To celebrate his 40th birthday, Michael Lodish vowed to
complete the 2010 Marine Corps
Marathon. And along the way,
he wanted to raise some money from friends and relatives to
benefit charity.
Mr. Lodish, a former preschool teacher who is now
studying for a master’s degree
in counseling, learned from a
cousin about a Web site called
IndieGoGo that allows anyone
to set up a fund-raising page
Lodish raised $5,000 on the
site for the Amyotrophic Lateral
Sclerosis Association in memory
of his uncle, who died of ALS—
commonly called Lou Gehrig’s
disease—in 2008. He finished
the marathon in four hours and
47 minutes.
More and more charities are
trying to appeal to do-it-yourself fund raisers like Mr. Lodish
who are putting their mark on
online fund raising by collecting
thousands and occasionally millions of dollars for charity from
people they or their friends and
relatives ask.
Individuals can use free or
low-cost sites such as Causes,
Crowdrise, FirstGiving, and
Razoo to create a personal
fund-raising campaign, decide
which causes to support, and
ask people to contribute. They
can share photos and personal messages and link to social
networks such as Facebook and
Twitter.
In other cases, charities are
building the same fund-raising
capabilities on their own Web
sites, using software by companies such as Blackbaud and
Convio, and trying to get supporters to ask people they know
for donations.
All of these approaches have
one thing in common: “We’re
looking at the world from the
donor’s perspective as opposed
to being led by the nonprofit,”
members blew past the goal,
raising more than $1-million.
The winning team was formed
by Zynga, a social-gaming company. It raised $817,375 from
162,544 donors by adding a new
feature to its Farmville game.
Players were asked to purchase
“candy-cane seeds” and plant
them on virtual farms, with
100 percent of the proceeds going to the challenge. The candy-cane purchases were automatically posted on the donors’ Facebook newsfeeds, inspiring their
friends on Facebook to make
similar gifts.
COURTES Y OF COLGATE UNIVERSI T Y
Autism Speaks has been enlisting college students, like these
Colgate University hockey players, to raise money from friends and relatives.
says Jeff Patrick, president of
Common Knowledge, an online
fund-raising consulting company in San Francisco.
“People feel like they have influence and more power,” says
Joe Green, the co-founder of
Causes. The site, which is primarily used by Facebook members, has attracted 150 million
people who have raised a total
of $30-million for 27,000 non-profits.
Mixed Success
Charities’ success in persuading volunteers to raise money
on their behalf has been mixed,
but it’s easy to see why the idea
is attractive. The bad economy
has forced many groups to seek
low-cost alternatives to direct
mail, telemarketing, and other
expensive approaches.
Sites that make it easy for
volunteers to raise money can
also reduce the time a charity’s
staff spends on logistics.
“We’re looking at the
world from the
donor’s perspective
as opposed to being
led by the nonprofit.”
Over the past decade, the campaign has raised up to $21-mil-
lion annually from 600,000 to 1
million letter writers per year.
While many of the letter writers now compose e-mail messages instead of paper letters,
the charity says it still gets less
than one half of 1 percent of donations online.
Nonetheless, online social
networks have transformed the
idea of fund raising for charities
of all kinds. Following are the
ways charities are tapping into
the power of volunteers to raise
money for them:
Equality California, a San
Francisco group that advocates
for gay rights, raised about $1.2-
million in a campaign against a
2008 ballot measure that sought
to ban same-sex marriage in
the state. The organization cre-
ated an online “gift registry”
and invited gay couples to reg-
ister there to celebrate an an-
niversary or other important
date. Couples created their own
Web page in the gift registry
where they could post photos,
share their personal reactions
to Proposition 8, and ask people
they know to donate to Equal-
ity California instead of buying
them a traditional gift.
Reach Out
to Celebrities
Hold a Contest
The University of California at San Francisco received $817,375
from a campaign using the popular Farmville game. Donors spread
the word on social networks about their own gifts and encouraged friends
to “buy” a candy-cane seed to help the university build a hospital.
Last year, Causes decided to
see how much it could raise for
the University of California at
San Francisco, which was seeking donations to build a children’s hospital. Causes held
a competition and invited its
members to form teams online,
offering prizes such as dance
lessons with the entertainer
M.C. Hammer and hospital
rooms named for teams that recruited the most donors.
Causes spent $20,000 for pro-
motional and other costs for the
UCSF Challenge for the Chil-
dren and set a goal of raising
$100,000. But in a short time,
Cancer for College, a Vista,
Calif., nonprofit that gives uni-
versity scholarships to cancer
survivors, took advantage of its
ties to comedian Will Ferrell
in a 30-day online peer-to-peer
campaign held over the holidays
last year. Mr. Ferrell, who has
been involved with the charity
since it was created in 1993, is a
fraternity brother of its founder,
Craig Pollard, who has survived
two bouts of the disease.
