fundraising
Friday Update – Get Social, Get Gifts – 8-7-15
The Friday Fundraising Update collects fundraising industry insights and success stories and delivers them to you each Friday from Ruffalo Noel Levitz.
This week, some links to resources on social media and giving, engaging young alumni, and a great crowdfunding campaign.
Meaningful Experiences = Engagement after Graduation
Jeff Fromm dropped a concise, powerful article on Forbes.com that offers advice about how to engage the Millennial generation before and after graduation. It’s all about utilizing data to personalize, network and create meaningful experiences. And Jeff says it will lead to more alumni donating in the future. He also wins our periodically offered “best power idea diagram” award this week.
Fundraise like Beyoncé
Greater Giving has a fun post using lessons from the pop star’s career about how to improve event fundraising, including creating a buzz and making sure you’re ready for your next “red carpet.”
Social (Gift) Planning
Greg Warner at MarketSmart has a great post answering the question of whether or not to create a separate Facebook page for planned giving marketing. The advice: use the social media engines you already have running with follows and likes, and consider leveraging other engines that are underutilized – like LinkedIn. Greg has some great links on other social media topics and checking your profile on Glassdoor as well. Your donors are checking you.
Funded! BACON at UCLA
What do you get when you combine a great project, a neat acronym, superb presentation and a social media “thunderclap?” Donations.
Check out BACON, a project at UCLA’s spark engine, powered by ScaleFunder. It’s all about amping up science education with popular culture, and apparently donors do love BACON.
UCLA also utilized Thunderclap, a crowdsourcing support tool to help build momentum for the project. What’s a Thunderclap? According to it’s creators, “It allows a single message to be mass-shared, so it rises above the noise of your social networks.”
The innovative project owners and supporters at UCLA certainly succeeded at that.
Webinar: Your First Year of Crowdfunding
The first year of a crowdfunding program comes with lots of questions – how do I select projects? Should I work with student volunteers? What’s the best way to introduce this new program to campus? A year and a half ago, the University of Maryland asked the same questions. Join ScaleFunder and Nora Pittmann, the brain behind Launch UMD, for a focused discussion on your crowdfunding program’s first year and how to set the foundation for a robust pipeline of projects for years to come. Register for this no cost webinar on August 17.