Effective (& Free!) Fundraising with Facebook Giving Tools

The Social Fundraising Disruption Your Nonprofit Shouldn’t Miss

As a nonprofit leader, you are likely aware of Facebook’s Charitable Giving Tools program. This program provides 100% free tools for nonprofits to raise funds directly inside Facebook (no software fees, no credit card fees!).

The tools allows you to:

• Receive donations directly from supporters through Facebook
• Add a “Donate” button to your organization’s page
• Create “Donate” posts where followers can click to donate directly inside Facebook  
• Encourage supporters to run peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns on your behalf

If your organization has put a lot of effort into growing an audience on Facebook, why should you consider Facebook Giving Tools? As the reasons are growing more compelling over time, let’s look at them.

The Benefits of Facebook Charitable Giving Tools

The funds raised through Charitable Giving Tools have been growing about 70% per year! No other platform or fundraising option is even close to growing this fast. The program started in 2013 with a simple “Donate” page button, and by 2021 it had already raised $5,000,000,000 (billion!) for nonprofits.

Why you should get in & Why you should consider putting effort into it:

• With almost no friction (everything built-in), your supporters can easily start peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns
• Your fundraisers can easily share their campaigns with friends and connections
• 90% of your fundraisers are new to your nonprofit (which means these tools will bring you new supporters!)
• The program is 100% free for nonprofits (including no credit card/transaction fees)
• The reach of FB and IG are growing every year

In spite of this potential, many nonprofits are not yet enrolled. Similarly, others are enrolled but don’t get meaningful results. These reasons are why this article was written. Perhaps you are interested, yet wonder if you can raise a meaningful amount from the program each year. Therefore, let us to share four best practices that will help you significantly improve your results.

How to get the most from FB Charitable Giving Tools

1. Thank each fundraiser personally

Data from the company GivePanel shows that when an organization personally thanks each fundraiser, the amount raised by that campaign increases by 23%! A simple thank you message is all it takes.

2. Get your supporters to opt-in to email marketing

If you want to get long-term value from Charitable Giving Tools, you need to get the contact information from your fundraisers. Ultimately, you need to be able to reach supporters outside of Facebook (email is the #1 channel for this).

To do this, you need to ask people to opt-in and make it as easy as possible. Build in an email opt-in form that looks and feels like a natural extension of your Facebook page and keep the number of fields to a minimum (email and name is usually best).

3. Track, Encourage and Follow-up

As new people start campaigns for you, here are four things you should do to build a relationship with them and increase campaign success:

• Thank them immediately for starting it
• Track their progress
• Encourage them along the way
• Thank and follow up with them when it’s over

4. Train people to start campaigns

Finally, if you want to raise more funds inside Facebook, you need to train and ask your audience to start campaigns! The more campaigns started for you, the more meaningful your results will be over time. Thankfully, you can follow proven and effective strategies to encourage more fundraising campaigns (we will share more about this in future articles).

Even if you follow the above four best practices, the Facebook Charitable Giving Tools program has some significant downsides. Specifically, it is very difficult to follow these best practices because of the way Facebook built these tools! Let’s look at three major issues with the program.

3 Major Issues with Facebook Charitable Giving Tools

Issue #1: Limited data

If you lack data on the people who run campaigns for you and on each campaign as a whole, it is very difficult to connect with these fundraisers to help them optimize and improve their campaigns. Here are five areas where Facebook limits the data that your organization gets from these tools:

• Facebook does not pass fundraiser’s contact to you
• There are only manual, 1-1 means to reach out to them
• There are even less options to reach out to those who donate
• Facebook gives the bare minimum contact data of donors (only enough to provide a receipt)
• The reports and analytics from these campaigns are confusing and unhelpful

Issue #2: Getting more campaigns is difficult

Most organizations simply hope that people will think of them and start a campaign on their behalf. The fact is, it takes intention, planning, and effort to help your supporters to start one. Here are three roadblocks to getting more:

• Lack of knowledge: many nonprofits are in the program but are not getting any campaigns – if this is you, where do you even start?
• Birthday-centered: most campaigns happen on a fundraiser’s birthday, meaning when they happen is completely outside of your control
• Facebook ads: using ads to get more people to run campaigns is expensive and difficult

Issue #3: Lack of admin tools & support

If thanking people who start campaigns, getting their contact info., and automating this process has a huge impact on success (both short and long-term), Facebook’s tools provide nothing to help with these vital best practices:

• Facebook does not send you built-in notifications with each new campaign
• you can only reach out to fundraisers to thank or connect with them one at a time
• there is no way to attribute fundraising income to different campaigns
• when there are problems or questions, it is hard to get support from Facebook directly

Thankfully, there are solutions to these issues, one of which in particular we will look at in this article.

Meet GivePanel: the ultimate Facebook Fundraising platform

GivePanel helps nonprofits like yours significantly increase the amount they raise each year through software and their proven system to thank your fundraisers, collect contact details, track results and drive new campaigns. 

You can learn more about the company on their site. Let’s address two specific ways GivePanel addresses the major issues with Facebook Charitable Giving Tools.

Two Ways GivePanel solves the Major Issues with FB Charitable Giving Tools

1. Campaign data

GivePanel provides the needed software to make Charitable Giving Tools like any other modern, robust fundraising platform. Gain valuable insights into data Facebook doesn’t give you, including:

• current amount raised for each campaign
• number of active fundraisers
• supporters opted into marketing (emails)
• number of registered event attendees running a fundraiser, etc.
• and more!

Their software also lets you filter this data by a helpful menu of parameters.

2. Automated outreach

Through the platform you can automate your stewardship of supporters and their campaigns, including:

• Send thank you messages (with built-in, proven templates), leading to a 23% increase in funds raised!
• Automate collecting contact information to keep supporters for the long-term
• Send opt-in messages (using built-in, Facebook “official-looking” forms) to turn supporters into subscribers without having to leave the platform. The average opt-in rate for supporters to become subscribers is significant: 35%!

Grow Your Facebook Fundraising Success This Year

Wonder if you should talk to the GivePanel team? Their solutions are most meaningful for nonprofits who get 10 or more fundraising campaigns each month. If that describes you, book a call with them now!

Good news: we are also trained in this proven Facebook fundraising process! We can actively support you if you decide to grow your Facebook Fundraising efforts this year with the help of GivePanel.