Non-Profits Using Web Tools: Homeruns or Moneyball?
Below is a comment I just posted on Read/Write Web regarding a couple posts on whether online tools have helped non-profits.
According to the initial post on Read/Write Web (September 9), “By non-profits, we mean charities, clubs and any ‘organization whose primary objective is something other than the generation of profit” (Wikipedia’s definition).”
While fundraising by non-profits, per se, is not the generation of profits, I can’t help but be squeamish when I hear a discussion about the successes of non-profits online that focuses almost entirely on fundraising. The web is much, much more than a fundraising tool. And for new non-profits that grow up in the web age, they have the potential to use the web to achieve magnificent things without ever needing to raise gobs of money to support a large infrastructure.
Let’s face it, when you have a large infrastructure, you need to raise a lot of money. But if you are a lean organization using a lot of virtual tools, you need far less.
As Seth Godin has been known to say, why turn off 95% of your supporters asking them for money so you can give them a megaphone when you can just give 100% of your supporters a megaphone in the first place? The infrastructure for processing donations is often the same infrastructure used for facilitating activist emails to Congress or other policy makers (I am using DiA’s Salsa now and sending a request for money is as easy as sending a request to write Congress… but I will get a far higher conversion rate and lower unsubscribe rate if I do not ask for money).
When recast in this manner, an online homerun for a non-profit will never be graded based on fundraising alone. It is about using online tools to advance a cause.
And while it is true that Change.org and Care2.com are for-profit organizations, they are, themselves, online tools for non-profits. And while Change.org may not have had a homerun in fundraising yet, it is young and they will definitely come…as will homeruns unrelated to fundraising.
Care2, on the other hand, has been around for many years. Its nearly 8 million members are offered as an enormous resource for the non-profit community. Care2 continuously recruits new activists interested in making a difference and then provides opportunities (especially through ThePetitionSite.com) for non-profits to recruit activists from among Care2 members.
To date, more than 3 million activists have been recruited from Care2 by non-profits. Leaving fundraising aside for the moment, my own experience tracking the performance of Care2 recruits is that they are about 4 times more likely to take an advocacy action I send out than the rest of my list. If they never give a dime, I would still consider the use of Care2 as an online tool for non-profits a homerun.
In this day of online activism, supporters have far more value to non-profits than as wallets. They are voices, they are organizers, they are protesters, they are recruiters, they are the life blood of non-profits.
Rather than focusing on hitting homeruns, we should be focusing on the fundamentals. In baseball, that means getting runners on base with walks, singles, and doubles. Homeruns in isolation knock in just one run. With lots of small hits and walks, runs come in steadily without hoemruns and the occasional homerun knocks in several runs at once.
In the world of non-profits, fundamentals mean moving supporters up the ladder of engagement. Get them to be activists first and save making some of them donors for later. The reverse will only seriously reduce the number of activists a non-profit can lean on without raising any extra money.