose us. You do that year round, you’ll be making a lot of money. The third thing is that the thing we’re talking about today, which is traditional personal Facebook fundraisers, in order for those to be successful, I have a bunch of tips in this training that I offer that I’ll share a link with for people later.
But in essence, what you need to do for personal fundraisers as an individual. Is there’s about 13 or 14 tips that you can do to make things work really well. But the 1st 1 is you need to make sure that you treat it like a fundraiser. You don’t post on your wall. You post in the fundraiser. So you create the Facebook fundraiser and then you have to treat it like a Facebook event.
You need to invite everyone to it. No one’s going to see your posts unless you invite everyone to it. A lot of people create it and then they post to their wall or they create it and just assume people are going to find it. That’s not how it works. Feed based social media. You need to constantly stay in the stream like Twitter or Facebook.
In order to do that, you need to constantly post so tip one is after you create the fundraiser, make sure you invite everyone. This is the time consuming part. I have 3 or 4000 friends. It takes me hours, but after I’ve invited them all, they see every notification and I hit my financial goals every time.
So that’s the 1st invite everyone to inside the fundraiser. The 2nd 1 and inviting everyone is to post every day. You have to stay in that feed. So you think that you’re going to be annoying people by posting every day. They’re not paying attention to all of your posts. People are busy. Some days they log in.
Some days they don’t. Sometimes they see your post. Sometimes they don’t. But if you post every day, you will get donations within 3 hours of a post. That’s when they happen because that’s how the feed works. And the 3rd thing is just to be the CEO, be the chief of enthusiasm and optimism. You have to be like
I’m going to hit my goal. There’s a couple of tips that really matter. So there’s other ones, but those are the three that can help them be successful. There’s this other term we use called Facebook campaigns, and that’s when you have 15 or more people running Facebook fundraisers at a time.
That’s what people hire me to run and lead for them. You can do this on your own for sure. But the energy of a full on campaign of 15 or more people raising these. People consistently hit 15, 25, 000 in a 25 day period when they’re doing these because of the energy of them. If you’re going to do all those, you need to find people that are willing to do this and then give them these tips and then follow them for I usually sit around at my software and just ping them every single day.
Have you posted ? I text them or I email them. Have you posted ? And that keeps everyone on track. And then you hit your goal.
RHEA 10:45
What’s the universe of scope that we’re talking about here as far as what we can expect if we do a Facebook fundraiser
SEAN 10:51
individuals who have 30, 50, 200 friends on Facebook, you’re going to raise a couple hundred dollars.
If you’ve got. Over a thousand friends on Facebook, you’re gonna do much, much better. You’re gonna probably looking at clearing a thousand dollars, maybe even $1,500 easy. If you’ve got thousands of friends, , it’s not impractical to think that you could be raising two, three, $4,000 for one person.
The real issue here is did you invite everyone to your fundraiser, and then did you post inside the fundraiser, not on your wall, did you post inside the fundraiser every day? That’s number one. Number 2 is your issue interesting, right? If you’re raising money for a community garden, as much as I love community gardens, it’s going to be a little different than raising money for abortion rights right after the Roe decision comes down last year.
If your issue is in the national conversation, If your issue is interesting, if your issue is timely, you’re going to do better. The first fundraiser I ran was in the fall of 2016. It was for a bullying prevention organization. Donald Trump had just won the white house. It was an issue in the national conversation about bullying at the time.
It was very present. And for our membership, this was a powerful tool to raise money. And we raised 20, 000 just in one or two fundraisers in a three week or four week window. So being at the right moment at the right time is more important than some other factors, but you can make your issue pop. By linking it to personal stories by saying here’s the story of Sam.
Sam wants to go to this camp. This leadership development opportunity for him is really powerful. There’s 300 kids like Sam who want this to happen. Will you help us raise money to make sure kids like Sam get to go to this camp? There’s a way to make this issue really resonant for people. And that’s how you actually can raise bigger gifts of money.
It really depends on who’s in your friend group and who’s paying attention.
RHEA 12:42
Really good information. What about cross platform promotions? So should I also be thinking about putting it on my email list, putting it on LinkedIn? What’s that strategy look like?
SEAN 12:52
You will need a Facebook account to be able to click on that Facebook Fundraiser link and then go access it.
So let’s say you’re a small nonprofit and you have no website or no fundraising software yet. This is your tool. Facebook is free and then donations to you using Facebook have zero transactions. So some people, this is the actual better tool. And now that you get the email addresses of your donors, it might be the preferable tool for small grassroots nonprofits.
Having said that. For a lot of organizations, they want their audiences somewhere else on email on their website on LinkedIn on some other place. Here’s what you do after you create your Facebook fundraiser and you invite all of your friends to your fundraiser, grab that URL to your fundraiser. Post it on LinkedIn.
Post it on Twitter. Post it on Reddit. Post it in all of the forums and groups you’re in. Put it in your electronic signature. Create an away message, whether you’re away or not. So every autoresponder email goes out to people for the two weeks you’re running your fundraiser saying, Hey, I’m actually not gone right now, but here’s a chance to give you a link to my, I’m raising money for this really great cause.
And put it in your email newsletter. Create a QR code for it. Like you have right now on the screen. QR codes in a lot of different places will bring people to this event. The cool thing about Facebook fundraisers, if you are an admin for the Facebook page, you can track the data on where people are coming in from also sometimes.
So it’s actually really helpful. But you can post that link in all the other platforms or analog or hand it out in meetings. The link just works, but anyone clicking on it from Instagram or anywhere else has to have a Facebook account in order for them to log in and then make the donation.
RHEA 14:28
It seems to me that with Facebook fundraisers that I participated in, it’s a fairly low dollar amount.
So we’re really looking at volume. Is that. A correct assumption to make
SEAN 14:39
it depends. Many organizations are finding that the nature of a quick, urgent Facebook campaign lends itself to where the whole sector seems to be going, which is people aren’t card carrying members of an organization anymore. They don’t like every year.
I get into the ACLU and on the membership renewal date, people give the quick, fast campaigns. They don’t need that donation receipt as much. They don’t need to be cultivated to renew. They’re just, my friend is asking me to pitch in for this short thing. I’m just going to do it. So you do get a lot of small, low donor things on digital.
Nowadays, you see all the politicians give me 5 to help me. Everything’s three, five, 8. So I do believe there is a trend in digital to go towards scale at a smaller gift size, but it all depends on the friends that you invite. I literally, today, I’m running one right now for a national organization, Stand With Trans, back in Detroit, and someone today gave 100.
Someone today gave, two people today gave me 75. It depends on how motivated that person is. Sometimes I’ll say, I’m 200 short of my goal, and someone will just give 200, so you close your goal. So it really depends on your language and your framing. But I generally think you’re right. It is about volume, but you will always be surprised as to who gives to your Facebook fundraiser.
I tell people, invite everyone. Don’t hold back cause your organization is based in Minnesota and you’re only going to invite Minnesota people. You will never know who will donate. It could be someone you haven’t seen since high school in Iowa. So just always invite everyone and ask, and you will be surprised at who gives to your fundraiser.
RHEA 16:11
Can we use a Facebook fundraiser as a donor acquisition strategy?
SEAN 16:16
Yes. In fact, because the organization needs zero followers on Facebook, almost all of these people are going to be new acquisitions, right? Peer to peer fundraising is very powerful. It has consistently been proven to work when headquarters of some nonprofit sends out an email saying, Hey, everyone do this, whether it’s Sierra club, Planned Parenthood, whoever.
It is less effective than if someone takes that email and gives it to their network and asks them to do the same thing, peer to peer, people who know people, this is how all things since the beginning of civilization have worked. Neighbors talking to neighbors, people talking to people they know. So if a nonprofit can find some way to get its ask in the hands of its followers, and then those people share it to their network, you’re going to bring new people in.
If you do it authentically and with story and with compelling copy, you might even keep these donors long term. For a long time, Facebook was not giving nonprofits the email addresses of the donors. They didn’t want anyone going off the platform and raising money somewhere else, but they’ve stopped doing that since they created MetaPay.
Now you’re going to get the email addresses, and the default checkbox is to give the email address to the charity, which is powerful. I always told people, though, when Facebook wasn’t giving the emails. Don’t worry about cultivating these people. Don’t even assume you have to renew them. Imagine that Facebook fundraisers are actually about a cash infusion.
If you’re able to build a brand and bring in some new people, great, but nine times out of 10, they’re going to give because their friend asked them to not because of the cause, not because of the compelling mission. It’s going to be because people. Give to people and that’s why, so you can acquire new donors, but I think that’s a more sophisticated strategy than most small nonprofits have the idea of saying thank you to this person and then getting them into a funnel and then getting them into some kind of system for renewal is for probably more sophisticated groups that have an actual development or communications team.
But for most folks, the acquisition thing, I wouldn’t count on them renewing as much as I would count on figuring out. Which of the people running Facebook fundraisers have engaged friends. I would want to get that person who ran a successful Facebook fundraiser on my board or on my team or in some volunteer capacity somehow that to me is the gold mine is the person who has 3000 friends on Facebook who keeps killing it on these campaigns.
RHEA 18:31
Oh, that’s so helpful. We know that especially around Giving Tuesday, I get hit a bajillion times on all the socials and email with a solicitation. Do you have any advice about the best time of the giving frame of mind or Q3, Q4, but it’s also the busiest time.
So like, how do we square that?
SEAN 18:52
We are so close to the issue that we tend to think that’s a noisy window of time for a lot of average everyday people. It might be a little bit noisier, but they’re not tuned into the nonprofit blitzkrieg that we are after giving Tuesday, but giving Tuesday works and the number of donations that happen around that window.
It’s something’s working with it. So there’s no 1 particular month or week or anything that works better than anything else. I will still say that giving Tuesday is very compelling. December is very compelling. Timing wise, those 2 really work. I will also say that if you can wrap your fundraiser around a key date and anniversary or in the give out day is a day for the LGBTQ community in May, University of Michigan has their own giving day.
Some institutions will have its own anniversary, or its own giving day, or giving month, or it’s related to some kind of cancer awareness month. If you can wrap your fundraiser around a key burst of activity, that’s really fundamental, but more so than timing, I would say, is having a match matches totally work.
So if you can add a match to your fundraiser, that’s really great. You can start tagging other people that have big audiences in your fundraiser. That also really works. But main thing here really is it’s less about timing. And more about finding a bunch of people who are committed to creating this posting daily for 14 days and just really making it personal.
In the course that I sell on how to do these, I give away 30 sample posts, so you have 30 days worth of posts to share out there. In case you run out of things to say, but the timing I think is less important. I will say that we might be nervous about giving Tuesday, but it actually really works.
There’s a lot of energy around that. And that could be a good time to rally your people around it. Remember that you’re 15 or 20 followers who are going to run these, their supporters and friends aren’t in the sector like we are. So they might just, they’re going to give because their friend is asking them to hit a goal.
RHEA 20:43
You keep saying two weeks. Is that the magic number? What’s the difference between say a two week campaign versus an evergreen campaign?
SEAN 20:52
If it’s evergreen, it’s not a campaign in my mind. In my mind, a campaign has to have a start date, end date, goal, and energy, ?
And so if you have an evergreen button on your page, that’s just like basically having a website or an annual fund, right? Which isn’t really, it’s less like a campaign. In my mind, I’ve been training people to run Facebook campaigns, which is the word I use, campaign for 15 fundraisers or more. You can run five, you can run nine, but I try to get them to 15 or more.
When I tried doing these for 30 days, people were just burned out. They didn’t want to keep posting for 30 days, but if you can get them going for 14 days, people tend to stick with the campaign. Some people flake out, they jump out. Hey, this was really fun. I hit my goal after day seven, I’m out.
But I really think 14 days is around the sweet spot for running these. So I keep recommending it. And in the course that I sell, I tell people, you want to set your fundraiser for 30 days out so that it doesn’t end for 30 days. The reason why that is, is you might get busy. Things might actually start happening and you get really busy for a week or something.
You can’t change the end date of your campaign after it ends. You can only change it during the campaign, during the fundraiser. So let’s say your first week gets really busy and then you really dive in and it’s building, and then some issue happens in the news and your issue pops and people start giving to it.
Like maybe there, maybe you work on gun safety and there’s a school shooting, God forbid, or if there’s some issue that pops around the election or something. All of a sudden your fundraiser is there as a vehicle to capture that energy, right? So I always say put the campaign deadline for 30 days out, run it for 14 days, but it gives you a little bit of cushion.
So that’s what I think is the sweet spot.
RHEA 22:26
If I’m sitting here and I’m like, Sean sounds great, but what do I post for? 14 days in a row, right? Cause it’s, it seems like a very daunting thing. Like I’m not a copywriter. I don’t know what I should be posting. What kinds of things should I be posting for the 14 campaign period?
SEAN 22:42
One of, I heard someone say once that you’ll never run out of content in anything you do as a business, as a nonprofit, you will never run out of content. If you tell stories. So the story of your nonprofit, the story of how it began the story of every board member and how they came to the organization, simply just pulling something from the headlines.
Today, I said, you’ll This is the most challenging environment trans people have ever had in our country’s history. When people come out, they’re getting more support, but also more hostility. An organization must be there to support them when this happens. Today, I’m raising money for Stand With Trans.
Please meet me where I’m going, which is a 1, 500 goal. And people respond. The next day I might say, I was raising money for a woman’s organization and I put out a challenge every day to the men. We need more men in the pro choice movement. We need more men funding this cause. Men, I want your dollars in right now.
I don’t want your opinions. I don’t want your money. So I kept saying this to all of the men. And men were rallying to the cause. Was it raining men, Sean? It was raining men. I loved it. I loved it as a gay man. I was like, this is perfect. I should run these all the time. I didn’t want to exclude women, but I was like, men need to put their money where their mouth is if they care about these cause.
So for me, each post can simply be about urgency. people I work with tend to innovate. They’ll find out what’s working with their audience in real time. I have some people who have found that one tactic that really works every day is making micro goals. So if you have 1000 campaign goal, and you only have 150 left to go in that one day.
Hey, everyone, I’ve decided that I only need 50 today to close my goal for today and another 70 tomorrow and I’ll hit my goal of 1000, ? That tends to work. So I’ve seen people break down their posts into. I just need a little bit more today. 3 more donors today. Someone’s willing to put in a match.
If I had all of my friends give 10 tomorrow, I could hit my goal. Just these little things you can just say but you don’t need fancy copy or anything like that. I do encourage folks if you’re a nonprofit to provide all of your fundraisers with images, links, copy. Pictures are things that make the post even more interesting in people’s feed, but I also find that brevity works, personal stories, work, grabbing a link from a news story and saying, this is why I’m raising money today.
Auntie up people put in your money.
RHEA 24:54
I love Let’s talk about your ambassadors or, the group of people that you’re recruiting. Do you have a recommendation as far as the size of group that you’re working with? Who should be in our. Tribes, so to speak,
SEAN 25:08
so many organizations that are smaller are struggling to find people to actually do these that I just tell them the first 15 people you can find that admit that say they’re going to do this.
We’ll just work with that. You can spend a lot of your energy trying to find the 15 people with the biggest Facebook groups. I have again, 3 to 4, 000 friends. Each post I put out is going to do better than someone with 400 friends on Facebook. I think that when you’re cultivating this list of people, the most important thing is those that are actually willing to do the work.
If they, if everyone says I’m going to invite everyone and post in my fundraiser and do it consistently for 14 days, and you have 15 people doing it, what I have found is that you typically raise about 15, 000 in 15 days. When 15 people are doing it, and that is not uncommon, even if one person has 400 friends and another person has 3500, but you don’t want is everyone having only 400 friends.
You’re just going to hit a lower goal, but the most important thing is actually people who say, I’m going to do this. I promise to you. I’m going to do it. And every day they actually post. It doesn’t matter if they really have a huge friend group that helps, but the commitment is really what’s important.
Whenever we have a nonprofit run 1 of these campaigns. They’ll usually book 18 volunteers to do it and I say you’re going to have two or three flake out. Two or three are just going to figure out this is hard or this is not what they signed up for and you’re going to end up with three less and that almost always happens.
So I tell people over book volunteers by three or four but the people who are willing to do it are the ones who will do it again six months later or a year later when you need them to do this campaign again.
RHEA 26:40
That’s an interesting question, Sean. So to your point, you have 3, 000 friends and you’re asking them to give to multiple things throughout the year.
Do you ever worry, or do folks worry that they’re going to tax their friends, get into donor fatigue? At what point are you like, maybe I shouldn’t hit my friends up for money again for a different thing?
SEAN 27:00
It all depends on your universe. I have friends who are professional fundraisers. I have been my whole life.
So people know that when they see posts for me, I’m going to be working on some cause. So no one’s really oh, God, how annoying. I think they just understand that’s where I’m at. I’ve dedicated my life to service. This is what they see when they see my page. I don’t think people should be running more than two fundraisers a year.
Individuals should probably not do more than two a year. You will get some fatigue with your list. Having said that, if you run something on a totally different issue in the spring than you do during Get In Tuesday, you might see people responding. I have some friends who give every single time because of their personal connection to the issue or because they just like me or this is the only thing they give to.
So that’s one thing is trying to only do two of these a year. We also think that people are seeing our soliciting and are asking more often than they do. We, the people are really busy that we think they’re seeing every one of our posts, but they’re really not. Notifications in Facebook are way less intrusive than email.
That’s another beautiful part about this. People aren’t getting emails inundating them about their GoFundMe or peer to peer campaign. In Facebook, they come up as notifications. So less intrusive. So I don’t think people are bothered as much by these invitations. Now, having said that, if you are new to fundraising, you have to overcome this when you’re training your volunteers you’re going to feel like you’re asking a lot.
Trust me when I say no one is offended when you’re asking, they might be bothered if you phone them during dinner, but no one’s offended that you’re raising money. And people are not really paying attention to every post as much as we I think they are. They’re not so just keep asking. Stay in the feed and you will hit your goal.
Some people, just they worry about being too pushy with how many posts I encourage them to do. But once they start seeing the money coming in, they’re like, it’s working. You were right.
RHEA 28:48
How much time are we talking about here? Because, during the campaign period, obviously you said to be in Facebook every day.
I presume that you’re probably also responding to. Comments, tax, et cetera. There’s the ramp up period, and then there’s the wrap up period. So what are we talking about in terms of time commitment?
SEAN 29:06
For the organization, if an organization is going to run a campaign, it can be a little time consuming.
That’s why they tend to hire it out. I might spend an hour or two. I already have all the materials. So I tell the nonprofit. I already have the recruiting email to bring people in the let’s go email that the email that you put out on the 1st day. I have the tracking roster for tracking everyone’s goals and all their links to all their I have all the tools.
So when you engage a professional in this, there are ways to just make it ready on turnkey on day 1 for the consultant or for the organization. Every nonprofit I’ve worked with, I give them the tools to do this on their own in the future without me so that they’re completely self sufficient, which is awesome.
So it gets faster every time the setup, just recruiting people takes hours and hours to be honest, but it’s going to pay off. Then once you start as the nonprofit, once you begin, it’s really only like less than 20 minutes a day or less than 25 minutes a day. I usually find a volunteer to go into all 15 fundraisers and total up what we’re raising every day.
That just, that’s the most time consuming thing. If you’re the nonprofit putting it into the roster, if you’re an average person raising money is two minutes a day. It is literally two minutes a day. I go to Facebook, I create the the fundraiser. There is a link now that you can use. That pre populates everything right in there for you in Facebook, and bam, it’s up, you just go.
The most time consuming thing is inviting all your friends. If you use the mobile device, you just go tap, and it goes really fast. If you use the web browser, it takes a long time. Once everyone’s in, it takes one minute a day or two minutes a day to post. And you’re done.
It is really that simple. And once people start doing it, the actual fundraisers it’s more just ah, gotta go in there. I know it’s easy once I open up Facebook and make the post, but it only takes a minute or two.
RHEA 30:52
What about things like Facebook ads? Should we be should we be investing in that to point people to the fundraiser?
Is that necessary?
SEAN 30:59
No, it is not necessary at all. I think you don’t need Facebook ads at all. And here’s why. Many people know that when you have a Facebook page, Facebook does not let you post in your own page and let all of your followers see it, ? What is it?
5 percent of your universe are going to see your posts. Facebook wants anyone with a page to pay for ads to make everyone see them. The two exceptions are Facebook events and Facebook fundraisers. Once you’ve invited everyone to it, they’re going to see these notifications and these updates. So you don’t need advertising as much.
I know some people who swear by boosting that when they boost their fundraiser, they’re hyper local, like very local county. When they boost their posts, they get more. Donations for them. They swear that works. I don’t think organizations need to spend a penny. The real investment is finding the 15 people or more and then just like getting them involved and staying on top of them every single day to do posting.
I don’t think you need an ad budget.
RHEA 32:00
Sean, this has been super helpful. Anything else that you feel like folks need to know about Facebook fundraisers that we haven’t yet covered.
SEAN 32:14
So I do have a bunch of really excellent tools for people. I have a blog post on the key 8 tips for raising money on Facebook, but I also have a download that has more resources in it.
So you guys can go grab this free tool. I have that gives you the 8 tips in my full course, which is like. 75 or whatever this course that I just did it this week live for 20 people. There’s another link that I just said, which is where people can go if they want to pay for the course.
If you pay for the course, what you get are all of the campaign assets, the thank you image at the end that you jump into everyone’s fundraiser, the roster the welcome email infographics for your page. I help nonprofits set up one page on their website that they use evergreen all year round saying, hi, welcome to our page, run a Facebook fundraiser for us.
Go down below this video, click that link, use these 3 tips and go and people are raising lots of money doing all of these assets are in the paid course. So one thing I would say in addition to those links is that I really believe that this is an underused resource. People are doing it wrong.
And so they haven’t seen the actual cash coming in. But once they realize, oh, I have to invite everyone and I post inside the thing, not my wall. Once they realize they’ve been doing it wrong, the money. Starts to come in and then they’re like, this is, this has to be a new line item for our nonprofit. So if you go to any big nonprofit around the country and go to their facebook page and click on the fundraisers tab You’ll see hundreds of these things running at any given point in time.
It is real money And so forget our attitudes about facebook as a company forget whatever We have a movement and an organization to fund go get the money
RHEA 33:58
I love it. Get that money, honey. There’s a book, I think. Question coming in from Megan.
MEGAN 34:01
I’ve been working on my monthly donor campaign and Facebook now will do monthly donations. I think your strategies probably work here as well, but what are you seeing in terms of that catching on? I’ve been able to recruit five donors to give monthly. using Facebook. I’m just not sure that it’s the right place to invest my time.
SEAN 34:25
I think Facebook has data to show that one of the things they wanted to provide on the platform was monthly giving potential. So now of course you can do monthly donors, and so they have tools. If you go into your dashboard for your nonprofits page, there’s something called the nonprofit manager.
The nonprofit manager allows you to set up automated thank you messages to anyone who sets up a fundraiser and automated thank yous for anyone who sets up a monthly giving system. So you can actually go set that up. So there’s a little mini funnel set up inside the nonprofit manager, part of your page.
They must have data to show that people are defaulting to some kind of monthly giving. So I would take the fact that they’ve provided this as evidence and data that people were clamoring for it. Yes, do I think the Facebook fundraiser system is a good way to get new monthly donors? I do.
They’re going to be lower donor for sure. You have to make a decision in your nonprofit, whether it is a better use of your money or not. I think anytime you can move to getting more sustainers, the better. Try it for 3 months or 6 months to see if it works. And then if it’s just not bearing fruit, try some other way.
But I definitely think that people should be Aiming most of their asks at a low monthly recurring gift. It all depends on your cause. If there’s lots of urgency, if it’s just a one time campaign every year, and that’s where your energy is at, you’re not going to get monthly donors. If it’s something year round that’s almost always really important, like health or wellness, you might find some folks who are willing to do the monthly giving.
RHEA 36:05
Really good information, Sean. Thanks so much. All right. So we’re signing off. I’m going to make sure that all of the information that you shared with us are in the show notes, along with your information for folks who want to get in touch with you. So talk to us a little bit about what it is that you do for nonprofits when you say people hire you to run their campaigns, because I’m thinking about the life of your average nonprofit executive director.
And I don’t think that many of them have time to figure out Facebook and to run the campaign.
SEAN 36:32
When I tell people how powerful this is and that they can usually guarantee a certain amount of money and that the platform is now giving the email addresses and donors, people are usually like, where do I sign up?
What do I do? My business is focused on Courses that I sell because a lot of people can’t afford coaching and consulting. So I offer courses for people. I also do coaching and consulting. So those are the 3 C’s coaching, consulting and courses for nonprofit organizations. My specialties are in executive director leadership.
So helping and coaching and working with executive directors. Also working with boards, but in fundraising is the part that I love. I love fundraising. I love teaching it. And the one specialty I have is Facebook fundraisers and in terms of price, what happens is I’ll talk to an organization and say, if you are willing to find me 15 people willing to run these fundraisers for two weeks, .
I will take it all off your plate. You bring me the 15 people who have said yes for 3, 000. I’m going to work with them over a two week window of time to just keep that campaign running and pull that money in and hopefully you’ll have one person watching the fundraiser campaign who can then repeat this in the future.
So you never need to hire me again, right? That’s the goal. So it’s a pretty. Huge ROI three grand usually brings in 10 to 15, 000 and then you can just rinse and repeat this every time you want to run one of these or run them throughout the year. That’s basically how that works, but it is set it and forget it.
Once you handed it off to me, there’s almost nothing you need to do until that window is done. I pulled a report. I give you the data, all of it,
RHEA 37:59
Sean, you have convinced me. I started at the beginning of this conversation a little skeptical, and now I think it’s time for me to do my Facebook fundraiser. Sean, thank you so much for your time.
Really good information. Folks, if you enjoyed this podcast, please rate it and review it on Apple Podcasts, because that is helpful for people to find the show. Sean, thank you so much for being with us today.
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