Facebook Fundraising: 8 Tips to Raise 10K+

The number one reason why people don’t give is that they weren’t asked. The more we ask, the more we invite people to be a part of the solution.

Hello and welcome to the Founding Connected Philanthropy Podcast. Today we are privileged to have Sean Koslowski here. His organization is called the nonprofit Fixer. We will be talking about fundraising today and more specifically, fundraising with Facebook. If you already know, Sean, today is your lucky day. He’s here on our podcast. If you don’t. He is an experienced coach, trainer and strategic advisor and basically an all around nonprofit problem solver.

I met Sean at the nonprofit consulting conference back a little bit in August when he was a featured speaker. So welcome, Sean, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Excited to be here today. Thanks for having me.

Yes. Before we dive into the topic, can you tell our community a little bit more about yourself? I always find it so interesting to hear about the journeys people take with their careers and especially in the nonprofit world. How did you get to where you are today?

Yeah, I kind of fell into nonprofits very early. I’ve been with nonprofit organizations for 30 years, little more than 30 years. So I got started at 16 working at the YMCA. I was in high school and I just was a captain, my swim team and I was a lifeguard at the YMCA and I kind of got drafted into other stuff at the YMCA and stayed there for a few years.

Toward the end of high school, I started doing Summer Doherty door work for the environment, so I realized I was pretty good at raising money by going door to door and having to hit quota, and that stuck with me for life. I was good at talking and good talking to strangers, so I kind of stayed in nonprofits throughout college.

I ended my senior year of high school. I came out of the closet. That was a big thing and transformational moment for me. I really wanted to dedicate my life to helping LGBTQ people. So I started running the very youth group that helped save my life in Metro Detroit, the Affirmations Youth Group. And then I fell into sort of working at the gay civil rights organization in Michigan, and we were only two staff at the time.

I moved to New York City, was doing bullying prevention. So I’ve always sort of been in nonprofits and then eventually ended up for the past four years running a national climate change organization in San Francisco. And then I started my own consulting practice about five or six years ago because I wanted to start imparting on other people all of the stuff I had learned.

Many small nonprofits are just spinning their wheels and stuck, and they’re not able to go make the change they want to see in the world. So I want to just give everyone everything I’ve learned, and that’s sort of my journey.

I love that in looking at all the resources that you’ve provided, you could tell that there’s experience that backs it up and you’re not just trying to do something flashy. And I really I love that you shared that journey with us, that that is quite a wealth of of great organizers, nations that you’ve worked with support and share passion with.

Thank you for that. Fundraising, I imagine, is one of the the key cornerstones of being able to fund the good work in all of these organizations. So yeah, leaving that to our topic, how did you come upon fundraising through Facebook and all of there’s a lot of opinions out there about using Facebook for fundraising. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Why people love it. Hate it.

Yeah, I think I got the last five jobs that I had working in nonprofits as an executive director because I said on the interview, I love fundraising. Like put me in coach. Like most executive directors don’t love fundraising. They see it as like, not a necessary evil. But I really, really enjoy moving wealth from where it lives to where she lives.

And that’s how I see fundraising is inviting people to part with some of the cash they have to go make the world they want to see happen. Right? And I’m just a conduit for that. And with Facebook, what has happened is we finally have a tool in social media that has unlocked how to use peer to peer fundraising to raise real money.

And then we raised $20,000 in like a month. And for me, that was just a meet like for small organizations. That is powerful. And I can’t imagine that other people can’t recreate what I did. So I wanted to teach people how to do this. I already know how to work in a campaign kind of environment. Clear goals beginning date and date.

So I knew how to run these these things, but the algorithm is super finicky, so you have to know how to use Facebook to do this. Well, a lot of people do them and they don’t do them well. So I’m here to unlock some tips today for people. But there is controversy because people don’t maybe don’t like Mark Zuckerberg or maybe they’re frustrated with privacy stuff on Facebook.

But if you can just suspend all that because all of the platforms are sort of bad, you know, when it comes to privacy, if you’re going to suspend that for a minute and say this is a powerful tool that will help raise unrestricted money quickly for your cause in a way that’s pretty accessible and pretty easily pretty easy for everyone.

So in my mind, I just really want to teach, especially small nonprofits, how to use this tool because it is so, so promising.

Great. I love that using it as a tool to do the good that you want to there. What what are one of the early things that people are getting wrong about the platform?

Very often nonprofit CEOs are going to some nonprofit organizations Facebook page and you’ll click on the fundraisers button and see all these fundraisers that people are running for their birthday or for any other reason, and they start them and then they just never come back. They never they they create the fundraiser opposed to their wall and then they never coast to get thinking.

I think people just think, oh, if I’ve created a fundraiser, it’s going to live somewhere visible in this world called my Facebook wall. Not a lot of people realize what other folks see on your wall or in their feed. So people start want and then they don’t give it any tad tender love, care, tender loving care at all, or the other mistake they make is that they post on their wall instead of inside their fundraiser.

And that is a problem because the fundraiser is like a Facebook event. You have to invite people to it and then post in it and everyone is creating it, but then posting in their wall. And the way Facebook has worked over time is that they want people to pay for advertising. So they want you to spend to reach your audience.

But the way around that, to turn that because they’re only serving up messages. If you have a Facebook page, they’re only serving up messages to 5% of your audience because they want you to pay for ads. But the way around that is to invite everyone to an event or invite everyone to a fundraiser. Then they’ll start seeing almost every notification.

That’s one of the things that people are getting.

Wow, I loved your insights. This is so great to share this broadcast, this and and another thing I love about having you on the podcast, this at this time is Giving Tuesdays coming up. And it sounds like you gave me a little early information is Facebook making some big changes so fundraisers can can do something at the end of this month?

Yeah, for six or seven years we’ve had this incredible benefit of Facebook not charging any fees while they pay their fees, they cover the fees. So Facebook as a platform is free, right? It doesn’t cost anything to use Facebook at all. But then if you run fundraisers there, they were paying, they were covering the transaction fees. So if it’s a now, if it’s 1.99% or 2.99%, whatever it was to process this, this Facebook just ate that pass, which means that this was the lowest cost form of fundraising out there.

So people who were utilizing this knew the power of that and the cost savings to that. Well, it’s you know, the day we worried about was coming is coming now. So on October 31st, I think it is at 5 p.m. Facebook is going to stop covering these fees. Everything is shifting from meta pay and the Facebook giving tools, fundraising tools over to the PayPal giving fund.

And that is a nonprofit that receives all the gifts and then grants nonprofits the money. So through some interesting arrangement, their PayPal giving fund is able to receive it. They’ll handle the thank you email to all the donors and then they will move money to you every 15 or 30 or 45 days. Used to be every 14 days you would usually get your deposit from Facebook.

So the first big change happening on October 31st, PayPal giving founders now the place where all this processing is happening. A second change is that nonprofits have to go into their account and make some changes in order to move into this new system where you will lose some of these fundraising tools. So everyone’s getting notifications. As of this weekend, some people were getting them much sooner to go fill out some stuff and make sure you can still have access to these tools.

But the big change is the fee, the 1.99% fee plus $0.49 every donation that comes through. So the bad news is that those new fees, the good news is Facebook is going to invite every donor to cover the fee. So when the donor is prompted to make the donation, they will be asked, hey, do you want to cover this this processing fee?

And many of them will do it right. So nonprofits hopefully won’t see a big surge in costs, not costs, but they won’t see a reduction in the donations as much because of this thing. But over time, two other good things have happened at Facebook that sort of makes me not so frustrated with them, which is nowadays when you’re raising money on Facebook, you can invite people to give monthly.

They used to not be a thing they would offer. So you can actually start becoming a monthly sustainer through the Facebook fundraisers. The other interesting thing, and this was the biggest criticism of Facebook all along, they weren’t giving nonprofits the email addresses of the donors at all. You could get their names, but not their email addresses. But now the default orientation when you’re using the platform is to give the emails to the organization, and that can help you grow your list and cultivate them for renewals.

Oh, that is huge. That is awesome. Oh, I’m on the board and I want to go run out and set some stuff up. So is it that’s all available to people that haven’t been using the platform yet as well? Right. You know, just diving in. Right.

And if I have a one see three that I as a Facebook page just needs to fill out a few things to make Facebook know that you are eligible, you have to submit some banking account information and some other things, and then bam, you’re usually approved pretty quickly and then you’re off and running. You can get the blue donate button on your Facebook page and you can begin rolling out Facebook fundraisers.

This is powerful. I mean, they’ve is like billions and billions of dollars from nonprofits over the years. And I think this is new money. I think this is money that normally would not have been given had they not been passed by a friend in that moment to get. So I really do believe that charitable giving might be up because of Facebook fundraising tools.

Wow, that’s great. That’s great. So you’ve said you have ten tips. I don’t know if we have time to cover them all, but can you scratch the surface and dive into some other ones that that people should know?

Yeah. I mean, I think we’re going to give folks access to a free tool that I give away. This Facebook fundraising guide eight plus Expert tips to raise 10,000 or more using Facebook fundraisers. The reason why I can say that is that my first time right out of the gate before I knew much, I raised 12,000. Right? So I know people can do this as individuals, so a couple of the tests will die then.

I already covered some of these, but like the first one for sure is that when you go in and create a Facebook fundraiser, it’s really important to set a goal that is ambitious. Some people just let the default amount be $200 that Facebook is allowing. I think folks should set a goal $1,000 minimum and it’s okay if you blow past your goal, you can increase the goal.

It’s also okay if you don’t hit your goal. Don’t worry about letting anyone down. But it is that higher goal that tells the people who arrive at the fundraiser. Look at how big the gap is. I need to help them close this gap and people will do that when they’re helping a friend, which is the key that people give to people.

That’s the second tip people give to people. The entire world is based on relationships, right? So when I need a big company or a big governmental entity to do something, those aren’t real things right there, people. If I want Amazon to stop doing something, I have to go target people at Amazon to get them to do something. The whole world is based on people talking to people and fundraising is no different.

So if you see in your nonprofit, you might be tempted on your board to forward someone else’s fundraiser, right? Don’t do that. Start your own. And the reason why is if I took yours, Tammy and I forwarded to my friends, my friends don’t know you, so they won’t be invested in your success. They way they’ll be invested in my success.

So people give to people, which means in your organization, each person should set up their own Facebook fundraiser instead of sharing someone else’s. You’re just never going to get the same amount of buy in unless people see, Oh, Sally is raising money for Sally’s campaign. I need to help my friend Sally. That’s tip number two. The third tip is once you create your Facebook fundraiser, you need to invite every single friend.

This goes way faster on a mobile device than it does on a computer. So on a tablet or on a smartphone, you just go a little blue buttons, invite, invite, invite to all your friends. It can literally take hours, but that’s where all the cash comes in, so it’s totally worth it. Grab a slice of pizza, maybe a glass of wine, sit there with your mobile device, and then invite people all night long.

You’ve set a goal for $1,000. You start inviting all your friends. And here’s why this matters. Don’t make the decision for someone else who’s going to give and who’s not going to get, Oh, I’m raising money for something that’s maybe more liberal, so I’m not going to invite my conservative friends around and raising money for something more conservative.

I’m not going to invite my lover like don’t make that decision for other people. Or I live in California and this charity is only a California. I’m not going to invite my friends from Michigan. Don’t do that. The people who are going to donate are your friends who care about your success. They’re not even drawn by the issue as much as they are the personal connection.

So this other tip is basically invite everyone. The next step is to post every day, every single day social media platforms that have a feed. That feed goes away pretty quickly, right? If people don’t see it, it’s gone. So you need to stay in the conversation and stay in the feed. Don’t worry that posting every day is going to annoy people.

They’re not seeing your everyday posts, they’re seeing lots of other stuff. So you have to post every day in order for them to see some of them. When you post every day, the donations will come in within about three or 4 hours of a post. So the more you post, the more donations you get. So those are just some of the tips.

One other one I’ll give you right now, I think for a lot of folks is the one we talked about earlier posting inside the fundraiser. Instead of on your wall, you can post on your wall all you want. You can post a link to your fundraiser on your wall. You can even post your fundraiser, which has its own URL, its own website.

You can post that on LinkedIn, you can post that on Twitter, you can post your ex, you can post it anywhere else. You put it in your electronic signature. You can even create an away message. Let’s say you travel and you put in a message on. You don’t even have to be traveling for the two weeks that you’re running a Facebook fundraiser.

Put an awareness to John saying, Hi, I’m actually not traveling, but I want you to see a link to my Facebook fundraiser because I’m raising money right now. Click here and give money. There’s all these different ways to drop your link and raise more money. So these are just a handful of the tips I give away in my free guide.

And then I also have a longer course where I give away all these assets on how to run these campaigns.

That is awesome and do you have to be a employee or associated with the organization as a fundraiser? Sorry.

So that’s the beautiful part about Facebook fundraisers. You can have a Facebook page on Facebook and have zero followers, zero followers and still make many, many thousands of dollars. You can be a stranger to the nonprofit, you can be staff, you can be a board member. If you’re approved for the Facebook fundraising tools, anyone can go right to that Facebook page, click the Raise Money button and begin a fundraiser, and all of a sudden you are inviting your friends.

So let’s say it’s the Sierra Club and you go to their page and create a fundraiser. And Sierra Club has zero people following, right? Of course they do. But if you go to their Facebook page, create your own fundraiser. I’m going to invite my friends to support the Sierra Club so they can have zero following and zero friends and my friends are going to start giving money to this organization so you don’t need to be staff.

You don’t even need to have a strong social media presence to have these things be out there in the world. That’s one of the most powerful parts about the platform. And I have clients who have had this exact situation. They are brand new to Facebook. They worried they would raise nothing because they didn’t have any followers yet. But that has nothing to do with how it actually works.

There are some challenges to the platform, but this is one of the beauties.

Oh, I love that you’ve already overcome all of my objections that I thought might stop it. So I’m going to have to try this. This is great. Talking specifically about giving Tuesday, is Facebook one of the better tools to use for that part?

Yeah. As giving Tuesday has exploded and grown and become like one of the biggest days and giving of the year might even be the biggest day of digital giving at least over the year. I’m Facebook fundraisers have become one of the most powerful tools to use around giving Tuesday. There are other giving days the LGBTQ community has give out day.

I think it’s in May. The University of Michigan has its own giving day and a nonprofit or cause can create their own giving day, which is powerful. But for giving Tuesday, I do think that the biggest week of Facebook fundraisers of the year is around giving Tuesday. So this is exactly the time to do this. Again, the platform is free, some of the transaction fees now your donors might pick up and you still get the money within a month, usually within a month, and it’s unrestricted.

So you can use that giving Tuesday energy to get all of these people who normally wouldn’t give to give to your cause and the money you get is unrestricted. You can use it for anything overhead, the rent, staff salaries. That’s another beautiful part about how the money is coming in. It’s not restricted.

And it’s marked. If everybody goes in and creates their own fundraiser, you can see how much it has generated from. So that’s another fun element to it. If you get a group of people.

If I’m the fundraiser, I have this great page that has a clear bar telling me how close I am to my goal, There’s people are sharing their stories. They’re saying, thank you. It’s just a place of pure joy. Like showing up to someone’s Facebook fundraiser is like a place I’m just gratitude and joy and people donating and thanking each other and sharing links and pictures.

They’re actually like wonderful places if you want to feel good. But I’m the fundraiser. My page shows all that. If I’m the person giving, I can see all of the other people donating. I feel like I’m part of something bigger. I can see where the money’s going to go. I can ask a question of the fundraiser, Where does my money go?

All of this stuff is happening inside of it. I get my tax receipt instantly. And the other thing is that the organization gets a report so the organization can pull a report at the end any day, any month or at the end of giving Tuesday. Pull a report that says these 43 people were all raising money for you.

Here are the here’s every donation, every amount, every day. And here are the top performers in your leaderboard Of all these people that were raising money for you, it’s all just kind of amazing that this is all free, right? And now there’s some fees on the transactions, but the platform is free.

Oh, I love that. There’s really no no reason not to give it a try. And so much I just feel so much more confident going from zero to knowing enough to be dangerous, I guess. Thank you. I know that this will be very, very helpful for for our community. Loving the new idea of trying something new like this for fundraising as well as feeling comfortable enough with the tips that you’ve shared.

This is great. I, I want to like wrap up a little bit here and see if there’s a place where you can give our listeners an overview of this resource. But you’ve gone so deep in this area. But I know you given the intro you gave so many other different ways of fundraising or even other issues that nonprofits face.

So do you have a place where our community can find this resource and what you have on other topics as well?

Yeah, for sure. Go to nonprofit Fixer Icon. The name of the company is Mind the Gap Consulting, but their website and my moniker is nonprofit fixers. You just go to nonprofit Fixer dotcom. It’s a playful word, you know, it’s to play off of being a fixer, you know, like I’m a generalist. I solve problems or just get into organizations and help solve them and fill gaps.

Right? So anyone can go to nonprofit fixer Rt.com I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook and on Twitter or X and also on LinkedIn. So the hashtag about the hashtag that out symbol nonprofit fixer on YouTube, also, they’ll all find me. But to get this tool on the Facebook fundraiser, my blog post, the free tool, the download and to learn more about the course.

All of that is at nonprofit fixer dot com. I will give you one last tip before I go about Facebook fundraisers and that is the birthday fundraiser. This is a whole other way. Not only do organizations get a blue donate button on their page, but anyone throughout the year who tags a nonprofit who’s been approved, let’s say one of my clients is Kid Power International, and let’s say I wanted to raise money for them in June.

Nowhere near giving Tuesday, I create a Facebook post just like, Hey everyone, I support this great organization. I would at ten Power. And then all of a sudden Facebook says, Do you want to turn this into a donate? But do you want to turn this post into a fundraising post? So all throughout the year, you can encourage all of your members to tag you in posts and start raising money with those posts.

And then the final tip is with birthday fundraisers that Facebook will start pinging you. We’ll start notifying you 14 days before your birthday that your birthday is coming up. Do you want to run a Facebook fundraiser? So I think nonprofits should get in front of your members 15 days before their birthday and say, hey, Facebook is going to ask you to run a fundraiser.

Can you pick us, choose us when you run your birthday fundraiser? But that does mean that nonprofits have to start tracking the birth dates of their donors, of their supporters. Now, you don’t have to ask people for their exact birthday. You can put out an E by saying Click on the month of your birthday and it tags their record.

My birthday is in October, so I might reach out to them in September saying, I know you have a birthday in October. Please raise money for us. These are just a handful of the things I give away in the course and in the blog post now so that folks can learn that this is all at your fingertips and I want everyone using this tool.

Oh, I love that. I love that. And as our listeners know, we are going to include both that specific link for the resource landing page as well as Sean’s contact information on all of the social platforms. This has been so helpful. Thank you so much for all that. The insight and the tips for successfully raising funds on Facebook, we appreciate you taking the time to join us.

Do you have any final thoughts or advice to leave our listeners with?

Just that? I really want to encourage folks to see fundraising as a joy. I really do believe that when you are asking someone for money, you’re not asking for a favor. You’re doing them a favor. Everyone wants to see less disease and a cleaner environment and more people fat in our world, right? Everyone wants these things. When you ask someone to do something for charity, you’re inviting them to do something that they want, right?

So you’re doing them a favor. The number one reason why people don’t give is that they weren’t asked. The more we ask, the more we invite people to be a part of the solution. So, you know, they’re there, they feel joyful and they give because they know they’re making a change. Right. So just want to encourage everyone out there who’s hesitating about fundraising, going into giving Tuesday or hesitating to fundraise at all, that when you ask other people for money, you’re not asking for a favor.

You’re doing them a favor by getting them involved. There is a donor. You’re the doer. It’s a handshake, it’s a partnership. And that’s how this whole thing works.

I love that. That’s so inspirational. I’m going to make sure that we tell people when they listen to this podcast to, like, block out an extra half hour because I’m fired up right now. So I love the insight that you’ve shared and thank you so much to our listeners. If you’ve learned something from today’s Connected Philanthropy podcast, please share it with others who also might enjoy and benefit from this.

Let’s spread the word about this and we look forward to connecting in our future webinars, podcasts and community discussions. As Sean and I talked about the potential topics for today’s episode, we came up with several others, so you’ll probably see him if he wants to come back again on future episodes as well. So we wish you all the best success And again, thank you for all that you do.