I’m pleased to announce that Tivix has launched a beta version of our new product, Give.fm. It’s a web application designed specifically for micro-recurring donations (individuals pledging 10-cents-a-day toward a cause, for example).

I thought I’d take a moment to address the two obvious questions about our new Give.fm offering – why micro-donations? and why recurring?

Micro Donations

Traditionally, fundraising profesionals at nonprofits have focused on high-capacity donors, for obvious reasons. But recently it’s become conventional wisdom that, in the aggregate, there is as much (or more) money in the long tail of smaller donors. The problem, of course, is that the long tail can be difficult to reach.

As an example of the power of reaching smaller donors, a special Haiti relief text-to-donate campaign in January 2010 by the Red Cross to engage mobile-phone supporters brought in $26 million in just 9 days. The younger demographic of Americans was eager act upon their social consciousness, and taken together they are an incredibly large donor base (even though their individual giving capacity may be lower).

But the fees for text-to-donate services are absurdly high. Creating a text donation campaign costs $3,000-$10,000 in setup fees, plus the mobile carrier takes as much as 20% of the money raised. In contrast, Give.fm charges nonprofits just $5/month for unlimited fundraising, plus standard credit card processing fees of approximately 3.75%.

Recurring Donations

Any nonprofit organization today is looking to improve the sustainability of their impact. One-time social benefit is good, but sustainable social impact is much, much better. And part of that is financial sustainability. Recurring donations, by definition, provide more sustainable support for an organization than one-time donations do. So, we’ve built Give.fm specifically to support recurring donations.

Social Media Integration

There’s another powerful aspect to Give.fm as well, of course: the way in which we’re harnessing social media. If you’ve followed Tivix at all, you know that we believe passionately in the unique power of social media for fundraising and advocacy. And so Give.fm has built-in support for spreading the word via Facebook and Twitter.

I’m incredibly excited about Give.fm, and we look forward to continuing to expand and refine the product in the months ahead!

As part of Facebook’s Roadmap for the Future, they announced to the developer community last fall that they would be changing the width of all custom Facebook application tabs from 760 pixels to 520 pixels, effective August 23, 2010.


This has implications for all existing Facebook 3rd-party applications, including custom Facebook pages for all kinds of organizations.


I’m pleased to be able to announce that the Tivix technical team (led by CTO Sumit Chachra), has released new versions of all Tivix’s Facebook apps in advance of the Facebook switchover. Tivix customers don’t need to do anything – one of the advantages of running on a “cloud computing” platform like ours is that when we make an update to the platform, all of our customers immediately receive the benefit without having to do a thing!


Congrats to the engineering team at Tivix for getting this update done!

I recently spoke with someone who had to close-down a nonprofit organization because of a financial crisis they just couldn’t overcome. “The crisis just hit us so suddenly”, this person said. “If we only had time to put together a fundraising campaign I’m sure people would have responded, but we just didn’t have time”.

That got me thinking about the potential speed of fundraising today. Could a well-executed social media fundraising campaign have saved this organization?

The fastest way to do crisis fundraising, of course, is to get on the phone to board members who have the capacity to write a check on the spot. But a mass market campaign takes time to execute. Or does it?

I actually think in many ways social media is particularly well-suited to take advantage of a sense of urgency to achieve emergency fundraising goals. Part of what makes social media unique is the speed with which individuals can tap their personal network: if there’s something that I think is incredibly important, I can reach my entire Facebook and LinkedIn networks (500+ people) with a few clicks. If you reach just 1,000 people like me and incite us to action, then your message can reach hundreds of thousands of individuals within a matter of hours (or even minutes). That’s precisely what makes social media so unique.

The keys to making this work are (1) As always, make the message clear, urgent, and compelling; (2) Get that message out to well-connected people with a direct “ask” for donations and for them to help you to spread the word; (3) lower the “giving friction” with an online donation processing method that makes it incredibly easy for people to donate.

Recent disasters (e.g. the Haiti earthquake) have actually raised more money than charities could effectively use, proving that people respond to urgent fundraising campaigns, through 21st century media.

Now, don’t be like the boy who cried wolf – don’t go launching “emergency” fundraising campaigns every week. But do remember that instilling a sense of urgency, with a clear-cut, tangible goal, can be very effective in fundraising, and that social media is particularly efficient for getting your message out quickly – especially when you include low-friction methods for individuals to respond to your call to action.

The beauty of social media is that it gives organizations the ability to engage in online conversation with supporters. Social media is very much built for 2-way communication, which is a very powerful thing, but it also means that if you inadvertently treat it as 1-way communication, you’ll run the risk of sounding like one hand clapping. So if your organization is posting to social media, you need to monitor and respond to the discussion around those posts.

You’ve probably had the experience of posting something about an organization and being surprised (and impressed) at how quickly that organization responds to your post. And you’ve probably seen the other extreme, where someone posts a question to an organization’s Facebook page and never gets any response at all. Or, worse yet, someone posts “This organization sucks!” – and that comment just sits there, unmonitored, for all the world to see.

If you’re going to take advantage of the power of social media to initiate conversations with your supporters and better understand their needs, then you need to stick around and actually participate in the discussion.

Laura Chyou, Director of Development and Communications at the Support Network and YWCA, put it to me this way in a recent conversation: “It is crucial to remember that the amazing benefits of social media tools work best when the organization’s leadership is actively involved with managing and monitoring the dialog, as part of the social media strategy”. She points out that since many nonprofit organizations struggle with lack of time, resources, and funding, it’s very easy for this to get overlooked.

But it’s not as hard as many organizations think. Here are some quick tips to making it easy:

• Set a simple Google alert for your organization.
• When you post to your organization’s Facebook page, check back on it at regular intervals (Facebook doesn’t yet have alerts for Pages, unfortunately, but may be adding this feature).
• At least once a day do a Twitter search for mentions of your organization.

Doing an efficient job of paying attention to organization is social media shouldn’t take more then ten minutes a day, and it will be time well spent. In fact, here’s a HubSpot webinar entitled “How To Monitor Your Social Media Presence In 10 Minutes A Day“.

If your organization is going to be active in social media then you need to also be actively participating in the online conversation. Otherwise it’s like not showing up for your own party.

Do have your own experience with this, and how to do it effectively? I’d love to hear about it!

There’s lots of attention these days to online privacy concerns (or maybe I should say attention to the fact that that in online social media no one seems to care about privacy anymore!). And there’s been a minor media firestorm about how some new companies like Blippy have come out with the bizarre-sounding business model of allowing people to publish their credit card purchase transactions for the whole world to see.

Business models like this are driven by the idea that if my friends see I’ve made a certain purchase, then they may be more likely to make the same purchase – and obviously companies are trying to figure out how to take advantage of that dynamic.

NPR member station KALW did an excellent piece on this general topic this morning, and included an interview with me about how Tivix takes this same principal and gives nonprofits a way to benefit from it, through our popular Facebook App Shop4Good. You can read a transcript of the whole NPR/KALW piece, or click below to hear audio of just the part about Tivix and nonprofits (with the added bonus of a hilarious clip from the Colbert Report!).

Savvy marketers and nonprofits today understand that what makes social media powerfully different is that it’s a medium built for 2-way communication. So success in social media is all about “engagement”. But what does that mean, exactly?

Let’s say you’ve built a Facebook page for your organization (hopefully using the special Tivix app to enhance it!), and now you’re ready to start posting to the page. You know that posting regularly is key to leveraging the value of your organization’s social media presence, because your organization’s fans will interact with your posts by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. And this engagement leads to “organic” posts being published in their friends’ News Feed, thus getting that elusive viral effect that every organization wants.

On your personal Facebook account, you may be used to status updates such as “working from home today”. But for your organization, that kind of status update won’t do anything to build engagement. If your organization’s posts seem meaningless and irrelevant then your fans get will bored, and (worse yet) will eventually remove you from their news feed. And then you’re not getting any value at all.

So, Tip #1 is to keep your posts relevant and compelling to your particular audience.

Tip #2 is to phrase posts in a way that invites interaction. Make them “conversation starters”, not just statements. The Environmental Defense Fund, a Tivix customer, is particularly good at this, with posts such as “Have you discovered what kind of eco-nerd you are yet? Take our quiz!” and “What do you think are the top environmental priorities today?” Posting questions – or posting content like a video or blog post and asking “What do you think?” – is what drives engagement.

Tip #3 is to find the right rhythm to your posts. If you post too infrequently, people forget about you (or view your organization as being inactive). But if you post too often you’ll get perceived as “spammy”.

As a general rule, post often (1x a week is a good rule of thumb), and remember that “spammy” has as much to do with the quality of the content as it does the frequency. If every post your organization makes is a plea for money, then that seems spammy regardless of the frequency. If, on the other hand, your posts are interesting, with high-quality content relevant to your cause, then you could be posting several times a week without annoying anyone.

When you do post for fundraising, do it judiciously, around a particular opportunity. “Give just $10 today and it will be matched by the Smith Foundation – only until the end of the week. Click to help us meet our goal!” is an example which instills a sense of urgency. But again, use fundraising pitches sparingly, so that people don’t just tune-out. Focus on providing quality content most of the time, and that will make your occasional fundraising pitches stand out and be even more effective.

Tip #4 is to use the great analytics which Facebook provides for free. Click on “Page Insights” on your organization’s FB page (you have to be an admin of the page to see this) and you’ll find great information on who’s been visiting your page, and how engaging your content has been. You’ll see “Post Quality” which is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. The Post Quality compares your engagement level to Pages that have a similar number of fans. Check this data regularly, and make note of the types of content and posts that seem to be particularly engaging for your audience.

There’s an old axiom that “you can’t improve it until you can first find a way to measure it”, and Facebook gives you free tools to measure engagement, so take advantage of them!

We have found that posting relevant content regularly, and developing a 2-way conversation around that content, is what creates successful engagement in social media. What has worked well for you and your organization? We’d love to hear your own experiences!

Every organization is different, but here are five components which we have found to be important considerations in developing a successful social media strategy:

1. Remember it’s just like any other communications channel – which means that your organization’s branding and messaging needs to be consistent and integrated. In my previous post I pointed out why handing social media off to a junior person on the staff is a mistake – it needs to be managed by the same person who owns the rest of your organization’s integrated marketing and communications.
2. Remember that it’s NOT just like any other communications channel. Specifically, remember that the power of social media has to do with the unique 2-way communication aspect. We used to say that “content is king”, but today, “conversation” is the new king of content. So, while email or direct mail messaging tend to be top-down and 1-way, content which you post in social media should be designed to stimulate conversation horizontally. Pose provocative questions, take polls, post images and video designed to encourage people to comment, respond, and – most importantly – share with others.
3. Get buy-in from everyone in the organization. All too often social media gets handed-off to one person, and the rest of the organization is cynical about it and not very engaged. If you don’t have your whole organization engaged, there no way that you can get the full value of engagement with donors, members and supporters. Here’s an interesting post on Beth Kanter’s blog about running a workshop for one of Tivix’s customers, the Environmental Defense Fund, to get all 350 staff members engaged in supporting their social media strategy.
4. Unlike most other marketing efforts, the budget for social media is not “front loaded”. With many communications channels, the costs are upfront – producing a website, producing a video, etc, and then the ongoing costs are relatively modest. Social Media is the opposite – there are no up-front costs (in the sense that Facebook and Twitter are free to join), but for it to be a success there needs to be substantial ongoing “care and feeding”, in order to keep posting fresh, compelling, engaging content.
5. Look for best-practices you can “borrow”. Find other organizations similar to yours who are using social media successfully and figure out which aspects you can emulate. Call them up and talk to them – most organizations are happy to share successes and learnings with you (especially in return for reciprocal privileges!). And even though you may be running a nonprofit, don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from the private sector as well. This post from Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research has an up-to-date set of slides with the social media strategies from companies such as Cisco, IBM, and EMC.

Like any other communications initiative, social media should be approached with a well-researched and well-drafted strategy before you begin. The good news is that it lends itself well to an iterative process, so that you can constantly refine it until you are getting the full value of social media for your organization’s efforts around advocacy, fundraising, education, and member recruitment.

Social Media has multiple uses – communication, donor relations, advocacy, marketing, PR, fundraising – sometimes these departments within an organization work in tandem but more often than not, they work in their own silos. So who owns the social media implementation strategy for a nonprofit? Is it development, marketing or IT?

The answer to this question has a lot to do with your particular nonprofit: in small organizations everyone pretty much wears multiple hats, whereas larger organizations have completely separate departments.

The biggest mistake that I usually see is nonprofits who put the youngest intern in charge of social media, thinking that “Well, social media is all about the younger generation so I’ll give it to someone junior and let them do it”.

Bad idea. There are two reasons why I believe this is flawed thinking:

• Social Media is not limited to a younger generation. Of the 450+ million individuals on Facebook today, the fastest-growing age bracket on is the 33-55 year olds – a key donor group for any nonprofit. (more on Facebook’s demographics).
• Of all the different communication channels available to a nonprofit today – direct mail, email, website – social media is the most engaging (ie, it’s a 2-way conversation) and it’s by far the fastest-growing. Why would you want to turn the fastest-growing most engaging communications channel over to the most junior person on the team?

Different nonprofits have different missions. But one thing they all have in common is that to achieve their mission they need to build a strong base of donors, members, and supporters. And building that strong base involves strong marketing and development skills, consistently deployed across all the integrated communications channels your organization uses. Don’t turn social media over to a junior intern. Embrace it – it may be the most powerful communications medium your organization has today.

Next up: Developing a social media strategic plan for your organization.

Shop4Good offers nonprofits passive fundraising via an affiliate store. Think of it as a designated mall for your cause – every time someone shops at a store in your mall, the retailer donates a percentage of sales to your nonprofit. There are over 300 brands and retailers participating in the Shop4Good application including Target, Amazon.com, iTunes, Budget Rent-a-Car, HP, JetBlue Airlines, and Starbucks. More are being added each month.

The application can be used on Facebook (opening up access to 400M+ active consumers) for easy shop & share, as well as recruit individuals to the cause; it can also be used on the open web, rendering it more flexible than other solutions.

“Consumer spending is continuing continue even amidst a recession but charitable giving is decreasing. As much as consumers want to give they feel like they don’t have the resources. Shop4Good lets consumers buy the items they need from the brands and retailers they trust – knowing that their purchases will support a worthy cause. It’s a win for charities and a win for consumers,” says Bret Waters, CEO and Founder of Tivix. Tivix’s solutions are all cloud-computing based so there’s no software or hardware to purchase or install; tech support and administration are unnecessary; and Shop4Good is free of any monthly subscription fees.

For Kat White, Development Coordinator at Aim High, a tuition-free summer program for middle-schoolers in the Bay Area, “It’s a different way get our supporters involved in our program. We know we do great work; they know we do great work; this gives them a way to support us as they go about their daily activities.”
Other nonprofits using Shop4Good include the Environmental Defense Fund, the San Francisco Theater, and the Support Network for Battered Women.

About Tivix

Tivix is an easy-to-use online platform designed to assist non-profits fundraise and advocate online through the power of social media. With a suite of online applications
which harness the power of Facebook and other online social media, offered in simple and affordable packages, Tivix is bringing the next generation of technology to the nonprofit world.

About Bret Waters

Bret Waters, a Silicon Valley executive with a passion for social entrepreneurship, is the founder of Tivix. He was co-founder of Metagraphics (an early leader in web-based
publishing), Founder and CEO of Artmachine (acquired by eMotion, now OpenText, NASDAQ:OTEX).

As a current board member of the Stanford University School of Education he is involved in driving a major new $75 million fundraising initiative for the University, and he has also led major fundraising initiatives in his previous roles as Chief Operating Officer for Stanford New Schools and as Executive Director of the Woodside School Foundation (both 501(c)3 organizations dedicated to K-12 education improvement).

For more information, photographs, or to arrange an interview with Bret Waters, CEO & Founder of Tivix, please contact: Ramona Persaud at 315.280.6505 or ramona@persaudmarketing.com

This is the first of what I intend to be a 4-part series of posts about how nonprofits can better use social media. But before I can really talk about “best practices”, it’s probably best to just start with “why?”, as in “Why should my nonprofit organization even be using social media at all?”

I meet daily with nonprofit organizations and I’m often struck by what an interesting point in time this is, in early 2010. Some nonprofits already have a very active presence in social media, some want to but just don’t know where to start, and others don’t believe in social media at all. Which means that social media today is pretty much about exactly where the web was in 1995 – some early adopters, some strugglers, and some ardent non-believers.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube are the big names in social media, but “what is social media?” One definition is simply that in social media there’s a 2-way conversation going on, as opposed to traditional media (TV, radio, websites), where the conversation is really 1-way. And there’s also a “social” component, usually having to do with the fact that individual people are connecting and sharing with each other (over 50 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every week).

Humans are naturally social creatures; when we get together and socialize we naturally talk about and advocate for the things we care about. Combine this natural behavior with the network effect (if I tell 10 people about a cause I’m passionate about, and each of them tells ten people, and each of them tell ten people, we suddenly have 1,000 new recruits to our cause) and social media is an environment which is incredibly fertile for nonprofits to use for fundraising, awareness, and advocacy.

Like any communications tool, social media requires a plan – objectives, content strategy, audience, tactics, and integration into your overall communications strategy. And like other communications tools, social media also requires ongoing care and feeding in order to be effective.

Over my next three posts I’ll write about what that social media plan looks like for some of the leading nonprofits which are effectively using social media today.

Next up: Who should own the social media strategy within a nonprofit organization?