Marathons for breast cancer research are successful largely because they often encourage donations from friends of the participant who might not have otherwise contributed, and now this same connection between friends is being used to encourage donations over the Internet.
New Facebook applications ““ or add-on programs ““ like Causes and ripple (spelled in all lowercase) allow users to show support for different charitable efforts on their profile and donate online.
Causes is one of the most popular of these applications. The application allows anyone to create a cause and choose a nonprofit organization that users of that cause can donate to. Causes exist for a variety of organizations, from animal protection to political campaigns.
“What’s so powerful about social networking is that it’s an online community that can reflect the real world,” said Joe Green, co-founder and president of the for-profit company that runs the Causes application.
Because Facebook and other social networking sites mimic existing relationships, users feel more pressure to get involved, said Green.
When users join a cause, they are prompted to invite their other friends on Facebook. Almost $400,000 has been donated and 3.5 million people are using the Causes site, Green said.
Typical donations to the Causes site are small, from 10 to 40 dollars, Green said.
But the small donations can add up quickly. Since the Causes site was launched on May 25, the Cause with the most members, “Support Breast Cancer Research,” has raised over $30,000 for the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Brigham and Women’s is a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, and the money is used to fund research for the Nurses’ Health Study, which investigates how women’s lifestyles affect their health.
For example, research is done on how eating red meat affects a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer, said Lindsey O’Neill, development officer for biomedical research development at Brigham and Women’s.
Brigham and Women’s is excited by the prospects of reaching out to a new generation of donors, said Mary Meyers, senior director of biomedical research development at Brigham and Women’s.
Philanthropy is becoming increasingly important, especially with less money allocated for scientific research in the federal budget, she said.
“(The Causes application) brings a culture of philanthropy into (the younger) generation, which is wonderful,” she said.
Though donating to charity can seem impractical to a cash-strapped college student, an organization called ripple is changing this with its ad-based fundraising sites.
The Facebook application and Web site operated by ripple direct users to view ads, and then ripple donates 100 percent of the proceeds to charity. Three Australian students at the University of Melbourne started ripple, which they work on in their spare time.
The average person who clicks on an ad on ripple’s site spends 40-50 seconds looking at the interactive ads. The site has between 4,000 and 5,000 users a day, and so far, ripple has raised just under $10,000 Australian (about $8,000 U.S.) for four charities that its founders believe empower individuals in developing countries by providing clean water, food, education, or microfinance.
When choosing which charities to donate to, ripple decided to focuses on organizations that help developing countries, said Simon Griffiths, one of four directors of ripple.
“What we wanted to do was not just simply provide handouts that aren’t necessarily going to be sustainable in the future,” he said.
While sites like ripple and Causes raise money for already established organizations, not all philanthropic sites on Facebook are for the benefit of non-profits.
The Help Vinay and Help Sameer efforts were both started by friends and family of Vinay Chakravarthy and Sameer Bhatia, respectively, who needed bone marrow transplants to fight off leukemia.
To help find a matching donor, friends and family used social networking sites, including Facebook, to encourage bone marrow donor registration, particularly amongst South Asians who were most likely to match Vinay and Sameer because of their genetic similarity.
In addition to traditional Facebook groups and a page on the Causes site, the Help Vinay effort made use of a separate Facebook application made by RapOuts. The application is specific to Help Vinay and prompts users to send messages to their South Asian friends.
Social networking, especially the RapOuts application, played a large part in getting the word out about joining the bone marrow registry, said Sundeep Ahuja, who is part of teams that worked on Help Vinay and Help Sameer.
But, he said, social networking is not always the most effective way of reaching out to potential donors.
“Because we require people to physically have their cheeks swabbed, the best thing we could do was sit in their workplace and set up a table,” he said.
Matching bone marrow donors were recently found for both Chakravarthy and Bhatia.
Part of the reason the Help Vinay and Help Sameer efforts were able to successfully utilize social networking is because it is so accessible. Anyone can start a cause on Facebook and become proactive.
For example, the National Parks Conservation Association had nothing to do with the creation of the Cause page that benefits it. It was created by an unaffiliated Facebook user.
Felicia Carr, director of online communications for the NPCA said this kind of user-initiated philanthropy is exciting for her organization.
“It’s (Facebook users) talking to their friends, it’s not an organization talking to (Facebook users). It’s started in a much different way,” she said.
The “Support the National Parks” site has raised 425 dollars for the NPCA. Since the Causes application has only been available for a few months, Carr said it’s too early to talk about the impact of these donations. But she is hopeful that sites like these will help NPCA reach out to younger generations.