The Rise of Technology and Fundraising Education

There’s also a wonderful opportunity in engaging supporters and having them share their own videos. So many nonprofit supporters — surely in the 20- to 30-year-old demographic but more and more in the baby boomer generation — are making smartphone videos. People can, with just a little encouragement, jump into the pool. You can ask some of your supporters to share what they’re making. We see it with the National Wildlife Federation, for example. You see people using smartphones to film sightings of rare birds, to capture and distribute that as a digital bird-watching community.

It costs them nothing; it’s just a way of thinking about supporter engagement in new ways that can also be powerful. People love to see their work being shared on the site of organizations that they care a lot about. It’s still communications, still fundraising, still engagement, but these tools expand the opportunities that nonprofit strategists have to not only coordinate these functions internally but to use them to amplify and accelerate the advocacy work they’re already doing. There are lots of opportunities out there. It’s very exciting.