Whether you’re a business owner or nonprofit director, the name of the game is raising funds. But fundraising on Twitter isn’t as easy as ask-and-receive. In 2012 we set out to do some fundraising on Twitter for the Gateway for Cancer Research.

Want to recruit fundraisers on social media? Show genuine interest in them, ask confidently, and thank publicly as the funds come rolling in!

Fundraising On Twitter

The Gateway for Cancer Research wanted to recruit runners to join their new running arm, Team Demand, to run in the Chicago Half Marathon and raise funds for cancer research. Incentives for Team Demand runners included free entry into the race and no fundraising minimum – two highly attractive selling points for runners who were on the fence about registering.

We took to Twitter to find runners and invite them to join our team. We set up Hootsuite streams to track running-specific, geo-targeted search terms and hashtags, including:

#RunChi , #Runnerd , “Running”, “Chicago Half Marathon”,  “Chi half”

Once we found people talking about the Chicago Half Marathon, we started the conversation by congratulating them on their goal and inviting them to join Team Demand.

Our biggest story came from an otherwise mundane response to a Chicago man’s tweet discussing his healthy eating habits while training for the race. By striking up conversation with Michael Brooks (who was not yet part of our network and had fewer than 50 followers) and asking if he was running with a team, we opened the floor for discussion about Team Demand and The Gateway for Cancer Research’s mission. We invited Michael to join our team and sent him a link to the registration page.

Within 24 hours, Michael had registered, created a fundraising account dedicated to his late Aunt Sandy, and raised over $600. After realizing how supportive his social network was, Michael upped the ante: if he raised $1,000, his parents would match it, and if he raised $3,000, he would throw in an extra $1,000 from his own pocket. We helped Michael spread the word by:

• Posting screen grabs of and links to Michael’s fundraising page (displaying a photo of and tribute to Michael’s Aunt Sandy) with a call to action asking our 50,000+ Facebook fans to help him reach his goal
• Re-tweeting Michael’s fundraising updates with messages of thanks
• Tweeting links to Michael’s fundraising page with short messages about his generous goal and tagging the tweets with running hashtags

Results

Within 11 days of our initial tweet to Michael, he raised $4,300 for The Gateway for Cancer Research. Michael was by far the biggest fundraiser of Team Demand’s 70 runners.

Key Findings

• Geo-targeted keyword searches on Twitter can unveil influential people that Klout ratings might miss
• Facebook photos with touching messages and images of a real person pull at the heartstrings and encourage more donations than text-only Facebook updates
• A user with a low Klout score and small network size can be the most influential

Practical Applications

Recruiting fundraisers on Twitter should be done through highly targeted searches, but conversation and outreach efforts should not be reserved exclusively for users with large networks and high Klout scores.

The best way to reach out to strangers and encourage them to join your efforts is to show genuine interest in what they are saying, confidently explain your mission and ask them to join by sending them a link to more information. Then cross-promote fundraising efforts between Twitter and Facebook.