Yesterday on Care2’s Frogloop, we discussed the value of Facebook’s new Donate button and its potential impact on nonprofits. If you did not get a chance to read it, I encourage you to, as there are some implications you need to be aware of. For example, since Facebook won't provide donor data to nonprofits this could easily lead to people receiving multiple donation solicitations when they just donated to the organization via Facebook, thus angering supporters, as Rob Manix, one of my colleagues at Rad Campaign stated yesterday.
While adding the Donate button is a nice gesture towards the nonprofit community, what the nonprofit community really needs is a Facebook Ad Grants program, an idea that Beth Kanter and I discussed a few months ago. The program would function similarly to Google’s AdWords program for nonprofits.
A Facebook Ad Grants program would be extremely beneficial to the nonprofit community given Facebook’s recent priority of paid content over organic reach. Nonprofit organizations on a shoestring budget have put in a lot of staff time over the last few years building a community on Facebook organically. But many nonprofits can’t afford to pay Facebook to promote their important content and fear that the years of work they spent building their community will now go down the toilet. No one wants to see that happen.
The right thing for Facebook to do is to work directly with the nonprofit community, gather their input, and create a Facebook Ad Grants program to help nonprofits continue to thrive on Facebook.
Very soon, a few of us in the nonprofit community will be organizing an open letter campaign to Facebook encouraging them to start a Facebook Ad Grants program. In the meantime, please share this article and idea with your collegues in the nonprofit community. The hashtag we are using for the campaign is #FacebookAdGrants.
Here are some other articles that highlights the need for a Facebook Ad Grants program:
http://communityorganizer20.com/2013/12/18/need-more-than-facebook-donate-button
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