DEL.ICIO.USVirtual fund-raisers draw real donations
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Fayandria Foley helped reel in big bucks in July with one of the year’s most curious fund-raisers.
She helped pull together an American Cancer Society Relay for Life, which is typically a walkathon locally.
Courtesy of Fayandria Floey
These are the Second Life avatars of American Cancer Society official Randal Moss and Second Life Relay for Life organizer Fayandria Foley.
Courtesy of Fayandria Floey
This is the avatar of Fayandria Foley of Corpus Christi, Texas, who helped chair the fund-raiser in Second Life. The avatar is now without hair because she had to ‘shave her head’ because the fund-raiser brought in more than $150,000.
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More than 2,000 showed up — or didn’t, actually. Everyone at Foley’s relay stayed home to participate.
The relay took place in the Web universe of Second Life.
Second Life is a three-dimensional video world where players can create an online personality (nearly everyone in Second Life is incredibly good-looking and shapely). Your online personality can wander 24/7 in a phantasmagorical world, interacting in real time with the estimated 10 million-plus other users worldwide.
Now in its fourth year, the Second Life Relay for Life is perhaps the most jaw-dropping example of the way the Web is changing how charities and nonprofits work, but there is no doubt the Internet is affecting the way they do business.
Online giving has gone viral, rising from an estimated $10 million in 1999 to $10.44 billion in 2007, according to Ted Hart, a pioneer in helping nonprofits use the Internet and founder of People to People Fundraising.
“Studies show that as many as 50 percent of donors to charities today will go to a Web site first before making a gift,” Hart said. “They may give offline, but the Web site is a powerful tool to help them make up their minds.”
Agencies are using the Web to bypass traditional media to tell their stories and plead their causes directly to viewers, organize responses to legislation affecting them, blog directly from disaster zones and put videos up on YouTube.
That is just the beginning, Hart believes. The real area of growth for nonprofits will be among the social networks the Web makes possible, such as Facebook and MySpace. Using them, individuals can influence friends and family to support causes, which is more likely to get a response than an e-mail from a nonprofit.
That is what happened in the Second Life relay. Foley and other organizers created a venue in Second Life at which participants could gather.
Organizers invited users, asking them to bring donations from friends, families and fund-raisers they put on in real life or Second Life.
“My avatar [online character] is bald now,” said Foley, who lives in Texas. “I made a bet that if we exceeded $150,000, I would shave my head for a year.”
It raised more than $200,000.
The American Cancer Society, headquartered in Atlanta, also “built” a headquarters in Second Life where avatars can come in and download the same kind of disease information available in a brick and mortar building.
“We’ve been at this for 100 years,” said Scott Bennett, the national vice president of marketing at American Cancer Society. “When we first started, we had volunteers going door-to-door collecting a dollar at a time. As other technologies developed, we’ve leveraged them to take advantage of how Americans behave and what is most convenient.”
The society is one of the relatively few nonprofits with a significant Second Life presence, but agencies large and small created Web sites in the past decade, and many are dabbling in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, RSS feeds (which automatically send a supporter news updates) and phone texting.
New ajc.com feature
Some Web sites run by third parties aggregate information on charities. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will soon launch a feature at ajc.com called good2gether that will link readers interested in volunteering or giving with local or national charities.
Larry Short, Web guru for the international aid agency World Vision in Federal Way, Wash., said the Web not only allows agencies to get information out, it allows donors a more detailed view in. They find information about children or projects they give to across the world, which helps agencies build crucial relationships to keep donors and donations coming back.
Web sites and e-mail save the cost of printing and mailing information, cutting those administrative costs, he said.
“It’s all about connecting … the people that God has blessed with resources with the people in need,” Short said.
Though online donations still make up less than 10 percent of all giving, it is growing, whereas responses to methods such as mail solicitations are flat, said Melissa Brown of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
A survey the center helped conduct last year shows the percentage of donors who gave online tripled between 2001 and 2005. Some of the donors switched from mailing checks in, but others are new supporters.
Toby Smith, CARE’s Web master, said online giving at the Atlanta-based relief and development agency (currently, less than 10 percent of overall donations) has been growing more than 50 percent each year.
Fast response time
The real strength of the Web shines through during disasters such as the recent earthquake in China or the cyclone in Myanmar. CARE’s people on the ground can start sending back information, photos, video clips and stories of personal experiences and post them online almost immediately, Smith said. The cycle of information that used to take days or weeks now happens in hours.
“If we have someone on the ground in Zimbabwe blogging about their day-to-day experiences, we bring home the work overseas to here. It makes it real,” he said.
At the same time, charities have to be careful about pouring money into online efforts that may not pan out.
CARE had an information kiosk in Second Life but found it was not worth the time it took to maintain it, Smith said. The charity is using social networking such as on Facebook, where friends can form and join support or action groups. Many charities are working to figure out how to make those user-controlled sites work for them.
Hart said that is the next and key step in the Net presence of charities. They have done a good job of creating Web sites that give information. But as the Web develops its more interactive properties, where users not only read, but add information and start their own activities, it is important for nonprofits to understand and harness this new social movement.
“Now, more than ever before, a charity’s Web site is its front door,” he said.
And information there will be key to inspiring supporters to act on their own — create their own YouTube videos, hold fund-raisers for their favorite causes or recruit support.
“That really is where the Web is moving,” he said.
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