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Personal Fundraising Campaigns
As older baby boomer board members get more and more disconnected from technology it is important to explore the possibilities, through blogs and wikis, of how nonprofits can use social media to support their work and help disseminate their messages.
Most nonprofits need to explore all the facets of the existing Web 2.0 tools in order to use and adopt them for raising funds. Recently many proactive nonprofits have been tinkering with how to mix social media with fundraising, as well as experimenting with personal fundraising.
I read about a woman whom less than a year ago, launched a personal fundraising campaign on her blog using a Web 2.0 fundraising tool called ¡°ChipIn¡± to send a young Cambodian woman to college through a program sponsored by a nonprofit called the Sharing Foundation. The woman was able to raise eight hundred dollars for a year's tuition and on campus living expenses, in less than two weeks!
Several weeks later, she experimented with an organizational approach to group fundraising working with a team of twenty Sharing Foundation board members and volunteers to raise $100,000 via a blog, using a Charity Badge. She was successful. It was quite an accomplishment, given that the organization had an operating budget of less than $400,000.
Conclusion
Web 2.0 and social media tools offer a huge array of possibilities for nonprofits to raise awareness of their work and mission, connect with potential new demographics of donors, raise funds and in kind donations, locate volunteers as well as identify unique volunteer opportunities, and many other types of tangible and intangible benefits.
Of course, there are challenges when adoption is an issue, but as an entrepreneur I understand that we just have to be creative It is just a matter of low risk experimentation and personal learning through success and failure in order to capture the innumerable and exorbitant benefits.
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