Anthony J. BradleyI had an interesting conversation today with David Karp of firstgiving.com a US based social fundraising community. firstgiving.com connects normal people who are fundraising (walk-a-thons, bike-a-thons, anything-a-thons) with their charities and those that would sponsor them. Firstgiving.com facilitates the logistics of some on-line marketing of your fundraising effort, signing up sponsors, and collecting money. Check it out. It’s easy. Our conversation was interesting on a few fronts.
First is that enteprises can learn a great deal from firstgiving.com about leverage. Leverage is a major if not the major benefit of social applications. By engaging the community and delegating what is best done by the community to the community you can get tremendous leverage. So what kind of leverage are we talking about here? According to David and their site they have about 1.4M people and 1500 charities and have facilitated fundraising of almost $74,000,000 since 2003. David says they are growing at a rate of about 50% year over year. They started in the UK as www.justgiving.comin 2001 where they now have over 6M people, 5000 charities and have assisted in raising over £348,000,000. This ain’t peanuts. Firstgiving.com delivers the capability with a dozen employees. The UK’s www.justgiving.com whose community is about 3 times larger and fundraising about a magnitude bigger has about 30 employees. Exponential leverage is the goal. In mass collaboration, mass matters!
Second, I beat the dead horse of purpose for a reason. This is a great example of the best of both worlds. They have a nicely restricted scope in community fundraising but almost limitless scale potential. Limited scope and unlimited scale is the key to getting transformational, game changing leverage.
Finally, this is another good example of new business models arising out of the social Web movement. Using mass collaboration technologies they have found a way to a win-win. Charities get easier access to more fundraising and www.firstgiving.com gets about a 5% cut for facilitating the transaction (I don’t know for sure but would imaging that this transaction cost is a good bit cheaper than the non-Web based manual effort.
I’m collecting examples of mass collaboration leverage and would love to hear of more good examples. Bring them on!
Category: social applications Tags: mass leverage, social software
5 responses so far ↓
1 The Online Fundraising Blog » Gartner: “enteprises can learn a great deal from firstgiving.com about leverage” October 10, 2008 at 8:58 am
[...] covers social computing and social applications, and that’s what we talked about. He was kind enough to blog about it on the Gartner blog, saying in part that big businesses can take a lesson from Firstgiving on the topic of leverage: [...]
2 Andrea Di Maio October 10, 2008 at 9:56 pm
It would be interesting to see how this model could be applied to helping governments help people. In areas like human services, the combination of fundraising and a “time bank” (see http://www.timebank.org.uk/) could offer completely new ways of delivering child care.
3 Anthony Bradley October 13, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Good point Andrea. One of the things I really like about firstgiving.com is it really can get you thinking about new ways of leveraging the community.
4 Twitter Trackbacks for The Art of Leverage and Social Fundraising [gartner.com] on Topsy.com August 25, 2009 at 2:25 am
[...] The Art of Leverage and Social Fundraising blogs.gartner.com/anthony_bradley/2008/10/08/the-art-of-leverage-and-social-fundraising – view page – cached [...]
5 Kim R. September 27, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Change has arrived in fundraising. I came across a website http://www.raisewhileyousave.com (RWYS) the other day when looking into Green fundraising oppurtunities, as I am fed up with my kids going door 2 door and selling cookie dough and magazines. I looked into this new fundraising program which is helping parents Save Money while raising money.they are also helping great causes which don’t have any budget to run a fundraiser, as they do all the work for you, by building you a webpage attached to thier website. Thier products are these really snazzy energy saving product kits, which can save parent $100′s of dollars on those bills we all hate to open. I thought I would share this information as we could all do with a little extra cash during this economy Im sure. My friend who is a PTA mom is always complaining about the difficulty of getting new ideas, and the lack of interest they have in the same old boring fundraising oppurtunities. I think this is very clever, as the schools and community fundraisers, don’t purchase anything, the kids don’t need to do anything, the kits save money and help raise money, and apparently they even send the kits out to the parents home, so PTA moms like my friend no longer need to chase moms around the playground to tell them thier products are in the sports hall for collection. we’ve all been there.