I don’t quite understand what you mean with your comment. Can you explain further what you mean? There was no blog that was being commented upon in this article.

I have never donated money thru a blog. There would have to be something inspiring and compelling about it.

You’re right about the drop in Causes activity happening in December- that’s indeed bizarre. Our own on-line statistics from our clients showed a 300% increase from the beginning of November through December.

It could be the demographic, but I think there’s something else going on there.

-Jon Biedermann
DonorPerfect Fundraising Software

Or even better, they could even tell me “we’re busy with the Giving Challenge”. There are numerous ways to settle this issue but by not saying anything I think they’re ceding ground to the thought that they didn’t get the $825k.

However, the preliminary data shows a drop of nearly 50% in user activity from their November highs with much of that drop occurring during December. It’s a bizarre statistic given that time of year and I’d love to see them explain it.

It IS important to mesh CRM with online fundraising. However, a lot of the newer online fundraising vendors don’t like to share donor data. Even if they did, it’s a lot of data interchange which surprise, surprise, many CRM vendors are really bad at due to their inability to properly implement an open API. Even if socialmarkets or Causes or change.org wanted to do data interchange — very few CRM vendors would be ready for it.

Does DonorPerfect have an API that would allow for such a thing?

I think the real problem is that the vast majority (I would guess > 98%) of the Causes that are listed have raised little or no money.

There is an enormous cost of doing business this way, to collect the fees and have systems in place that aggregate the donations AND send a check out once a month. In many cases, the cost of processing and physically mailing a check may cost 2-3 times more than the fees they receive.

Also, I do agree with you that in order to be successful, Causes will have to align themselves with one of us (or all of us) in the CRM industry to make it easy for our clients to use their application. (We have 6000+ clients, and quite a few are looking at this).

Depending on individual users to be passionate about a cause is not the best way to go to build this business- you’ll be stuck with large numbers of small causes and lose money on every single one.

It is much more effective to build relationships with non-profits who can then mobilize their fanatical donors to setup these social fundraising networks. But, again, there’s a real cost to doing this- you have to hire $$$ account managers to call on non-profits to convince them to use your product- and counting on the transaction fees alone doesn’t work because despite your best effort, most of these non-profits will not be able to execute a successful on-line fundraising plan without lots of help.

Besides this main factor, there’s other Facebook limitations as well. For example, it’s my understanding you can only send out 20 invitations a day. Again, this is fine for small org’s, but doesn’t work for bigger ones. There also seems to be a disconnect that the names of the donors aren’t shared with the non-profit. This is a huge turn-off for larger orgs because they do have CRM systems in place to track this, so why use a fundraising application like Causes that doesn’t?

I really like Causes and think they are on to something that has the potential to be big, and they need to figure it out before they lose their momentum.

-Jon Biedermann
DonorPerfect Fundraising Software