Guest post by Marianna Boguslavsky

In the past, only a few of South African NGOs raised funds via the internet. The extent of this type of fundraising usually went as far as placing a donate button on the website or featuring their bank account details on the website for an EFT transfer. While most corporates have been utilizing the relevant online channels to market themselves and make a profit, the NGOs were relying on the traditional, traditional methods of fundraising (the main ones being grant writing, and corporate sponsorships).

Recently, the nonprofit sector has been following suit. Charities are creating Facebook fan pages, communicating with their donors via Twitter and implementing national scale fundraising campaigns utilizing the online community.

While competition amongst NGOs in South Africa for raising funds through the use of social media is not as rife as it is in the UK and the States, it still presents quite a challenge. I have worked on a number of online campaigns ranging from using the Twitter API to build a competition microsite, launching a celebrity sms campaign to creating an online buzz for a fundraising event and I have found that there are common perceptions that need to be considered when launching a campaign via social media:

• People do not like to donate online.

I am very tempted to write that people do not like to donate full stop but that is not entirely true. It has to do more with people not liking the complexity of donating online. When we launched the Breadline Africa celebrity sms competition, we had a flurry of smses and hundreds of entrants with the main source of PR being the online sphere. The celebrity sms campaign had an online component also but the donations made online versus the sms donations were minimal. So my advice would be to make it very, VERY easy for people to donate online. It needs to be simple, user friendly, clear and the less information that must be supplied by the donor the better (but it is vital you get as much contact information as possible).

• People like to promote a NGO campaign when they are involved in the campaign themselves

Take the Geek Fashion Show for example. If we had asked ‘real’ models to take part in this fundraiser, we would have been lucky if we had 10 tweets in total about the event. So we got the online community involved and reaped the online rewards for it (hundreds of mentions on Twitter plus numerous blog posts). The reason why this worked was because the bloggers who were part of the event wanted to promote their participation, encourage the public to purchase tickets and (of course) show off that they were part of the select few that were chosen to be models for one night.

• People like to know the person behind the brand

In my experience, I get a better response in terms of RTs, @ replies, comments on FB and blog posts, and participation in the actual social media/online campaigns when I promote them from my personal Twitter account as opposed to the NGO’s Twitter account. People are more ‘invested’ in the lives of the real people that they follow on Twitter rather than the actual brand so while you should be tweeting all your news and promoting your campaigns from the company’s account, these should also be retweeted by the employees that work for that NGO.

• People like originality

Be original. Be creative. Be innovative. Like many who have said this before me and many who will say this after me, content *is* king. Do something that has never been done before (no matter how crazy /out there the original idea seems). These days everyone is on Twitter so the ‘noise level’ is pretty high and the goal is to break through that, and get your NGO and your campaigns noticed.

Marianna Boguslavsky is the Online Marketing Manager for Breadline Africa, a NGO that focuses on poverty alleviation and assisting self sustainable projects. Her educational and career background is as diverse as her cultural one. Born in Latvia, spent her student life in Port Elizabeth, gained her digital marketing experience in London and is now a proud Capetonian passionately involved in utilizing the online skills to help the fundraising sector. Her marketing experience encompasses B2B and B2C marketing in a wide range of sectors and she spends her free time freelances as a digital marketing consultant.