Posted on 10.24.10

Lessons from the Climate Ride: Driving Social Donations

by Tim Frick

Social sites offer great tools for cultivating donor relationships, but you may need to tweak your approach a bit.

I recently embarked on a 320 mile bike ride through the California wilderness to raise money and awareness for the climate crisis. The Climate Ride experience was exhilarating, educational, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in challenging themselves and doing good work for a great cause. It was the fourth ride of this kind—long distance road touring in the name of a good cause—that I have done, but the first in which I used social media almost exclusively for my fundraising efforts. I found social fundraising to be a quick and effective way to meet, and eventually exceed my goals, but discovered that it requires a somewhat different approach than your standard plea for donations.

Sure, it’s easy to fire off a tweet or update your Facebook or LinkedIn status with a “give me money” message, but in my experience that approach wasn’t very effective (imagine that). It was all about details and context, both of which provided the necessary elements for my successful fundraising. Social media tools are custom-built for sharing such details.

Content-in-Context

This is not to say I highjacked my Facebook status or Twitter accounts for weeks at a time in the name of fundraising. I continued to share content relevant to my business strategy and personal interests, but punctuated those efforts with content-in-context relevant to Climate Ride endeavors and the interests of those with whom I was conversing.

I met a lot of really great people from all walks of life and employment on the ride, including the incomparable Deb Janes, a professional fundraiser and vegetarian chef (what a great career combo!) with whom I chatted daily on the ride. I also corresponded with Deb post-ride about her take as a pro regarding online fundraising and was happy to find that her advice mirrored my own experience in regards to social tools.

Professional fundraiser, cyclist, and gourmet vegetarian chef Deb Janes.

“In general, I think it’s best to think of using social media as a donor cultivation tool and not for solicitation,” Deb said. “In essence, Facebook, Twitter, etc. give donors and prospects a chance, albeit remotely, to interact and engage in the work of an organization. Those efforts bring the donor or prospect closer to the organization so they’re primed for making a financial contribution to the organization through an in-person meeting, a phone call, a snail mail appeal letter, or an email message.”

My Revised Approach

For the first ride—the Minneapolis-to-Chicago AIDS Ride way back in ’99—I relied on old school direct marketing techniques of snail-mail pleas, emails, and phone calls to my network of potential donors. I wrote heartwarming letters and designed kitschy, clever thank you notes to donors that I sent out via the USPS.

A lot has changed in twelve years (in addition to the inevitable forces of age and gravity). For the Climate Ride, my timeline for both training and fundraising was curtailed by the fact that I only found out about the ride about six weeks before it started. So I had to work fast, and social tools provided just the immediacy I needed.

Tools and methods I used to raise funds for the Climate Ride included:

Climate Ride Beneficiaries

Green America, 1Sky, and The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy offered a wealth of information that I could share via my various social profiles. Each organization is doing great work and offers a wide variety of programs and services that help the environment, making them easy subjects for content sharing and conversation topics.

MapMyRide

This social training tool offered great ways to share my cycling progress with potential donors on Facebook and Twitter. I was able to tally up miles trained for both individual rides and for my training as a whole and share them as interactive maps that offered a higher level of engagement than just a status update that said “I biked 30 miles today.” The more rides I did, the more I shared. The more I shared, the more encouragement I received from friends, family, and the rest of my network, many of whom eventually became donors.

Facebook

Many donations were likely a direct result of my activities on Facebook, something I attribute to the fact that much of my FB network consists of longtime friends, family members, and associates with whom I regularly do business. Given this, the granddaddy of all social networks offered a great platform upon which to cultivate my donor relations. Twitter, LinkedIn, and a few others were great resources for posting content, but most of the actual engagement between donors and I happened on Facebook.

My Blog

I added content to timfrick.com that was specific to the ride and offered details on the ride, its beneficiaries, and my training/fundraising efforts, as well as a direct link to my DonorDrive fundraising page.

DonorDrive

This software offers a great set of tools for social fundraising. For more info, check out our Five Tips for Social Fundraising post and Climate Ride executive director Geraldine Carter’s comments below.

MyEmma

I also used Mightybytes’ preferred email marketing tool-of-choice to send out one custom-designed email update to friends, family and clients.

The Big Picture

So how did all this turn out in terms of the bigger picture? Well, overall the ride raised nearly a quarter million dollars for the three previously mentioned beneficiaries. Not bad for around 100 cyclists. Geraldine Carter, Climate Ride co-founder and director, had some interesting statistics to share about the role social tools played in spreading the good word and helping riders raise the necessary funds.

Climate Ride co-founder and director Geraldine Carter feeds a goat.

“DonorDrive takes 4% of every donation made through their system,” Geraldine said, adding that most software programs ask for 5% in comparison, and the Facebook hookup feature was an additional cost.

But check out the results:

• Climate Riders who used DonorDrive on Facebook raised an average of $3075.
• Those who didn’t raised $2819. That’s a difference of $256.

For an event where minimum fundraising was $2400.00, that’s a lot of money. However, the average donation to riders who used DonorDrive with Facebook was $73 compared to a $78 average donation for those that didn’t use it. “To me, this says explore these numbers further,” Geraldine said.

Geraldine also shared that using Gmail status updates helped with fundraising and marketing the event as well. “It allowed friends and family to stay tuned in more ‘real-time’ with a rider’s progress.” Geraldine updated her own Gmail status daily to reflect changes and thank donors. “I think it also served as a reminder to donate, and demonstrated that others were donating, so it put a little psychological pressure on potential donors.”

The California Climate Ride was an inspiring enough experience that I signed up for Climate Ride East from New York City to the steps of the nation’s capitol in May 2011. I have definitely learned a few social fundraising tips along the way and definitely plan to put these—and possibly others I haven’t discovered yet—into play for the next ride. Care to join me?

Check out more pics from the ride on our Flickr feed.

Want to know more? Be sure to peruse our other articles this month in our blog series about innovative fundraising and social media charitable marketing:

• Barrel of Monkeys: Chase Community Giving Winner
• Grant for Good: A Year’s Worth of Services
• and even our 10 Tips for maximizing your Twitter account.