Social Media Has Growing Impact on Event Fundraising

Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, continue to drive new levels of success for Not for Profit event fundraising that organisations can no longer ignore, according to new research from global software company Blackbaud and Charity Dynamics in the US.

Mark Davis, co-author of the research says while some people still doubt the fundraising potential of these tools, special event participants continue to be an exception and have shown strong fundraising success by tapping into the power of social networking.

The research uncovered the following trends:

• Event participants that adopted integrated social media tools increased their fundraising by as much as 40 percent compared to their peers who weren’t using the available online tools.
• Participants who used Twitter raised more money and reached more donors than non-Twitter users, tripled their personal fundraising goals and raised nearly 10 times more online.
• Fundraising via Facebook has evolved in both process and success from user initiated to organization-prompted to sophisticated Facebook applications that automate status updates by prompting participants throughout event campaigns.
• YouTube users performed the strongest offline compared to participants who were using other social media tools and are more likely to balance their use of both online and offline channels to tell their stories and conduct fundraising activities.
• Donors attracted through social media are more likely new to an organization. On average, 75 percent of donors through social media are new to organizations versus an average of 50 percent of all donors in support of participants.

The research provides an in-depth look at the growing impact of social media tools on peer-to-peer fundraising and how event participants are using these online tools to more effectively support Not for Profits.

As part of the research project, the team analysed data from 1,750 events that provided social media tools to nearly 1 million participants during 2009.

Donna Wilkins, co-author of the paper and president of Charity Dynamics says that in all cases, the research found that event participants who used social media tools set higher fundraising goals, reached more donors and raised more money.

Additionally, it found that participants who achieved the strongest fundraising success were those that combined multiple social media tools.

Visit www.blackbaud.com/eventfundraising or www.charitydynamics.com/socialmediastudy to download the research paper.