Fundraising for Social Change, 8th Edition

chapter FIFTEENOnline Fundraising

Online fundraising involves using all available internet resources, such as email, your website, blogs, crowdfunding, search engine optimization, and social media, in combination with each other and with offline efforts to help raise money and build relationships with donors. Social media allows anyone with access to the internet to follow your work and comment on it. Crowdfunding and its sibling, peer‐to‐peer fundraising, make it possible to aggregate lots of gifts into a significant amount, allowing people who can only make smaller donations to do so and to feel good about it. Peer‐to‐peer fundraising is also the driver behind the “Big Give” days like Giving Tuesday. The rapidity of both of these methods has worked well for getting money quickly to on‐the‐ground organizations for natural disaster aid; for funding special, time‐limited projects; and for fueling a lot of political campaigns.

The very democracy and immediate access the internet provides, however, means you are in an almost unimaginable competition for attention. According to research compiled by DataReportal (https://datareportal.com/global‐digital‐overview), internet use is huge and growing. As of April 2021, there were 4.72 billion internet users in the world; the total number of users around the world grew by 332 million from January 2020 to January 2021—more than 900,000 new users each day. More than six out of ten people in the world have internet access. In the United ...