As Tom Belford pointed out in The Agitator raising money when Americans are watching death and desperation 24/7 is more like ‘holding out the bucket for the donations to drop’ than real fundraising.

However disasters like Haiti showcase the strength of new media fundraising and its ability to make it easier and faster for people to donate – or organise to deliver assistance in person or help locate lost people – when they are so motivated.

Mobile phone donations
Americans have donated more than $774 million for Haiti with most of the small donations coming via the Internet. For the first time three million Americans donated $10 by mobile phone generating over $30 million for the American Red Cross. The previous high point for mobile fundraising was Alicia Keys’ appeal on American Idol that raised $500 000 for her Keep a Child Alive charity.

The Obama campaign had a big mobile programme but they used it for mobilisation not fundraising assuming they could get much higher average gifts – and full donor information – using the Web instead.Single emails generated hundreds of thousands of dollars each for several of my company’s clients with response rates many times higher than normal and average gifts over $100.Search marketing showed its stuff too.

For example one of our clients raised almost $300 000 for Haiti work from Google and Yahoo! on an expenditure of $70 000 – a 4:1 ROI.

Even a month after the earthquake the organisation raised $12 450 over a four-day period at a cost of $1 533!Facebook and Twitter played a greater role than ever in the Haiti disaster letting Haitians abroad communicate among themselves and with family and friends in Haiti.

The social networks also provided a communications and fundraising platform that enabled many of the 300 million worldwide users to express their sympathy and create their own fundraising programmes benefiting their chosen NGOs.

According to Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg two days after the earthquake ‘Every minute people have been posting more than 1 500 status updates on Facebook that contained the word “Haiti”.’

Of course fundraising was not limited to online. Across the country kids organised bake sales and car washes to raise money. My daughter and her 8th grade class raised over $1 000 in our little rural town – four or five times more than a cake sale usually raises there – and then donated the money online to Partners in Health.

So what can we learn – to use in normal times – from the outpouring of donations online to help the people of Haiti?

I think there are several lessons:

(1) Urge your mail-acquired donors (and new Haiti online donors if you raised money for Haiti) to give online because multi-channel donors are worth more. The Haiti disaster like Katrina and the tsunami and the Obama campaign drove millions of donors and non-donors to give online for the first time.

While many of the new online donors are ‘disaster donors’ who probably won’t give again to the organisation perhaps until there’s another disaster many of them are also ‘regular’ donors who gave by mail (or online) before.

Higher gifts
Now is the time to urge them to continue giving online where you’ll get average gifts usually twice as high as by mail. We already saw this migration at the year’s end when many mail-acquired donors went online in the last week of the year to make a donation and qualify for the tax deduction in 2009.

As the Target Analytics Internet benchmarking reports prove multi-channel donors are worth more.

(2) Understand that mobile fundraising may have a big future but it’s not yet going to make a difference for most organisations. First you have to be able to reach millions of people – the White House promoted the Red Cross short code – or you have to have American Idol or Bono on a 50-city tour.

Second the average gift (so far) is capped at $10 and you don’t get any donor data except the mobile number and a very limited ability to use it for cultivation and fundraising. In addition the carriers and service providers take a cut. What’s worse – at least by our usual thinking – is that it may be the cutting edge of a donor viewpoint that says ‘I’ll choose when to give and I won’t give you my information so you won’t bother me ’ as Target Software founder Chuck Longfield suggests.

(3) Facebook Twitter iPhones and whatever comes next are going to play an ever larger role in fundraising even if you can’t easily measure the ROI from social communications. Dedicate more staff time to building relationships with donors and other supporters who use the networks and try to figure out the revenue stream as well.

Nick Allen is Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Donordigital an online fundraising marketing and advertising company. Contact nick@donordigital.com 

Adapted fromMal Warwick’s E-newsletter March 2010Visit www.malwarwick.com