Causes, a Facebook and MySpace application that promotes viral donations of time and money to charities and nonprofits, launched a year ago. They’ve now released statistics today on their usage and donation numbers for that first year.
The company says they’ve registered 12 million users who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. $2.5 million has been raised for 19,445 different 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. Facebook reports 60,000 daily users of the application, and MySpace reports 25,000.
Causes was founded by Joe Green and Sean Parker. Sean, a partner at Founders Fund , previously co-founded Napster, was the founding President of Facebook, and co-founded the recently acquired Plaxo. His goal with Causes, he told me last year when the company was called Project Agape, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.
So far, so good.
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12 million users, 2.5 million donated: not so good.
Not so bad either..
You must be mad… $2.5 million in donations is a great thing. Those other people are obviously donating through OTHER channels, or–get this–are donating their time in real life. A donation of time is just as good as a donation of money. Moreover, the fact that they are publicly telling the world that they support a cause is a donation. They are donating their public reputation to advance a cause through publicity. This type of publicity is the best because its very personal; you know the people which you can see their causes profile with.
Congratulations to Sean Parker and the Project Agape team.
#3 - Alejandro is right. More important then the actual number of dollars donated (although a good thing) is the social affect of users displaying the causes they want to associated themselves with.
Many charitable organizations spend considerable amounts of money on marketing and fundraising. By allowing users to showcase their own interests through Causes Project Agape is enabling a new form of charitable marketing.
This is one of the more interesting applications in Facebook due to its social meaning.
Considering the age group we are talking about, I think this figure is very encouraging.
i registered a cause China Democracy at http://apps.facebook.com/cause.....id=3695182
i would like to receive donation but the facebook app request non-profits have an office in Us or Canada, which denied me for i live in China.
hope non-profits outside of north American can also receive donations.
How do they make money, Do they keep part of charities or ad revenue.
I donated $100 to three different charities and all I got was a lousy profile badge.
So, 2.5MM / 20,000 nonprofits = $125 avg. raised per nonprofit. Not very impressive at all.
I donated 50 cents… do i get a tax receipt?
It’s only been a year. This is just getting started. They are off to a very promising start, and there are a lot of exciting companies in this space.
http://www.maxgladwell.com/200.....ial-media/
It’s also available on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/causesapp
They keep 4% of proceeds raised, and prob have to split that 50/50 with the processing fees. So $50k in rev with all of the users and viral tactics (some of which have since been shut down by FB)… I would agree with most here and say so far, not so good.
They keep 4%? If you’re serious about giving charity you’d donate directly and give that 4% to the cause as well.
Causes on Facebook and Social Responsibility means Good Business {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/9GFuAVEOeq_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Causes on Facebook and Social Responsibility means Good Business ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/p2aYqoYNR7″}}}
12 million users, 2.5 milllion raised: $0.21 cents per user
You build a whole charity infrastructure that raises $0.21 cents per user.
How can ANYONE call this a success?
#16, read #3 post again. The facebook app is mostly about raising awareness for these causes. There are, as #6 pointed out, restrictions on who can accept donations through Causes; however, there are many others who collect members, who in turn donate money / time via other channels. The impact of Facebook Causes, even if you want to measure it simply through the amount of money donated, exceeds these figures.
An example of this is the cause for saving the Baltic Sea. This Facebook cause got publicity in mainstream media and helped in raising awareness for the conservation effort. It now has 57 000+ supporters in FB. There are a number of organisations and initiatives working for the same goal, and donations are made not only to the WWF account that the FB cause is associated with (about $2700 so far) but these other organisations as well, directly, and outside the causes infra. Meanwhile, the FB site for the cause is an important channel of information about the issue, and joining the cause is a pledge to do something about it.
Frankly ANYONE with any idea about how these causes work will call them a success.
At 16.
Success in my opinion because it’s not 0.0$ per user.
I have yet to donate through FB though. But i have donated in other websites outside FB in the past. It was not .21 cents.
I have the domain http://Manna.Org that I let someone use to support a food charity, but they seem to have gone kaput.
Do anyone know a good user for this domain? I would love to contribute
How do people donate $5.00 and not have the credit card company eats up the money? I know credit card company charges $0.30 + 2-3% per transaction. If someone donates $5.00, the person is actually donating $5.00 - $0.30 - (0.03)($5.00) = $4.55. Plus on top of this, Causes will want to take a cut for administrative and management fee, you can’t hire programmers without paying them. That’s 10% on top of this. And the charity organization will also want a cut.
Does anyone know how much of the $5.00 actually goes to the Cause itself?
One of the thing I hate about donating is that very little money is left to go to the cause, and most are suck up by the administrative fees. All the non-profit organization I’ve donated never reveal this information. That’s why in the past 3 years, I’ve not donated a penny to any non-profit organization. The only cause I’ve donated lately is to the Obama campaign and that’s it.
@20, As 501 (3) c organizations they have to reveal ALL information. Check out Charity Navigator and you’ll see many org’s have fundraising costs of 7-12%, so this isn’t so bad. You made up the 10% number without being certain, I doubt it is that high. However, Project Agape is far too opaque an operation for me to give.
Instead use:
Network for Good
Just Give (Project Agape uses them for the ‘back-end’ giving)
While creating any opportunity to encourage donations and build awareness for charitable causes is a good thing, it’s surprising that Causes has raised so little money given it’s huge user base. At a recent nonprofit technology conference I attended, the results highlighted in case studies by nonprofits who have used Causes was equally disappointing - one organization shared that the average amount they raised = $1.24 per donor.
At http://www.bringlight.com, we raise money for specific charitable projects so donors can see exactly where their money goes. Our average donation is over $125.00.
Today, only a small % of the total amount given to charity in the U.S. is donated online, but many of us are working hard to see that number increase.
Seeing that this is a new company and that they are raising money among younger people with less disposable income, I’d say 2.5is a great start.
Ryan
lessons in brevity: http://www.mofata.com
@16
Causes uses Networkforgood.com, Justgive.org and Canadahelps.org as their charity infrastructure.
But still .21/user is not outstanding even given their lightweight “awareness app”.
Cheers
While the numbers may not seem fantastic, I think some folks are missing the bigger picture. When was the last time a new organization raised $2.5 million for charitable causes during its first year of operation? These things take time. Let’s see how the second year turns out.
The facebook crowd is getting older every day. Causes has helped these folks identify with social causes that interest them. They may not be giving large amounts today, but the seed has been planted. As the facebook crowd gets older, they’ll start to give more and they’ll likely do it through Causes because that’s what they will be accustomed to doing.
http://www.biddingforgood.com has raised almost $50million- half in the last 12 months. lots of cool stuff to bid on.
Interesting application, will give it a try. How do you go on creating one of these applications?
I don’t get why people aren’t being positive about this. In one year, 2.5 million is a lot. Sure, for 12 million users, it may not be too much, but exactly how many of those 12 million are underage high-school kids without jobs? Exactly. And if you had 2.5 million on you right now, there’s quite a bit you could do with it, right? Just think about how many lives were changed with that money. Sure, it may not be too impressive, taking in the fact that there are 12 million users, but give it some time. The number will grow. And this has hopefully made a difference for the betterment in someone’s life, and that was the driving force behind the whole idea.
I agree with the viewpoint that for number of visitors/users of the Causes app, the revenue generated isn’t spectacular. However, the charitable giving market is about $300 Billion in the US alone. Of that only about 5-12% is from online donations. During 2003-2006 the growth of the online donations has grown 101% while offline donations has only grown 6%. The Causes app is poised to capitalize on this growth in the coming years.
One problem I see with the Causes app is the lack of incentive to actually donate money through them. Most of the people I know who have the app installed haven’t ever donated. I think it’s just too easy to feel good by adding a cause and NOT donating.
Let’s face it, people need an incentive to do things (in this case donate money) - whether it’s a tax deduction or something else. http://www.iPlayiGive.com tries to address this by giving the people who donate money the chance to win large cash prizes. Yes, of course, that means less money ends up getting to the charity. However, we feel that the total amount will be much larger by giving the donors the nudge that they need.
Take into account that many of these people will be first time givers. For fund raising orgs getting the first gift is often the hardest. Many “high end” donors started out on the low dollar end of the donation pool.
The nonprofits get 93.5 percent of each donation made through the Causes app. So, for a $5.oo donation, that’s $4.67. Which is actually very standard. Donating to a nonprofit on a credit card through any channel requires about a 3-5% processing fee. Consider this though, Causes/Justgive/Networkforgood all take care of the tax receipt. So, if you send a check for $5.00 to an organization directly, you pay another 41 cents for your stamp, and they pay 41 cents for a stamp to send you a letter back. Turns out to be a higher percentage taken that way. At least on a $5.00 donation. Most of the Causes donations are probably in the $10-$25 range anyhow.
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