Glossary

Award recipient: Nonprofit organizations that received prizes (both from daily and overall Challenges).

Causes: Causes (with a capital C) refers to the Facebook application and company – Causes on Facebook.

cause: cause (with a lower case c) generally refers to: a) a cause on Causes on Facebook that is created in order to fundraise, or b) a general term synonymous with a nonprofit organization’s issue area.

Cause champion (champion): Individuals who spearheaded fundraising efforts on behalf of an organization.

Challenge: The experimental Giving Challenge was two events. America’s Giving Challenge in PARADE magazine and on PARADE.com and the Causes Giving Challenge on Facebook. The causes with the highest numbers of unique donors received awards from the Case Foundation. For the purpose of this report, the overall effort is referred to as the Challenge.

Prize: The combined $750,000 of award money given by the Case Foundation to nonprofit award recipients are referred to as prizes.

Unique cause: Each champion had to create a new, standalone cause for the Causes Giving Challenge. For reporting purposes, they could not use an existing cause.

Unique donor: Each individual that donates to one cause is considered a unique donor for that cause. An individual may donate to multiple causes, and is considered as one unique donor per each cause.

Unique donation: A unique donation is defined as one single donation per individual. This means that duplicate donations from the same individual to a single charity badge/widget will only count once towards helping a fundraiser get a prize.

Viral: This paper defines viral campaigns as those that had 150 or more unique donors. This follows the method known as the “Dunbar Number,” which asserts that 150 is the number of relationships that one human can successfully maintain.