Facebook, Fundraising and the Dawn of a New Age

By Karin Kirchoff and Jeff Regen

There also have been significant changes on the unpaid data side. About a year and a half ago, Facebook enabled marketers to request permission for users’ data on their profiles, friends and activities via Facebook Open Graph — with the promise of providing deeper and more engaging experiences for users who opt in. To our knowledge, this has been largely untapped by nonprofits. (Prove us wrong! We’d love to hear from you!)

Here are a few ways to use Facebook Open Graph to get your creative juices flowing:

Use supporters’ likes, interests, friends, activities and profiles on Facebook as inputs to segmentation and messaging. This data enables the creation of much richer profiles of individuals, especially for high-value supporters (major donors, super-activists, event team captains, volunteers, etc.).
Share with supporters (e.g., in e-mail) which of their Facebook friends already have donated to your charity, or like your cause or action.
Profile and then target potential event participants and fundraisers based on this data. Engage them via Facebook and other channels. (They must have shared their e-mail, addresses or other contact information through traditional means in order to contact them outside of Facebook.).
Find “grass tops”/key influencers for lobbying efforts.
Target frequent sharers explicitly to ensure that viral campaigns go … well, viral.

How do you get people to opt in? Getting users to click on “I believe in …” “I support [your cause],” or “I want to stop [climate change/animal cruelty/cancer]” buttons on your site is one great way. And when people click, not only can you access their Open Graph data, this also generates earned media as it’s shared in their friends’ news feeds and can help with search rankings, too. Try tools from Small Act, ActionSprout, ShortStack or others for Facebook research and generating actions and conversions.