Tag Archive for 'causes'

Birthday Cause Wrapped Up

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on January 4, 2009
in fundraising and reports
. 6 Comments

My 26th birthday came and went already and what I’m most excited about (other than the weekend trip we took to Bruges) is the money I was able to pull together from generous friends for Free Geek!  As you can see from the screenshot below, I exceeded my goal and Free Geek will be seeing nearly $350 coming its way!

THANK YOU to all of you who donated and supported my Birthday Cause; it means SO much to me!

I first talked about the Birthday Cause application on Facebook in December when I set it up for my birthday.  In addition to the Thank You, I wanted to share some thoughts about the Birthday Cause application and my experience using it for my birthday fundraiser.

It’s super EASY

It came to me, always. When conducting a campaign at your organization, you’ve probably experienced that you get a better return (whether it’s donations, volunteers, sign-ups, or whatever else) when you reach out to people often with direct opportunities.  Causes’ Birthday Cause application does just that when you set it up.

It emailed me two weeks before my birthday to let me know that I could use the application, and once I had it set up, it emailed me every day with direct links to help me make the most of the tool.  Birthday Cause “Tip of the Day” emails included actions for setting my status, emailing contacts, personalized asking, setting notifications and more.  Here are some examples:

Setting your Status:

Dear Amy,

Just 11 days left until your Birthday!

Congratulations on having raised $234 from 9 donors. Great work! If you haven’t already, take a look at your birthday cause page to see if they left you any birthday greetings, and stop by your promotion page to thank them.

Tip of the Day: Setting Your Status
Every time you change your status, all of your friends can see the update. We’ve created a set of status messages for you to chose from that link directly to your Birthday Cause. Choosing a new one each day is an easy way to make sure your friends know about your birthday cause. To change your status just go here: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/birthdays/29850/status?m=7835d9b4

Keep up the good work,
The Causes Team

Birthday Cause Page:

Dear Amy,

Just 12 days left until your Birthday!

Congratulations on having raised $182 from 7 donors. Great work! If you haven’t already, take a look at your birthday cause page to see if they left you any birthday greetings, and stop by your promotion page to thank them.

Tip of the Day: Your Birthday Cause Page
Your quote is the most important thing on your birthday cause page. Its what your friends will see when they go to the page, and what will help them decide if they want to donate or not. Spend some time making it look nice, and explaining why your birthday cause is important to you. To edit your quote, click ‘Edit Birthday Cause’ from your cause page, or click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/birthdays/29850/edit?m=7835d9b4

Keep up the good work,
The Causes Team

Inviting Friends:

Dear Amy,

Just 1 days left until your Birthday!

Congratulations on having raised $312 from 12 donors. Great work! If you haven’t already, take a look at your birthday cause page to see if they left you any birthday greetings.

Tip of the Day: Invite More Friends
You can now send more Birthday Requests through Facebook. This is one of the most effective ways to let people know about your Birthday Cause. Invite More Friends

Keep up the good work,
The Causes Team

Email:

Dear Amy,

Just 10 days left until your Birthday!

Congratulations on having raised $286 from 11 donors. Great work! If you haven’t already, take a look at your birthday cause page to see if they left you any birthday greetings, and stop by your promotion page to thank them.

Tip of the Day: Email
Email is an effective way to get in touch with large numbers of your friends and let them know about your birthday cause.

We have set up an easy way for you to email all of your friends with the Causes application. You can do this up to two times, at any time up to and including the day of your birthday. To do so now, click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/birthdays/29850/email?m=7835d9b4

Thanks,
Amy

Keep up the good work,
The Causes Team

One to One Requests:

Dear Amy,

Just 8 days left until your Birthday!

Congratulations on having raised $312 from 12 donors. Great work! If you haven’t already, take a look at your birthday cause page to see if they left you any birthday greetings, and stop by your promotion page to thank them.

Tip of the Day: One to One Requests
People are most responsive to one-to-one requests. If you have some friends that you are comfortable enough with to ask specifically to donate, doing so is the most effective thing you can do to raise money for your Birthday Cause.

You can make these requests by posting to the walls of these friends from your Birthday Cause promotion page. You can get to that page by clicking ‘Promote your Birthday Cause’ from your cause page or clicking this link: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/birthdays/29850/promote?m=7835d9b4

Keep up the good work,
The Causes Team

Notifications:

Dear Amy,

Just 9 days left until your Birthday!

Congratulations on having raised $286 from 11 donors. Great work! If you haven’t already, take a look at your birthday cause page to see if they left you any birthday greetings, and stop by your promotion page to thank them.

Tip of the Day: Notifications
Notifying your friends about your birthday cause is a good way to spread the word. We allow you to send up to three notifications to your friends about your birthday cause. You can even queue up notifications to be sent automatically the day before your birthday and on your birthday. To send notifications, click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/birthdays/29850/notify?m=7835d9b4

Keep up the good work,
The Causes Team

The direct links (most are hidden in the above examples as they were hyperlinked text into my account) helped me jump straight to where I needed to be to let my friends know about my cause.  Not only did it make getting the word out about the cause easy, but it helped me stay on top of the donations so I could properly thank my donors!  This is a huge bonus point for the Birthday Cause application because publicly thanking supporters is one of the biggest keys to keeping up the momentum of your fundraising appeal (because not only to donors feel appreciated, but also more inclined to tell their friends about the opportunity - plus, it’s another public mentioning of your campaign!).  Here’s what the email looks like when someone donates:

Lori Faye has donated $26 to your birthday cause! You have now raised $26 from 1 friend and need 9 more to meet your goal.

Thank Your Friends For Donating

Thanks,
The Causes Team

The emails has a direct link to my Birthday Cause page where I can read Lori’s message and thank her.

I was worried when I first set up the application that it would end up being more work to maintain than I had in the midst of holiday season.  Instead, I didn’t feel like I was doing any work at all and yet saw the donations streaming in!

It’s actually FUN

It let me connect with my friends, all over. Facebook is a tool I use to stay connected to my friends and family all over the world.  Regardless of where I’m travelling or currently based, I know everyone is just a click or two away.  That’s why it was such a great opportunity to celebrate my birthday INSIDE Birthday Causes because I’m now a continent away from most of my friends and family.  Connecting with friends as they donated was such a thrill, with people contributing to the Birthday Cause from all over the globe.  I was always excited to get an email from Causes and could never even guess who it would be from each time.

It’s designed to WORK

I really like when things just work.  Like I said, I wasn’t sure how much time I would have with the holidays and our planned travels.  It didn’t matter though, because the application did everything I would have needed it to do. Of course, everything could always work a little better, right?  Here are some of my suggestions to Causes to improve the Birthday Cause application:

  • #1.  I was always unsure whether it would send a request/invite to people who had already donated and that made me less inclined to send out messages repeatedly
  • #2.  I wish that I could have personalized the groups more specifically - if I said I wanted the application to automatically alert my friends at certain intervals, I wanted to also say which friends at which intervals instead of the option being the same for all of it
  • #3.  I know that the Birthday Cause is supposed to help you raise money for a cause of your choice, but I wish I could have had other options beyond giving money - Free Geek is a dynamic organization and I would have liked to encourage people to donate money, but also to pledge to volunteer, register their donated computer parts towards the Birthday Cause, and so on with all of it counting towards my goal
  • #4.  If people donated close together chronologically, the application would only alert me to the most recent donation, so some times I didn’t realize people had donated  to thank them in a timely way
  • #5.  I would have preferred it if my Thank You messages to my donors could have shown up on the Birthday Cause page as well as on their profiles, the same way the application creates posts to my profile when they donate and leave a message

I think it’s a great way to celebrate your birthday and support your favorite organization at the same time.  Learn more about Causes here and how you can use the Birthday Cause application for your special day!

Happy Birthday, Beth!

My good friend Beth Kanter’s birthday is coming up quickly and guess what, she is using Birthday Causes to raise funds!  If you want to wish Beth a happy birthday, you can donate to her Birthday Cause to help support The Sharing Foundation.  Learn more and support Beth here.

My Birthday Cause: Free Geek!

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on December 16, 2008
in case studies and fundraising
. 0 Comments

I have a birthday coming up and over the weekend I received an email from Causes, the social change application in Facebook.  Here’s what it said:

Happy (Almost) Birthday!

Thanks to Facebook, in two weeks all of your friends will see that it’s your birthday. Instead of just writing on your wall, or giving you something you don’t need, what if they had a chance to help a cause you believe in? Whether you want to raise money for clean water in Ethiopia, vaccinations for children in Haiti, or a safe home for a puppy in Mississipi, with a Birthday Cause your friends can give in honor of your special day.

Select your Birthday Cause today: Get Started - Learn More

Have a very happy birthday,
The Causes Team

Since we moved over here just 3 months ago, I knew that my birthday wasn’t going to be spent with all my friends from home (we are going to travel a bit though, so it’ll still be a fun day!).  No birthday party meant no one buying presents.  I wouldn’t have wanted the gifts anyway, but know that people like to give them, just as much as I do for their special days.  So, I figured this would help friends celebrate my birthday with me, but help out a worthy organization, at the same time!

I clicked through and created my birthday cause in support of Free Geek! (I’ve talked about Free Geek before and why I think they are a great organization.)

The process was simple, straightforward, easy, and most importantly, empowering.  Causes has done a great job to put the tools in the user’s hands to personalize their message, pick a cause/organization that they care about, and choose the avenues for publicizing their cause that fit their community (I didn’t want to email every person right away but just those using Causes, for example, and didn’t want to email people as often automatically as I new I would email people personally, etc.).

After I finished personalizing my Birthday Cause and alerting friends about it, I was able to place a widget on my profile so people could see it when they visited my page.  I just want to point out, this was the easiest application process I’ve ever seen: it did everything for me and I just chose what, when and where.  Even putting the widget on my page was done for me, I just clicked where I wanted it to sit!

When friends donate to the Birthday Cause, they are able to write a message that appears on my Facebook Wall.  It’s great because they get recognized as donors immediately, I get to have a birthday greeting from them, and others see the donations coming in and click through themselves to check it out.

I receive notifications by email when friends donate, and can click through from the emails to thank them, send out messages, and more.  The Causes application has really done it right with the Birthday Cause process.

The first person who tried to donate, my friend Rose Vines (a wonderfully kind, and incredibly smart woman), experienced an issue with the site and it wouldn’t let her donate - the worst situation for potential donors!  She let me know what happened and I immediately emailed the Causes team at the email address in their help section.  I received two emails from Dave: 1. just after sending in the message about the issue, he let me know they were aware of the problem and were working on it 2. the next day he emailed again to say the problem was fixed and everything should be up and running.  Though, in just that little time, I’d already had 7 successful donations and one of them was from Rose!

The next time you have a birthday, if you use Facebook, I’d encourage you to try out the Facebook Causes’ Birthday Cause application and have fun raising funds in celebration of your birthday and the great work of one of your favorite organizations!

Thanks to all those who have helped me raise much-needed support (whether it is funds or not) for Free Geek - I really appreciate it all!  And thanks again to Causes for the great application!

If you’d like to support Free Geek and wish me a happy birthday - check out my Birthday Cause!

Thoughts on Millenials and political action

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on May 22, 2008
in issues and socialmedia
. 0 Comments

About a year ago, I sat down to write two white papers on issues I had rumbling around in my head that involved the changing roles, as I saw it, of nonprofit organizations and foundations as well as the changing relationship between those organizations and citizens.  Trust me that had I finished writing those, you would have been privy as they would have been up on the blog.  Needless to say, my brain was taken over by work as is the problem that always comes up, and they remain strings of thoughts in text files on my computer.

Today, I finally made a little time to read through Social Citizens from Allison Fine and The Case Foundation.  It tore apart all of the other things I was thinking about today and threw me back into the subject of those white papers from last year.  It was wonderful!  So, I took it as a sign that I needed to get some of those thoughts out to you all this time around.  Keep in mind that these are my thoughts and I would love a chance (read: the time) to expand on them fully, so I apologize for the brevity.  Also, these ideas do not only sprout from this recent publication, obviously, but are inspired through many reports and from my own experiences as a Millenial.

Changing Role of Nonprofits and Foundations

Because so much of the organizing and activism, and thus information and opinion, around issues is done in networks of friends and family, the problem with access to both sides of the story and the opportunity for an independent and unique opinion grows.  As views are shaped by those closest to the individual, there is much less of a chance for a network-created cause or action to include full dialogue of an issue.

Nonprofits and foundations will continue to be tied to causes, changes, actions, and groups that form in social networks and elsewhere on the web.  The role these organizations have in the relationship will change to incorporate the need for access to the big picture.

Nonprofits and foundations will become sources for information and reliable reporting.  They will be the places that personalized campaigns link to for the background and continued data on an issue.  As the fundraising and momentum building moves more and more into the hands of supporters across the web and around the world, the relationship with the aligned organizations changes to reallocate responsibilities.  As information, data, and reporting providers, these organizations will work to ensure that the multitude of unique campaigns taking place simultaneously by supporters provide an opportunity for those networks and potential interested citizens to learn more (and act more).

Changing Expectations of Government and Corporations

Millenials feel political change by individuals is impossible and that political actions like voting and participating in the political arena as it currently exists do not have the impact they want.  This doesn’t mean that young voters aren’t turning out, as we see from the numbers in 2004 and so far in the primaries that the youth vote is taking a big upswing.  But, young voters view their action closer to a symbolic step than a concrete motion.

Millenials are also very concerned about and aware of the cause-related work that corporations are involved in, choosing to support (or purchase from) organizations that are environmentally conscious, giving back to the community, and/or contributing to changing social problems.  Young people report, as it says in the report, having more confidence in corporations than they do in the government.

This could mean that instead of groups of citizens urging politicians and policymakers to make changes around issues or specific legislation, that citizens instead turn to corporations who are aligned with those issues and support them in pressuring the government.  Standing behind more than just a product, but trusting in the clout of a corporation to swing policymakers.

To go further, this could even have implications for key supporters to have a ‘role’ (of some sort) in the leadership of the corporation.  This would complete the circle of accountability between the corporation and the supporters who have chosen to be loyal to the organization because of the issue alignment.

Changing Identity

In previous generations, personal identify was defined by career/job title and field.  You were an engineer or a teacher or a scientist.  That meant something when you said it to a new acquaintance and similarly created automatic circles of colleagues even if you hadn’t met personally.

Now, as taking action for Millenials has become incredibly important and easy via the social communities and world of the web, who you are is no longer defined by the college major you graduated with.  Not only are people of my generation projected to change career fields, not just employers, many times over compared to past generations, but we have come of age in a time when learning is no longer a hierarchical or institutional activity.

The power to do something is in our hands and accessed any time we want online.  This means, Millenials will be identified with their issue-alignment and causes.  The personalized widgets for fundraising campaigns, challenges, and international issues now speak to who we are.  We find friends through the interconnected profile links of campaigns to save Darfur or cancer awareness.  My online actions and challenges are met by people from all backgrounds, job titles, and locations - but we are all working to protect the environment, or raise air quality standards, or stop human trafficking.

The way I expect not just my friends and family, but also my employers and politicians to identify me and communicate with me is also effected by the way I am defined by issues and not simply where I live or where I work.

—-

I know that is just the tip of the iceberg for three incredibly large areas, but I was going to burst if I didn’t get at least that much out of my head.  I would really, really love to hear what you think and keep this conversation going.  As the way individuals ‘live’ online is already drastically changing the way nonprofits do their work.

America’s Giving Challenge: Importance of discussion

Published
by
amysampleward
on December 23, 2007
in fundraising and otherblogs
. 2 Comments

I received an email from Beth Kanter about my decision to join her in championing the cause for the Sharing Foundation, which helps children in Cambodia receive the education and support they need. Beth asked:

What is the workflow for an effective cause ..? Suppose your
organization wanted to work with an intern to manage the cause with you. What’s on the to do list? How should the staff person manage the intern?

My initial response was two fold:

1. Build discussion

This is achieved by creating posts and questions on the Cause page so that when people click through from a blog or an invitation to join the cause, they are able to see people engaged and learn more immediately, without having to do the research themselves if they are unfamiliar with the organization. Identifying the most active participants in the cause and asking them to post a question, or better yet, asking them to respond to a question posted by the intern would be a good first step to getting conversations started on the Cause page.

2. Link to discussion

This is simply a matter of finding blogs and websites posting about and inviting others to the Cause, then putting links to them on the Cause page and thanking them for their shared support. This cross referencing will add to the information/education on the organization and therefore more people supporting it, while at the same time creating an opportunity for more participants in the conversation.

What do you think? Is conversation, the opportunity to ask or see other’s questions and answers about the work of an organization, something that positively influences your participation and support?

Also, today is Earl Kanter’s (86th) birthday and Beth is encouraging all of us to donate $10 to our Sharing Foundation cause to celebrate. You can join the Cause now, too!