Blog Custom Facebook Fundraisers: Lars Østergaard, Danish Cancer Society
Custom Facebook Fundraisers: Lars Østergaard, Danish Cancer Society
You may have heard about GivePanel’s Custom Facebook Fundraisers (previously known as 1-click fundraisers) Creation Link feature, which allows you to generate a unique link for an event or campaign that you can send to your supporters to create a fundraiser that has specific settings for your challenge event.
The problem with Facebook fundraising right now is that when people create a fundraiser for you on Facebook the default settings are generic.
This feature solves that by allowing your supporters to set up a Facebook fundraiser in one tap, plus it gives you a link to create Facebook Fundraisers from everywhere and lets you track fundraiser creation, for the first time, using the Facebook Pixel.
Sounds great, right? But how does it work in practice?
To find out more, GivePanel CEO Nick Burne spoke to Lars Østergaard from the Danish Cancer Society about their Facebook Fundraising activity and the impact that the Custom Facebook Fundraisers feature was having.
Transcript: Custom Facebook Fundraisers
Nick Burne:
Hey everyone, Nick from GivePanel here, and I've got Lars. Lars, can you just introduce yourself?
Lars Østergaard:
Yeah, sure. My name is Lars. And I'm from the Danish Cancer Society, the biggest Cancer Society or biggest NGO, non-profit in Denmark, where I do a lot of Social Media and Campaign work.
Nick Burne:
Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about your organisation. You said you're the largest in Denmark? And is it? Is it Cancer Research that you do? What does the organisation do?
Lars Østergaard:
Well, we actually have three primary areas that we work on. We have 300 or something scientists working on Cancer Research. Then we find a lot of research outside the organisation of law. We do a lot of patient support and relative support; with physical locations, phone hotlines you can call and some digital possibilities as well. And then we do a lot of preventive work as well, do larger campaigns to get people to stop smoking and not drink too much and watch out in the sun.
Nick Burne:
Awesome. Awesome organisation. So well, thanks for coming and doing this. You've recently been trying out GivePanel. But tell us a little bit more about what’s going on at the organisation around Digital Fundraising and Facebook Fundraising. What was the situation before you started using GivePanel?
Lars Østergaard:
We accessed the fundraisers on Facebook, in 2017 I think at first. But here in Denmark, there was a new law, so it was closed down for a period of time and then we got back on. So we were actually kind of using Facebook Fundraisers as an add-on. It was nice to get some money thrown in the window and just get some extra money. But we weren't really using it that much, that well and not really in relation to the larger campaign that we did. So when we reached out for GivePanel, and we asked you that we had a certain case for GivePanel, using it on one of our campaigns. So we actually needed it to make it easier for our customers or for our target groups to create fundraisers on Facebook a lot easier than they were able to today.
Nick Burne:
Right, because I think before you were doing campaigns, were you sending people to Facebook to create a fundraiser using Facebook's kind of default link, or were you sending them to other other platforms?
Lars Østergaard:
Well, we do have a lot of other platforms as well. But we were sending them to Facebook to try to create a fundraiser through the native way of doing it, yeah.
Nick Burne:
So the problem you were trying to solve was kind of getting into creating a Facebook Fundraiser. But doing so with the custom image, the custom title, the custom end date, maybe different targets, those kinds of things. And our new Custom Facebook Fundraisers tool helped solve that problem, I guess?
Lars Østergaard:
It does, and it makes it a lot easier for us to actually do a lot of different campaigns at the same time, because were able to define the title on the cover image; but also actually it eases up a lot of the problems that the users are facing when they're trying to create a fundraiser coming from other channels on Facebook. So depending on device, browser, time of the day almost, they could face a lot of problems in creating a fundraiser and actually get stuck or maybe even were not allowed to create a fundraiser.
Nick Burne:
Yeah, I know exactly. So the problem was, and it's one of the reasons why we created the tool, is that they were getting from an email they were clicking on the link to set up a fundraiser on Facebook or from some other device, and it wouldn't work or wouldn't send them to the right place. So we've tested that from GivePanel. So it worked from all the different channels that you were sending it from?
Lars Østergaard
Yeah. makes it a lot easier.
Nick Burne:
Cool! So how did the campaign go In the end? How did it work when you started using GivePanel?
Lars Østergaard:
Really well. We couldn't really track the campaign early on when we didn't have GivePanel because we just couldn't track it. Now, we can use Facebook and track it by GivePanel and we can see a lot more fundraisers have been created and a lot more money being raised. Because we could define the description of the fundraiser, we could actually include a (CTA) Call-to-Action to create a fundraiser when you read your friend's fundraiser, and that lifted the number of fundraisers by 10% just by adding that little sentence and link in the event.
Nick Burne:
I love that and I think you did a LinkedIn post about that which was popular and a lot of our clients and customers saw that. So that was really generous of you to share that.
So you edited the description in GivePanel for the fundraisers when they created the fundraiser. So there was almost like another viral effect that 10% of extra fundraisers that you wouldn't have got, if you couldn't edit that. Which was a real innovation that we never thought of. We love it when our customers innovate and that 10% is no extra, it doesn't cost you anything.
Lars Østergaard:
Nothing, only 10 minutes of time.
Nick Burne:
So before using the Facebook link, you weren't able to track anything like that. Now, you can first of all track it, but you did see overall more income as well you said right?
Lars Østergaard
Yeah, we did, we were able to actually work with the target for creating a fundraiser. So our (CPA) Cost-Per-Acquisition set a target for that. The Facebook ads work with the different target groups, seeing which are performing best and creating different kinds of content to lift the performance overall and see how the tracking went.
Nick Burne:
So it kind of almost turns Facebook’s fundraising tools into like a traditional platform that you can track. You can measure what different channel is causing the highest (CPA) Cost-Per-Acquisition and optimise from there. Was there a year on year improvement in percentage terms that you can share?
Lars Østergaard:
It’s difficult for me to say, because it was closed down for a while, and then we haven’t really used it on campaigns in that sense. So what I could say is that we managed to fundraise a lot of money and get people to create a digital fundraiser, a Facebook fundraiser, that we couldn’t get to fundraise before.
Nick Burne:
And now next year, if you use GivePanel again, I guess you can benchmark and you can try and improve next year and spend more?
Lars Østergaard:
Exactly, and broaden it out to other campaigns in the organisation.
Nick Burne:
Awesome, so for other charities to help them what was the number one thing that you liked about using GivePanel?
Lars Østergaard:
It’s got to be the Custom Facebook Fundraisers feature. That’s the one for me.
Nick Burne:
That’s the one that really helped you guys.
Lars Østergaard
Yeah, it is. I guess if you can’t visualise your data from Facebook, then GivePanel is nice for that too. But we were able to do it by ourselves before so that wasn't really the thing for us. But the Custom Facebook Fundraisers thing, that was a make it or break it for us because it’s so useful.
Nick Burne:
It’s very early days as well. So we’ve got version two coming out, which you’re helping us improve and with that… the user experience. So it’s the very beginning of that feature and I don’t know any other platform where someone can create a fundraiser in one click. I think one of the things that we ran into with your campaign was it’s almost too quick for people to set up a fundraiser, like that’s amazing! That’s a good problem to have. But when they clicked the button, they’ve started a fundraiser before they even kind of knew it, right? So that was an interesting thing.
So knowing what we offer at GivePanel, with all the dashboard data that you're able to do yourselves and the Custom Facebook Fundraisers, if you were recommending GivePanel to maybe another Danish charity, or another European charity or any charity. What would you say? Is there any advice that would help them make a decision whether to use GivePanel or not?
Lars Østergaard
It’s just got to be the repetition of the Custom Facebook Fundraisers feature because, for me, that’s the thing I can go to my boss and say, ‘I got this function, I can track it, I can show you how much we’re paying for a fundraiser to be created’. And I can actually tell him if we use this and use it on a campaign, we can raise our fundraising funds by some other percentage. So yeah, the Custom Facebook Fundraisers feature for me, it’s really the one.
Nick Burne:
Great, awesome, Well, look, Lars, thank you so much for your time, and hopping on the video with us today.
Lars Østergaard
No problem. Thank you. Bye.
