Everybody is talking about social media today. Facebook has over 750 million active users, YouTube is the #2 search engine on the web, and Google just launched their own social networking site, Google+. But while it's obvious that social networking is a big deal, it's not nearly so clear how or if businesses and non-profit organizations should be engaging in it. The simple answer is "Yes, you should be," but the complicated answer takes a bit longer to explain. Thankfully, the great people at Sage Non-Profit have put together this free webinar that covers ten tips for getting your foot in social networking door, and what you should be doing once you get established.

Although the webinar was created with non-profit organizations in mind, these are actually general tips apply equally to any organization or business. The first four tips are:

• Claim Your Name
• Complete Your Profiles, Completely
• Listen
• Old Etiquette Rules Still Apply

Want to learn the other six tips? Click here to sign up for the free webinar! This is a pre-recorded webinar, so you can view it at your leisure and as many times as you wish.

After spending a week looking at five myths that might be holding your organization back from developing a robust online donation strategy, you might be wondering what kinds of proactive steps you can take towards growing your donation pool. Jason Falls, public relations and communications expert, provides some interesting and compelling ideas about helping nonprofit organizations develop a strategy that will grow your network of financial giving. On his blog, Social Media Explorer, he presents 3 keys to nonprofit success that are well worth paying attention to, whether you raise funds online or not.

The Three Keys

In the opinion of the Falls, a good nonprofit strategy must include 3 important components as follows:

• Have a compelling story to tell
• Make a specific ask or establish a specific goal to reach
• Make it astonishingly easy to give

The first of these three key components is the most important so let’s take a closer look.

A Compelling Story

Some of the most seasoned, well-spoken and intelligent advocates talk for hours about the importance of supporting their cause. They are passionate about the subject matter and supply you with fact after fact to convince you to donate. Then they wonder why people don’t immediately pull out their check books.

It’s because their knowledge and facts don’t include a compelling story. A nonprofit needs to find an emotional connection with their audience. When you see starving children on television and the desperation in their eyes, you’re compelled to write a check and help out. When someone shares a personal story about breast cancer and persuades you to think about your mother, sister, wife, or other relative, it can be powerful motivation to make you want to support the cause. Nothing is more compelling than a great story and every nonprofit has one (or several).

Make a Specific Ask

If you’re goal is to “Raise Money,” then it’s difficult for donors to see a tangible result of their contribution. On the other hand if your goal is to provide “1 week of meals that serves 10 people in need within your community,” donors feel like their contributions are being put to good use.

Make it Easy to Give

The third component of growing your donations is where technology comes into play: Making it easy to give. Sage Fundraising Online is one option available to your organization to make sure that your supports can give easily to your cause. Creating custom tailored donation forms for your website may be the most obvious way that SFO can help your donations, but have you considered using those tools to help your live events as well? From having laptops open at your speaking engagements to creating specific forms for smartphones, there are a nearly unlimited number of ways you can use the tools that SFO provides to make things easier and more streamlined for your donors. And remember, the better the experience they have, the more likely they are to tell their friends and to donate in the future.

Keith Ross of Dundee Group hosts monthly webinars explaining Sage Fundraising Online. If you would like to see a live demonstration of this tool and some of the things it could do for your business, click here to see the date of the next free webinar.

Click here to read the full article “Three Keys to Nonprofit Success in Social Media.”
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Dundee Group is now equiped to help non-profits bring in money as well as slow the outward flow. Sage Fundraising Online, a new software solution from Sage North America, will give organizations the tools to quickly, professionally, and inexpensively raise money using the internet.

We're going to be discussing all that you can do with Sage Fundraising Online in the next couple of weeks, but first we want to address some myths that you may have heard about fundraising on the internet. Check back every day this week for the truth about online fundraising!

Myth #5: Raising 10 percent of all gifts online is a great goal.
In January 2008, the Barack Obama campaign raised $28 million online—88 percent of the total funds raised. In fact, on one day that same month, the campaign raised $525,000 online in one hour. Many political campaigns, like most fundraising organizations, consider raising five to 10 percent of all funds online to be a success. But the incredible results of the Obama campaign should force many fundraisers to rethink those expectations.

Granted, most organizations don’t have the marketing power of a presidential candidate, or the deep financial and staff resources. But, there are two things the Obama campaign does that any organization can do: first, any organization can commit to making the Internet a major point of engagement with supporters; and second, any organization can commit to offering a variety of messages and giving options.

As a final thought, consider this year as an opportunity. The vast social shift happening online will create winners and losers. Organizations that set high goals and truly commit to online fundraising will reach and retain more donors in the coming years. Be one of the winners.

You can read all five myths in a PDF on our website, or learn more about Sage Fundraising Online! Keep reading next week for information about this new software and what it can do for your non-profit organization.

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Dundee Group is now equiped to help non-profits bring in money as well as slow the outward flow. Sage Fundraising Online, a new software solution from Sage North America, will give organizations the tools to quickly, professionally, and inexpensively raise money using the internet.

We're going to be discussing all that you can do with Sage Fundraising Online in the next couple of weeks, but first we want to address some myths that you may have heard about fundraising on the internet. Check back every day this week for the truth about online fundraising!

Myth #4: Technology is not the problem.
Most online fundraising tools have a few things in common: they’re expensive, they’re difficult to deploy, it’s hard to change anything once deployed, and they only work on a single website. Because of this, many nonprofits have extremely limited online efforts. As discussed earlier, organizations then mistakenly “blame” poor results on their marketing programs, or even on the donors themselves.

The truth is that online giving is often limited by online fundraising technology. Cost and complexity have led many nonprofits to focus on only a few, or even just one, online fundraising program.

The good news is that a new generation of online fundraising solutions are available today that don’t have the limitations of prevalent software of the past. Such next-generation tools are significantly less expensive and much easier to deploy and modify. One major benefit is that the flexibility of these tools allows experimentation with different strategies and tactics for online fundraising. This means it will be easier for you to create an online program for every marketing effort, and give donors more opportunities to support your organization.

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Dundee Group is now equiped to help non-profits bring in money as well as slow the outward flow. Sage Fundraising Online, a new software solution from Sage North America, will give organizations the tools to quickly, professionally, and inexpensively raise money using the internet.

We're going to be discussing all that you can do with Sage Fundraising Online in the next couple of weeks, but first we want to address some myths that you may have heard about fundraising on the internet. Check back every day this week for the truth about online fundraising!

Myth #3: Online fundraising means raising money through my organization’s website.
The standard model of online fundraising is to divert people from wherever they are on the Internet to a central donation form on an organization’s website. But the massive, untapped potential for your organization to raise more money isn’t on your website—it is on all the other websites that your donors and supporters frequently visit.

If we look at the places individuals visit online everyday, their favorite charity is probably not among them. However, they do visit their employers’ websites and they might take action for a nonprofit their company supports. They likely edit their personal pages or blogs everyday, and they’ll even publish about a cause that inspires them. They also visit their friends’ blogs and personal pages, and may post, email, chat, or tweet about their favorite charity.

The individuals engaged in these conversations include some of your strongest, most vocal advocates, and each of them is willing to evangelize your organization’s mission. They have established bonds of trust with their personal networks. Why, then, would you ask them to leave a site they trust and go donate on yours? If they are willing to evangelize for you, they also might be willing to host a donation form for you. So, why not take the donation form to where the conversation is already happening?

Airline ticket sales provide a helpful reference for this point. It is possible to buy tickets on an airline’s website, but it is more common to buy them from one of many “portals,” such as Expedia.com. Millions of people buy their tickets on travel sites because they have an existing affinity for those specific sites. Airlines don’t care where people buy their tickets, so long as they’re being sold.

Similarly, you can reach out to your network of supporting organizations, partners, or even the personal sites of individual advocates and turn them into donation engines for your organization. This is an opportune time to look beyond your website and consider how you can more effectively leverage the broader web to build new relationships and increase online giving.

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Dundee Group is now equiped to help non-profits bring in money as well as slow the outward flow. Sage Fundraising Online, a new software solution from Sage North America, will give organizations the tools to quickly, professionally, and inexpensively raise money using the internet.

We're going to be discussing all that you can do with Sage Fundraising Online in the next couple of weeks, but first we want to address some myths that you may have heard about fundraising on the internet. Check back every day this week for the truth about online fundraising!

Myth #2: People won’t give online.
Americans gave an estimated $300 billion in individual gifts to nonprofit organizations in 2008. About four percent of this amount—$12 billion—came online. That means that people give billions upon billions of dollars a year over the phone, in the mail, or by other means. The important question is, what is holding people back from giving more online?

One widely held belief is that donors choose to give offline because of security and privacy concerns. Some nonprofits even believe that their donors prefer to transact offline. But this is countered by evidence from the broader marketplace. A 2008 Nielsen Company survey showed that 94 percent of Internet users in the U.S. have shopped online. In 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans spent more than $136 billion buying merchandise over the Internet.

Clearly, there is little reluctance within the general population to make purchases online. So, what is holding people back from giving online? The answer has a lot to do with the options donors are given. If online giving software is complex, cumbersome, and unrewarding for a nonprofit, it is almost certainly complex, cumbersome, and unrewarding for a donor, too. A donation is an extremely important social interaction, but once someone is committed to a gift, it is simply another transaction; and the more steps a donor is asked to take, the less likely he or she is to complete that transaction. Creating multiple giving opportunities for each of your programs and streamlining the donation process are simple changes that can increase online giving and strengthen donor satisfaction.

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Dundee Group, Ltd has long been involved in helping non-profit organizations fulfill their missions. We have provided solutions to reduce administrative burdens, allowing them to focus more of their resources, both human and monetary, on the care and services they provide.

We want to help more.

Now Dundee Group is equiped to help non-profits bring in money as well as slow the outward flow. Sage Fundraising Online, a new software solution from Sage North America, will give organizations the tools to quickly, professionally, and inexpensively raise money using the internet.

We're going to be discussing all that you can do with Sage Fundraising Online in the next couple of weeks, but first we want to address some myths that you may have heard about fundraising on the internet. Check back every day this week for the truth about online fundraising!

Myth #1: Online fundraising isn’t as effective as offline techniques.
In the 2007 Philanthropic Giving Index report published by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, only 34 percent of nonprofits surveyed reported success with online fundraising, and participants ranked online giving as the least successful fundraising technique in the survey.

The reason for these lackluster results is that organizations have not applied the same focus to their online efforts as they have in other areas. Most donors expect professionally printed mailings that include good stories and related giving options. But too often when they go online, they find gray, generic giving forms with no associated content. It’s not surprising, then, that donors give so little online, and fundraisers conclude that online giving doesn’t work. Organizations end up setting lower expectations and focus even less on their online efforts—which leads to more bad results, and the cycle repeats.

The truth is, online fundraising can and should be far more effective than other “offline” fundraising techniques, in terms of response rates, dollars raised, cost per dollar raised, and, importantly, connections with new and younger donors.

Set high expectations and focus on achieving better results. Start by evaluating whether you are committing a comparable amount of resources—people, time, and planning—to your online initiatives. Keep in mind that since online fundraising is almost always more cost effective, your financial investment won’t need to be as high as other efforts.

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