Blog Why your charity needs to invest in a Facebook Fundraising Strategy
Why your charity needs to invest in a Facebook Fundraising Strategy
Facebook Fundraising is likely the most effective way to attract donors for your charity. With Facebook being one of the most popular social media platforms, it’s easy to see why nonprofits would benefit from using its services. However, with Facebook rules always changing, this can affect your nonprofit’s Facebook fundraising strategy.
GivePanel ensures that investing in your Facebook Fundraising strategy is made simple. To show you how, we welcomed Carla Ankiah, the Head of Fundraising and Communications from Autism Assistance Dogs Ireland for a quick interview on how investing in GivePanel has helped improve their Facebook Fundraising ROI.
About Autism Assistance Dogs Ireland
Autism Assistance Dogs Ireland trains and places highly skilled autism assistance dogs where they are trained to the highest international standards to provide safety to children in public places.
Assistance dogs enable children to go out and about safely and reduce anxiety not just for the child but for the whole family. They can be a lifeline for children and their families when a child is suffering from the sometimes debilitating symptoms of autism.
The Beginning of Investing in Facebook’s Fundraising Strategy
Before we had GivePanel, we probably had been fundraising through Facebook for 12 months and we were seeing enough success that I identified it as an area to look into. It was one of the areas that we really wanted to explore a bit more.
We were struggling with contacting these donors and although we were trying to thank and message them, it was just so time consuming.
However, after identifying GivePanel, I saw it as a huge opportunity to explore that avenue of fundraising further.
The Collaboration of GivePanel and Autism Assistance Dogs
Through using the GivePanel platform, fundraising through Facebook has skyrocketed. And our ability to contact the donors has also. We’re getting much more engagement through our supporter base and collecting a significant amount of data.
The scale at which we're now fundraising on Facebook wouldn't be possible without the GivePanel tools. Managing all that data on the back end and being able to export that into our CRM is really useful to us. It’s as simple as being able to take a glance at the dashboard and being able to see how much money we raised in one particular month or within a particular date.
Before, it would be a struggle to do that because Facebook's transaction reports are quite in depth and it was a challenge to review them.
My main priority was actually to relieve some staff resources to make sure we could message all our fundraisers as quickly as possible. That difference of joining GivePanel was significant – to be able to have preset messages that we didn’t have to copy and paste and instead having pre-personalised messages brought to the table by GivePanel was super useful.
Facebook’s transaction reports are not easy to read and you have to be quite data minded to understand them, nevermind to try and decipher them. We definitely have overcome those challenges through the use of GivePanel and how easy it is to use.
For instance, if we have a volunteer or someone on a work placement, I can show them through a 10 minute video on how to use GivePanel. It's not a difficult task, they don't have to understand much to be able to use it and it takes a lot of pressure off of us.
Where next with Facebook Fundraising Strategy?
If you want to get the most out of the GivePanel tools, you have to be committed to developing in that area of fundraising. Reflect and consider how much time you’re currently spending on Facebook fundraising and how that could be made easier and less time consuming through the use of GivePanel.
I recommend GivePanel all the time and one of my favourite things about the company is the team. The support and helpfulness of the team is absolutely awesome and they are great to work with.
If you want to improve the scale of your fundraising and effectively manage your data, there’s so much opportunity to do that through using GivePanel. Book a demo here and see how GivePanel could help your team.
