Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could send people directly to set up a Facebook fundraiser for your nonprofit? Guess what…. You can! And here’s how...
There’s a feature on Facebook in your Donations setting where you’ll find a special URL or a “deep link” specifically for your nonprofit.
You can then use this deep link in all of your digital marketing to encourage supporters to set up fundraisers for your cause. How it works is that it will take your supporters directly to the first step of creating a Facebook fundraiser for YOUR nonprofit – they won’t see the list of other nonprofits on Facebook that they can fundraise for.
Once your supporters have clicked on your deep link, it’s then just a few easy thumb taps or clicks for them to set up their Facebook fundraiser page.
This is a great feature as it allows you to link directly from emails, your website or even Facebook Ads and social media posts to drive new fundraisers to fundraise for you!
Where to find your Facebook fundraiser Creation Link
You can find the “Simple Fundraiser Creation Link” in your Page settings under “Donations” > ”Donation Settings”.
However when testing this deep link with GivePanel customers, we have run into some problems. The link doesn’t seem to work from all places and from all browsers and it can be really hard to get it to work from a Facebook Ad. This is who one of our amazing GivePanel customers explains it…
”Promoting Facebook Fundraisers during our campaign seemed like a no brainer, celebrate your birthday and double your donations! But I struggled to get a link that worked across all devices and browsers. It just goes to show how important it is to test your links and ads properly, I hate to think of the money we could have wasted if we’d blindly accepted the link provided.”
Emma Stephens, Digital Marketing Manager, Send a Cow
The good news is, we have a couple of steps to solve this problem!
The Problem…
The link that Facebook gives you to for people to create fundraisers for you works great on desktop devices. It also works well from most places within Facebook's mobile app. However, if you use it on mobile NOT through the Facebook mobile app or on Facebook Ads the link does not send people to the right place.
The Solution...
There is another link we have found that works for mobile cases where the link Facebook gives you does work. Here it is:
https://m.facebook.com/fundraiser/with_presence/create_dialog/?default_beneficiary_id=[yourcharityid]
(you need to put your charity ID where it says [yourcharityid])
So now you have a link that works well for desktop (the one Facebook gives you - https://www.facebook.com/fund/yourcharitypage/) and the mobile one above.
All that is left to do is to route the user to the right link depending on their device. this is technical but the good news is that they are low costs services out there that do this for you already like Capsulink.
You will end up with a short URL that routes the user through to the correct link depending on their device. Problem solved!
