It's not just giving online that counts

Third Force News

30 May 2008

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ONLINE fundraising is not the huge money spinner that it is cracked up to be a charity think tank announced this week. NfpSynergy carried out some research for the launch of eBay for Charity that revealed that while everyone else is making money out of the internet, charities aren’t.

The conclusion that charities are not techno savvy enough for online donations may or may not send them scurrying into the arms of eBay, but it will no doubt put added pressure on small organisations to try to get online. In this day and age of social networking sites, safe online giving and online charity auctions it seems amazing that the internet is not generating more. The amount that people are giving to charity has been increasing annually for the last five years, according to CAF figures, and it is hard to believe that none of this is online. The truth is that much of it is, but it is difficult to quantify.

Take sponsorship for sporting fundraising events for example. It is hard to say exactly where the big growth in people doing sporting events for charity, like marathons, abseils and Himalayan treks, over the last few years has come from. It is likely to be partly linked to the healthy lifestyles messages being pumped out by government and health bodies. However, it is also down to the growth of the internet. You don’t have to be an electronic whiz kid to use sites like justgiving.com, which have made it easy for even small charities to generate online sponsorship pages. And bigger charities, like Cancer Research’s Race for Life, provide them automatically for all participants. In fact the days of paper based sponsorship forms and exchanging bags full of 50ps for postal orders are well and truly over, and charities are bound to have benefited as a result.

It is not just ease in donating that makes the internet good for these events though it is also the communications element. Charities are using email and websites to persuade people to sign up to participate in event to begin with. Those interested in signing up just have to click on a link to find out all the details and register at once – greatly reducing the chances of them thinking better of the whole thing by the time the forms arrive in the post. And once they have signed up participants can email everyone they have ever known in a bid to persuade them to donate – far less embarrassing than knocking on their door and likely to produce better results. It is unlikely that surveys such as that carried out by nfpSynergy will associate all of this with the internet, but it should be reassuring to smaller charities that they probably are already using electronic media to generate funds. It could be that in the future charities employ whole teams of people just to operate social networking sites and generate income through Second Life (maybe this is already happening in some places). However, it is not even yet proven that these areas of the internet are able to generate funds – part of the popularity of sites like Facebook comes from the fact that they are free.

On the otherhand face-to-face activities like ticketed events, raffles, tax-free giving and can collections definitely do. Of course charities can be innovative, but it is not the role of the charities to gamble their limited resources on online gimmicks just for the sake of it.

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