Facebook is Great, but Does it Really Work for Fundraising?

Last weeks post highlighting a few statistics from the business world seems to have resonated with readers here. That got me thinking more about how we, in the non-profit space, should look to learn from examples, trends and best practices found outside of our sector. So here’s another great bit of learning for us.

This week ReadWriteWeb shed some light on the ineffectiveness of social networks to aid in customer acquisition (see graph below).

“Of the 24 companies interviewed (in Forrester study), only 7% cited social networking as one of their most effective sources for customer acquisition. Affiliate programs, organic search traffic and even offline advertising scored higher than social. By far the most effective channel was paid search marketing, which 90% of respondents put in their top three biggest sources of acquisition.”

Social Networking Adoption by Non-profits

Heading in to 2011 most nonprofits (92%), regardless of organization size are using at least one social network like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and close to nine out of ten nonprofits (89%) have a presence on Facebook – up from 74% in 2009. By comparison only 70% of small businesses use Facebook as part of their online strategy.

Fundraising via Social Networking

It would seem that non-profits are eager to figure out how to utilize social networking as part of their online strategy, but only 2.4% of non-profits were able to raise over 10k through Facebook in 2010.

So, the question remains, Facebook is a great platform for many things, but is it useful for fundraising? I’d love to hear your thoughts, examples, experiences in the comments below.