Today, online fundraising accounts for 30% of most major U.S. events. And experts believe that social media is only going to become more valuable as a fundraising tool. In fact, Twitter™ and Facebook™ have more than 344 million combined users, and growing.
A recent report indicates that adding social media tools, such as Facebook™, Twitter™ and YouTube™, increases individual’s fundraising efforts by as much as 40% compared to their peers who did not use social media. Yet, fewer than half of fundraisers tap into their social networks or use social media tools when fundraising.
The report reviews the different benefits and average fundraising yield for each social media channel, as well as what elements should be leveraged for each. In fact, (check out the infographic link below) adding Twitter™ to your fundraising channels is the ONLY method where individuals consistently tend to beat their fundraising tools.
And, leveraging social media yields more new donors than any other method: on average, 75 percent of donors through social media are new to the organization versus just 50 percent of all donors in support of event participants.
Yet, email, which is a one-to-one communication vehicle, still returns the best numbers. The authors say this is understandable because social media has a much broader reach and therefore donors are often not as closely connected to the participants they are supporting. But in the end, by combining online and offline, participants raise 6 times more than offline only.
The report analyzed data from 1,750 events and more than 1 million participants that had implemented social media tools for their participants in 2009.
Check out the corresponding infographic on the value of “friends asking friends” fundraising. Here’s a piece of it, in case you need a little extra motivation to click the link…enjoy!