Non-Profit Times: Facebook/Social Media Boosting Fund-Raising

The June 15 edition of the Non-Profit Times just found its way into my inbox (my old-school inbox...you know, the one where they put this stuff called paper? And I walk downstairs to get it out of the admin office? On the actual, physical first floor of our building? Oh, forget it.)



It's nice to see the article point out non-profits who are making a buck through social media in general and Facebook specifically. One of the big questions everyone has about social media is, of course, "what do I get out of this?" I don't know the answer, honestly...and this is coming from someone who considers himself a social media evangelist.

The question for the here and now becomes this: is sharing information enough? Sure, social media shares a lot of information, engages communities, etc. But whether or not it is having an impact on the bottom line remains to be seen.

Oh, sure, there are exceptions. Zappos does very, very well on social media. So does Dell (in fact, Dell's success marketing on Twitter during the holiday season gave birth to a rumor that Twitter was going to start charging companies for using its service; I sure hope they don't do that to non-profits, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Then there are those non-profits that are seeing tremendous success on Facebook. The Nature Conservancy raises the most through its Facebook cause, bringing in $214,468. That may not sound like a lot, but as the NPTimes article points out, updating Facebook is a heck of a lot less expensive and time-consuming that sending out a solicitation letter. Hence the appeal of this form of communicating with potential donors. It's one of the myriad of reasons we're committed to reaching out this way.

But at the end of the day, whether Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or blogs helps bring in donors remains to be seen. Yes, it raises awareness, which has its own enormous value, to be sure. One question I've always had is how do you track financial contributions that may or may not come from social media channels? Right now it simply can't be done. I can tell you to the penny how many people gave to Union Mission as a result of our decidedly old-school appeal letter that went out to donors in June. But I have no clue--and may never know--how many (or if any) dollars came in because someone is a Union Mission fan on Facebook, or because they joined our Facebook cause.

So...do you forsee a day when we'll be able to quantify, in dollars and cents, how valuable social media is to a non-profit? Is it worth the time I spend, on a weekly basis, updating content across all of our platforms?

Hope you'll share some insights with us.