CharityVillage® Research: Cybergifts, Part 1

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Cybergifts, Part 1
By Adam Corson-Finnerty

Every so often I find myself driving on an out-of-the way suburban street, only to come across a scene straight out of Charlie Brown. Two children are sitting hopefully behind a makeshift lemonade stand, with paper cups and a change box at the ready. Their mother is usually perched in a lawn chair behind them, both protecting and encouraging her little ones in what has to be their first foray into retail commerce.

After Dad and a few neighbors have purchased their obligatory cup of lemonade, I wonder who else stops to make a purchase. Not me; I don't happen to like lemonade.

It is astonishing to me that non-profit organizations, making their first foray into online giving, often set up the equivalent of a lemonade stand in a suburban cul-de-sac. They create a plain vanilla online donation form, bury it four levels down on their site, and wonder why nobody makes a gift.

Thus there are sites which have been up for a year or more, and which have received less than 25 gifts. Is cyber-giving therefore a failure? Of course not. The only "failure" is a failure of imagination.

Innovation Diffusion:

It takes a while for new ideas, new tools, and new inventions to work their way through to maximum utilization by a society. In fact, those who study such sociological processes say the average time from introduction to widespread and mature adoption is 50 years!

Ah, but you say, with today's mass communications-and the Internet-this process must be telescoping in. Perhaps 50 years is becoming 50 weeks. Maybe 50 days!

After all, look at amazon.com. Look at ebay. These new ideas have taken off like a rocket, and been widely adopted.

"Yes," says the Sociologist, but these two "innovations" are simply evidence of the maturation of two relatively old inventions: the telephone and the computer. Without the wiring of our society-courtesy of the telephone and electricity-and the widespread adoption of the personal computer, ebay and amazon.com would be nothing but science fiction.

The main notion of this article is this: cybergiving is in its infancy, and we early practitioners are all helping it to grow up. The Internet provides a stunning, staggering, superlative-exceeding new tool for charitable fundraising; and our job is to experiment with this new tool in order to see what it can do.

This is a wonderful time to be involved with the Internet. It's the ground floor. It's lift-off. It's the California Gold Rush and we don't even have to tell Mom and Aunt Mary goodbye. We are at the yeasty, bubbly, formative time for this medium-and we get to be co-inventors of its future. What could be more fun?

Beyond Brochureware:

The first stage of any invention is to think of it in terms of one's current frame of reference. Thus the automobile was the "horseless carriage." Electronic message-delivery is "e-mail." And Websites have a "home page."

Not surprisingly, then, most early html pioneers thought in print-reference terms. Their first impulse was to put their various brochures, press releases, annual reports, and newsletters online.

When it came to gifts, memberships, and purchases, most non-profit organizations started with what might be found on any brochure: An address to mail to, an "800" number, and a "form" that readers were encouraged to "print out and mail." Or, if you were really progressive, "print out and fax"!

These early efforts were the equivalent of the suburban lemonade stand. You build it and nobody comes.

The next level of innovation began to capture the power of email. Websites peppered their pages with "mailtos," allowing readers to easily click and send comments in a freeform box. Next up were simple "cgi" scripts which allowed us to create online forms. Now, our visitors could fill in the blanks, click on "send" and a message would come to us.

That message could be a pledge in any amount. It could be a membership application with a "bill me" checkbox. It could even be a credit card number, expiration date, and gift designation. Voila! Cybergiving was born.

Currently, we have the capacity to accept credit card gifts online, with varying levels of security. If we are willing to pay the extra cost, we can also have real-time validation, direct transfer to our merchant account, full integration with our accounting and donor-tracking systems, and an automatically-generated and personalized thank-you.

This is a nice tool! With this we can begin panning the streambeds, and digging into the hillsides. In a moment, we shall turn to a few prospectors' tales to see what we can learn from each other.

Having generalized and philosophized, let's futurize.

As we invent the future together, here are three "science fiction" ideas to ponder, each of which has vast implications for fundraising.

The first is micropayments. One way or another, we will soon be able to spend small amounts of money online. Like 15 cents for a transaction. Whether we do this through digital cash or through micro-debit is not material. Think about how an institution might be able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars through micropayments-even millions!

The second is convergence. Sure, it is already a stale buzzword, but however it is finally tagged, think about the possibilities when voice, text, and image all flow smoothly through your computer-I mean, your information appliance! Prospects will be able to scan your site, and if desired, "click-up" a real-time conversation online. Virtual donor-initiated visits become possible. And, just to add an interesting twist, imagine that you can not only speak to each other in real-time, and see each other in real-time, but that your speech can be translated into any of forty languages and dialects in real-time, and vice versa. Your English becomes Parisian-accented French; their French becomes Peter Jennings-style Canadian. Oh, and the computer smoothly renders their mouth so that it appears they are actually speaking the translated language.

The third is identity. Imagine this: A surgeon receives an email saying "Doctor, I understand that my son's survival depends upon a lung transplant. You have my permission to operate." What surgeon in his right mind would proceed? Yet one day identification mechanisms will be so rock-solid, and the law will have caught up with the technology, and legally-binding decisions-online-will be commonplace. Enter a binding pledge through email? No problem! Buy a house online? You bet! Transfer ten million dollars? Just say where you want it to go!

Baby-steps:

Back to earth. Believe it: we are not even at the "toddler" stage in cybergiving. We are just learning to crawl. Yet there are already some very exciting examples of innovation out there, and some of them are beginning to produce gold.

--Donate Now-

The simplest method for cybergiving is to place a "donate now" or "click here to give" button on your site. The visitor clicks, receives a long or short form to fill out with the amount of the gift and credit card data, and clicks "send" or "complete gift." That's it. Ignoring a lot of behind-the-scenes processing, the gift is done. And the money (less processing fees) has gone to your cause.

For most people who think of cybergiving, the above example practically defines the concept: create a credit card form, place links to it on your site, and wait for the money to arrive. In some cases, this works.

Those of us who follow cybergiving were electrified by the news that the Red Cross had taken in over $1.2 million in online gifts for Balkan Relief, from more than 9,000 donors, in the first half of 1999. Other relief organizations, like CARE and World Vision also reported very significant giving during this same period. Clearly, people were touched by stories of suffering in the Balkans and wanted to do something about it. As I write, the terrible earthquake in Turkey is in the news, and I would guess that the Red Cross will experience another upsurge in giving. (See http://www.redcross.org)

It would be a huge mistake to think that the Red Cross "breakthrough" heralds great things for the rest of us. About four years ago I predicted that disaster relief organizations would be the first agencies to experience a flood of small online gifts. This came from my experience of working for the American Friends Service Committee when the news of the holocaust in Cambodia first hit the world press. The AFSC was one of the few agencies that could channel aid to Cambodia, and tens of thousands of spontaneous donations came our way. Office workers passed the hat in Texas; schoolchildren took up collections in New England; little old ladies and college students wrote out checks and then found our address through the phone book or at their library. Such outpourings of public sentiment occur when publicity is widespread and the need is clear.

While the Red Cross does many things, it is best known for its work with natural and human-made disasters. Therefore a critical strategy for its site is to offer timely and accurate information about such disasters. The Red Cross decided that their site must enable visitors to quickly:

Find out what happened;

Find out what the Red Cross is doing about it;

Find out what "you can do" about it, including volunteering;

Donate on the spot.

All of this was in place when the refugee crisis in Kosovo began flooding the news. Gifts followed. Not just online gifts, but 800-number gifts, mailed gifts, and major gifts from foundations and individuals such as Bill and Melinda Gates.

And, I have been saying for four years, that's it. Disaster relief will have early take-off, but every other form of fundraising will have to slog through the trenches for several more years. But I was wrong.

Politics has show early successes too
Politics has more than one thing in common with disasters, but the link I have in mind is that politics can generate high emotions. And, apparently, high levels of gift motivation. As of July 31^st, Presidential candidate Bill Bradley has raised $312,000 from 2,000 donors. The Republican National Committee says it has raised $200,000 online since 1996, and soon expects that 25% of its under $100 gifts will be made online. (Business Week, 8/30/99)

But this is peanuts compared to the experience of MoveOn.org. According to a front-page story in USA Today (8/31/99) this "grass-roots movement" has generated over $13 million in online pledges. If even half of that is paid, this will be by far the most successful example of Internet fundraising in the medium's young history.

Here's what happened. Silicon Valley husband-and-wife team Joan Blades and Wes Boyd got fed up with the long, drawn out campaign to punish Bill Clinton for his peccadilloes. They launched an online petition campaign, asking others who felt the same way to urge Congress to "censure and move on." And to pass the petition along. The petition spread through the net community and soon over 500,000 petitions were clogging the computers at Capitol Hill.

Some time later, they launched a "We will Remember" drive to raise funds to defeat legislators who were anti-Clinton activists. They placed an online pledge and donation form on their site, and thus far have garnered $13 million in gifts and pledges. Mostly pledges, due by November, 2000 at the latest.

They also launched a "We will Act" drive to collect pledges that people would work for candidates in this election. As of September 1, 1999 they have collected pledges of 776,485 hours of volunteer work. (See their website: http://www.moveon.org)

Is this for real? Well, they have already distributed $336,000 to political candidates, and more donations and pledge-payment checks are coming in every day, so-yes, it's for real.

So real that some political professionals are predicting vast changes in a very short period of time. USA Today found one pundit, John Phillips, who predicts that more than $25 million in political donations will be raised online by November 2000. By Election Day 2004, Phillips predicts, "as much as 80% of all money raised--$600 million or more-could flow through electronic channels." (But note, dear reader, that Phillips sells political fund-raising software, so a few grains of salt may be in order.)

One would hope that Bill Clinton is not the only "political cause" which will open people's cyberwallets. How about gun control? I have not seen any figures, but one might suspect that the gun control movement would have received considerable support online, following the series of terrible shooting episodes this year. MoveOn.org does have a gun control petition drive in motion, and has collected 60,000 signatures thus far.

So a second area of online fundraising is "taking off." Even so, high levels of gift-motivation are unusual for most charities, most of the time. Clearly however, when such periods occur, a charity should be prepared to handle them.

What might be examples of such times? Well, how about:

Your organization was just given a glowing segment on "60 minutes."

You have just announced a breakthrough treatment discovery for a major disease.

Your come-from-behind football team just won the Rose Bowl, and your alumni are delirious with joy.

Your Library just burned down.

It's December 31^st.

The year-end phenomenon is common to most of us. Some donors wait until the last minute to make their gift and still be able to take advantage of a this-year tax deduction. When Brown University set up a donation site, they received a spurt of gifts in late December. They also noted that donors made gifts at unusual hours, like 3 a.m. Will someone come up with a "night owl" gift strategy? I am sure of it.

The trick, of course, is to work with the opportunity that is presented by a high-profile event. Do a quick mailing. Make phone calls. Run Ads. But the most immediate way to get the word out, and to suggest a related gift, is by email.

There is much to be said about email as a major fundraising tool, and it will be said in due course. For the moment, however, note this advice: Use every opportunity to collect email addresses from your constituents and would-be constituents. Even if you don't yet have a web site! You will, and those email addresses will be institutional "gold." If your current printed information forms don't have a line for email addresses, throw them out. Print new ones. It will be worth the expense.
Part II: "Push" and "Pull" fundraising strategies, and a soup-to-nuts list of ideas, tactics, and gimmicks.
Adam Corson-Finnerty is a Development Officer, Author and Occasional Consultant. Reach him at: 215-635-4084 or corsonf@fund-online.com. Find his web site at: http://www.fund-online.com. This article was originally published as a series of three postings to the CYBERGIFTS mailing list at http://www.charitychannel.com.