Tag Archives: March of Dimes

What’s New in ePhilanthropy

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Social media expert Beth Kanter updated her list of listening, monitoring, engaging and management tools.  It’s not easy to measure the results of social networking, but it’s important to pick at least some of these programs, most which are free, to evaluate your efforts.   Here’s some questions to help evaluate your social media initiatives.   (Thanks also to Harish Rao for highlighting this topic for GrassrootsCamp at a live event this week in NYC.)

Network for Good‘s Katya Andresen explains why you can’t just focus on older donors, even though they have traditionally been the most reliable givers.   Older constituents are also getting more active in social media , per reviews in The Agitator.net and the Chronicle of Philanthropy of a recent Pew Internet report.

It’s challenging to change the name of a major event, but the March of Dimes used a variety of strategies to rebrand its major fundraising event (not all which worked well).

Courtesy of Big Duck’s blog, use these tips to revitalize your email subject lines.  (Sorry, email is still a valuable way to reach constituents, despite the rising role of social media.)

Finally, TechSoup asks what does your organization look like from the outside, reminding us of the importance of clear, consistent messaging across our online (and offline) communications.

Have a safe and restful Labor Day weekend.

Are Special Events Worthwhile?

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A report released earlier this month by Charity Navigator raises interesting questions on whether special events are an effective way for nonprofits to raise funds.  Its main points were:

  1. About half of all charities use special events as a way to fundraise.
  2. Special events generate 15% of all contributions to organizations
  3. Overall, special events are inefficient in comparison to overall fundraising activities
  4. The most efficiently run special events are held by organizations that are the least likely to use special events as a fundraising mechanism, e.g. religious charities
  5. Health and arts charities are the most likely to hold special events
  6. Charities in the Northeast are more likely than their peers in other areas to hold special events
  7. Many health charities would benefit from shifting their fundraising focus away from special events
  8. Almost half of are reporting special events data incorrectly, with no recourse from state or federal regulators

These five organizations receive the most from special events: American Cancer Society, Muscular Dystrophy Association, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, March of Dimes and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International.

Since I currently work at a health charity in the Northeast which relies heavily on special events, these conclusions make sense.  I’ve felt for a while that it may be time to start moving away from events and take advantage of new methods of fundraising.  Charity Navigator’s report also points out, however, that “there are advantages to special events that cannot be measured: raising awareness, rewarding members, cultivating prospective donors, PR exposure, and brand building to name a few. These benefits are impossible to measure, and vary greatly from organization to organization”

Charity Navigator is a site that guides donors towards nonprofits that are run efficiently and make the best use of donations.  For that reason alone, this report suggests that special events be carefully evaluated, especially since many new types of online fundraising, e.g. widgets (see Chipin for an example) are now available which further empower our constituents.