Crowdfunding is most successful if charities promote campaigns heavily through Facebook and other social media, try to raise small amounts, and go public with money already committed, an audience of fundraisers heard last week.

Eleanor Harrison, chief executive of GlobalGiving, a charity crowdfunding platform, said that use of Facebook was the single most important tool for success in crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding usually involves charities asking for donations for a specific project. Donors make commitments but must only go ahead with their donation if the project hits a target.

Harrison was speaking as part of a panel at Fundraising First Thing, a specialist event for charities run by Fundraising Magazine and Civil Society News.

“Facebook is the most successful tool for converting exposure into donations at the moment but the market keeps changing," she said.

"Facebook delivers the most, Twitter is the most successful at building links across different organisations and making people aware, and email still continues to drive a significant number of donations from older donors but YouTube is getting more and more important in terms of driving traffic for people under the age of 28.”

Harrison also said that GlobalGiving had found a direct correlation between the number of links to a project shared on social media and that project's success.

She said that if a charity had “1,000 friends on Facebook,” then a crowdfunding campaign would be as much as 40 per cent more likely to succeed.

Mark Hodgson, chief commercial officer at donations platform JustGiving, also said that Facebook was key to success.

He said that “42 per cent of JustGiving’s current content is driven through Facebook,” but agreed with Harrison that charities should not ignore other social media channels.

“Your voice will be amplified by their technology,” he said.

“The more people you can reach with your message, the more likely it is that your message will resonate with someone. You have to use all of the tools available to you.”

Aim small and start well

Crowdfunding campaigns raised over £1bn for charities last year, but Harrison warned that they suited particular types of campaigns .

“The average, successful crowdfunding campaign in the UK last year raised £4,375. So crowdfunding probably isn’t going to be a solution for your whole budget.”  

The panel also said that launching a crowdfunding campaign which went out to the public with no donations in the pot was guaranteed to fail.

“How can you try and convince donors to give money towards your campaign, if you and your staff won’t even give a fiver to it?” asked Harrison.

Poppy Damon, who ran a highly successful crowdfunding campaign for independent fact-checking organisation Full Fact, suggested that coordinating a crowdfunding campaign with existing major donors was a good way for organisations to both start and end a campaign strongly.

“When we launched our campaign we had our target and we spoke to some of our existing major donors and asked if they would hold on to their donations until the end – in case we needed a boost. As it happened, when the major donors came in, we were already over our target and they pushed us further on.” 

The importance of digital marketing

The panel also told the gathered fundraisers that, while crowdfunding is not a particularly new fundraising tool, the digitalisation of the industry meant that fundraisers need to adapt.

Katherine Carter, annual giving manager at the University of Southampton, said that fundraisers interested in using crowdfunding for their charities must think of their role in a different way.

“If you work in fundraising then you’re all marketers. Crowdfunding forces you to be a digital marketer, whether you want to or not or whether you have the resources to be one or not.

“If you’re going to do crowdfunding you need to get in with social media, you need to have good social media channels and you need to fill those channels with content. If you don’t have the tools you need to succeed, then you will fail.”

Damon said that repurposing content across a number of different social media streams was a relatively simple and highly effective way of ensuring charities maintain a clear brand message throughout a campaign. 

• Fundraising First Thing is a bi-monthly peer learning event for fundraisers run by Fundraising Magazine. The next event will be discussing leadership and inspiring the next generation of fundraisers, and will take place on 16th July. More information and booking details are available here. 
• Eleanor Harrison explains in the May issue of Fundraising Magazine how GlobalGiving managed to raise over £3m through crowdfunding for its Ebola campaign. Subscribers can read the article here. Those interested in subscribing to in-depth content can do so here.