Person-to-Person Fundraising

At the beginning of the month, Peter Deitz of the About Micro Philanthropy blog, asked the question, "Is Person-to-Person Fundraising Dead, or Just Getting Started?". This was part of the Giving Carnival, which he describes as:

a monthly event that gathers the best blog posts on various topics related to Giving (philanthropy, charity, etc).

Since Peter referenced us, and the story the Guardian ran about Justgiving the other day, it seems only  fair that I return the favour and give our opinion (as our US company, Firstgiving, has).

Now it will come as no surprise to anyone that our response is that person-to-person fundraising is just getting started. Since Justgiving started in 2001, almost 5 million people have raised more than £260 million for over 4,700 charities.

But we have never helped our users raise as much money as in the last 7 days - more or less all of it down to the 15,000+ people raising money on the site for running the Flora London Marathon (officially the world's largest fundraising event, for which over £18 million, including Gift Aid, has been raised so far on Justgiving).

On Friday alone, we helped our users collect over £1 million in donations for the first time ever - March 2004 was the first time we'd helped people raise that much in just one month. That's some increase in donations, and shows how popular and widespread online person-to-person fundraising has become.

But these marathon runners are only the early adopters of person-to-person fundraising. In the last year we've seen a huge increase in the number of 'non-thon' fundraising pages - created by people doing more than just events, as I wrote about recently - from hymnathons to weddings, birthdays and doing nothing. And it's the same in the US too.

Plus, we're by no means the only ones who extol the *personal* aspect of fundraising: over on the Extreme Fundraising blog, Marc A. Pitman agrees, with his post Fundraising Secret #15: People Give to People. And whilst he writes in reference to people and direct mail, and not people-to-people fundraising per se, it still rings true...

When public trust in charities is apparently falling, giving money to people you know and trust who are raising money for a particular charity could become more effective than any direct mail a charity produces.

And that's not just our biased view. Read how Andrew Cates, Chief Executive of SOS Children's Villages, writes that their charity sent no direct mail in the whole of 2007 and "why internet fundraising is so cool".

So many charities produce guides for "A-Z fundraising ideas", where pretty much all of the ideas involve some sort of person-to-person fundraising - all of which can be done online with the minimum of fuss and maximum gain for the people and the charities involved.

To sum up, we're constantly amazed by the imagination of people who use our site to raise money for the causes they hold dear, through the people they know and love, and the unstoppable enthusiasm and creativity they bring means we're confident that this is by no means a passing fad.

You can see more examples of the wide range of person-to-person fundraising that takes place on the Justgiving website in our JG: A-Z (or, er, A-G as we've got up to so far) series of posts...

Comments

[Marc A. Pitman, Fundraisingcoach.com]

Thanks for the shout out!