Micro Philanthropy

I pointed to Beth’s Blog the other day for info on fundraising widgets. Now she's become a guinea pig for the ChipIn fundraising widget by creating a personal campaign to raise money for the Sharing Foundation. She blogs about her ongoing experience here, here, here, and here at Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog.

With a fundraising widget you can empower your donors to create their own campaigns for your cause, using video testimonials and telling their own stories. It’s not so different from what people do for walks or races for a cause. What is means though is that your organization gives up a level of control about how the story is told, how your organization is portrayed. But guess what? You’re really not in control anyway. Your fans and detractors are out there talking about you in whatever terms they wish – if you’re lucky. If you’re not, they’re not talking about you at all.

I was at a session a couple of years ago run by Seth Godin for nonprofit organizations. The fundraising for one of the organizations there emphasized individual fundraising efforts, but the staff was concerned that some volunteers get out of hand. They were developing more online resources for the volunteers, and Seth’s advice was simply give the volunteers the best tools the staff could and let them go evangelize for the cause.

Some significant questions that Beth raised are about accountability and donor recognition – ChipIn apparently doesn’t provide data about the donors’ wishes to remain anonymous or not, and the funds raised are apparently entrusted to the volunteer fundraiser rather than going directly to the organization. Perhaps future versions will address these issues.

Would you encourage your donors to undertake a micro-campaign with a widget like ChipIn?

Comments

[Beth]

Hi Maryann,

You know what is cool about chipin widget is that you cut and paste the code into your post and have a badget here.

[carnet]

Maryann,

A couple of comments.

1) We have plans to integrate with one of the online giving services (networkforgood, justgive, etc) to increase validation of the NPO and accountability of funds.

2) We our users and all NPOs the ability to direct all contributions to their own Paypal account so the funds never touch the ChipIn account. We suggest that NPOs publish their Paypal accounts to their volunteers so they use it when creating a ChipIn campaign.

3) We are looking into allowing donors to be anonymous. Right now only the organizer can see a full list of contributors.

4) And as a final thought, we are releasing the concept of campaign and sub-campaigns in the next couple of weeks so a NPO can allows uesrs to copy a widget and create their own goals towards the parent campaign.