Characteristics of Successful Efforts

Award recipients fell into two categories: causes that generated the largest number of unique donors over the course of the entire contest; or, like Heather Box and the League of Young Voters, those that generated the most unique donors in a single day and won a daily prize.

That said, many more causes that did not receive Challenge awards were still able to raise significant amounts of money from individual donors throughout the Challenge. Many went viral as well, which for this report we are defining as campaigns that had 150 or more unique donors (“Dunbar's number” 2009).

Overall, the following traits characterized successful efforts and their champions:

They were immersed in the Challenge. Some of the most successful champions were the few that spent almost every waking hour, especially in the final week of the challenge, encouraging donors to give to their cause or managing scores of volunteers who were canvassing friends, family, and neighbors for donations. These champions were not solitary cheerleaders for their causes. Their passion and dedication to winning the Challenge inspired others to step forward and work many hours on behalf of their cause.

“We entered 12 days before the end of the contest and my life in those 12 days was spent on this contest. I was online 24/7.” – Heidi Dormody, Engineers without Borders, USA

“We spent 24 hours a day towards the end. Every waking moment. A lot of volunteers work full time, so they worked on the campaign after hours.” – Linda Shiller and Mary Parente, 11th Hour Rescue

The survey results highlight the average number of hours that champions spent working on the Challenge and the increased number of hours for those champions who generated more donors.

Table 7: Hours Spent on the Challenge by Champions

Efforts went “viral.” As previously mentioned, for this assessment we defined efforts that were successful or “viral” as those with more than 150 donors. These causes had volunteers who solicited donors independently of the cause champion, and all award recipients experienced this viral effect. To put it another way, the most successful efforts were social networks with individual activists self-organizing activities online and off to support their causes, without necessarily the knowledge or direct control of the champion or cause organization.

By large margins (between 61-74%), cause champions reported reaching out for donations and outreach assistance to known supporters, friends, family, colleagues and co-workers first. In other words, they activated the viral effect by connecting to the people they knew personally—whether those people were familiar with their cause or not.

Several highly connected individuals leveraged a large number of donations by themselves. For example, one volunteer for IDEA League singlehandedly brought in more than 600 donors. This example represents how a viral effect can be achieved by connecting primarily through existing relationships.

Table 8 & 9: Viral Effect

Causes Giving Challenge

“We had 40 volunteers who did the work of 4,000 volunteers. They emailed their address book of friends. They asked their friends to ask their friends to donate. It is fascinating. The last day of the contest you've never seen 40 people more on edge. We were shocked by the numbers. By the end of the day, we got 700 donations in one day. Took years off our lives!” – Linda Shiller and Mary Parente, 11th Hour Rescue

“Other people put it on Facebook, on blogs, my father started calling people. My secretary asked anyone walking in to the building. That 6-degree of separation part was right on. I would hear from someone who knew someone who knew someone who had emailed everyone they know. it spread like wildfire.” – Peggy Padden, Fanconi Anemia Foundation

Smaller organizations and all-volunteer efforts tended to be successful. Eleven of the sixteen champions were for causes with annual organizational budgets less than $1 million. Seventy percent of participating organizations had ten or fewer employees, and 50% had annual operating budgets of less than $500,000, according to the survey responses.

Many of the smaller organizations confessed to initially feeling they wouldn’t be successful against larger organizations, and were surprised and delighted to find that they could be—and often were—more successful than many larger competitors.

Indeed, larger organizations with slower-moving hierarchies and professional development staffs were less successful in this fast-paced effort. One cause champion who was interviewed said, “I work for a large nonprofit. When I first heard about the Challenge, I suggested to my boss that we get involved. However, there was too much inertia between development and marketing departments.”

Table 10: Annual Operating Budgets of Participating Cause Organizations

Table 11: Full-time Staff at Cause Organizations

Differences Among Cause Champions

Just as important as the common characteristics of successful efforts were the issues and structures that turned out not to affect whether causes and their champions were successful. These included:

Previous social media and social networking experience. As noted previously, the survey results indicated that all of the cause champions were comfortable using e-mail and online forums, but the Causes on Facebook users were more savvy when it came to using microblogging tools such as Twitter and online social networks such as, well, Facebook.

Novice users turned to more experienced social networking and social media users in their networks for advice and technical support. Some found tech-savvy friends within their networks who blogged about the contest, or could send a text message for their cause. Others learned through immersion, quickly picking up new tools and techniques out of necessity, and were able to turn around and assist others.

Reverend Margaret Klapperich, the cause champion for the Order of Christ Sophia, said, “My tech savvyness stayed the same, but my tech strategy changed. I got smarter about what we were doing and [learned] how to do it better, smarter and faster.”

"I don't use any of those social media tools. No Facebook, no social networking, no widgets. I use e-mail ... But I learned as we went along." – Stephen Hollister, IDEA League

Table 12: Comfort Using Communication Tools Before the Challenge (ranked from 0-5 with 5 being most comfortable)

No fundraising expertise needed. Most of the cause champions were not professional fundraisers, although most champions who worked for the nonprofit or were on the board of their organization were development professionals or had experience with grassroots fundraising. Some award recipients were experts or were very experienced using Web 2.0 tools for activism before the competition, but had not used these tools for online fundraising.

The personal connection of volunteer champions to their causes (e.g. I have a family member who is afflicted with a disease, I live in a community affected by this issue, etc.) came through in their appeals and attracted donors. These champions knew intuitively that their appeals had to be personal, authentic, and without the patina of professionalism.

Often the cause champions who were inexperienced fundraisers were surprised that asking people to give was easier than they thought. Interviewees often mentioned the low $10 dollar donation amount as a particularly helpful component in garnering their courage to ask their friends to donate (Andresen 2007). Conversely, cause champions found that impersonal group emails were completely ineffective.

“The more I worked with [Causes on Facebook], the more I realized that 90% of the people who gave were personally asked by me or one of our volunteers. E-mail blasts and canned messaging does not work. What works is short quick messages asking for the $10. It has to be personalized to the person you are asking based on your past connection.” – Heather Box, League of Young Voters Education Fund

No size fits all. There was no one right way to be successful in the Challenge. Some very successful efforts, such as Education for 900 Rural Girls in Burkina Faso, were conducted almost entirely by e-mail. However, most campaigns had a mixture of technology tools coupled with off-line activities for outreach.

Some of the college-student led efforts used conventional techniques with a millennial twist. Several held “collectathons” where students brought their laptops and cell phones and sent text messages to everyone in their mobile address books, Instant Message Buddy Lists and Facebook friends. Others used their laptops to solicit donations from students waiting in line for basketball tickets.

And just as there was no one right formula for outreach, there was also no one right answer for when to begin the Challenge. Some cause champions started early to great effect, while others started early and sputtered. Some champions started later and had rousing finishes, and others focused most of their energy on winning a single, daily prize of $1,000.

And some cause champions found that even with a significant web presence and many friends on Facebook, they couldn’t just push a button in the waning moments of the Challenge and succeed. As a champion from a large organization said, “We can’t just win because we’re big. You really have to engage people to get them to want to be a part of it, particularly when it needs another degree of separation to be successful.”

Table 13: The Effectiveness of Various Fundraising Tactics

Action-reflection-revision-action model. Because the Challenges were announced on the day they opened, there was no significant planning done by any of the champions who were interviewed. But this wasn’t necessarily a barrier to their success. The nature of the fast-paced Challenge combined with the fluid nature of online networking and fundraising was a better match for an ongoing learning process than a static planning process.

In addition, the competitive nature of the Challenge encouraged cause champions to watch and learn from one another. This represents best practices in deploying social networking and social media strategies for online fundraising and activism that have been well-documented recently (Schultze 2008).

“We bombarded family and friends with e-mail. We got more organized as time went on. We have a lot of the same Facebook friends, a lot overlapped, five or six e-mails went to the same person initially. We jumped into the deep end and tried to learn how to swim.” – Josh Lee, Fighting Poverty With Nourish International

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