I believe that more organizations should encourage its use both in conjunction with events and just for general support. A volunteer may not be comfortable making a face to face solicitation on your organization’s behalf, but may be perfectly happy to create a personalized fundraising page and encourage friends and relatives to donate. Put these tools in your donor’s hands, link to them from your website, create an example page and template language and consider offering incentives to those who are successful at raising funds on your behalf with these pages. Ask your donors to simply tell the story of why they donate and why they would encourage others to do so as well.

There are several vendors that offer these tools. In the case of Kintera, Convio, and GetActive these tools are integrated with the other modules they offer such as online messaging so I feel there are some advantages to that, one being that all your data about who donated through various campaigns would all be in the same place and people could choose to opt in to the organization’s e-newsletter at the same time that they make a donation via a friend’s personal fundraising page. I’d encourage you to get demos from these companies and others.

One of my e-newsletter subscribers asked me about a service for creating personalized fundraising pages called justgiving.com. I had heard about it, but had never used it hands on so today I tried it out. This is a free service and anyone can use it. I went to the site, searched for a nonprofit I wanted to support with my personalized fundraising page, and set up the page in a matter of minutes. Even if your organization officially works with another vendor, you may want to get your name listed at just giving because if someone happens to go there and wants to create a page for your org, you don’t want to turn them away.

I decided to create my personalized fundraising page for The Anti Cruelty Society because that’s where I adopted my beloved cat 10 years ago. Check out the page I created and if the spirit moves you, I hope you’ll make a donation. It’s a great cause.

http://www.justgiving.com/pfp/cc_cat

I found justgiving to be very user friendly when I was creating my donation page. I did it in a matter of minutes. However, I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that when someone makes a donation, they need to create a password. That extra step may create some “shopping cart abandonment.” Ideally, someone should be able to donate with just a couple of quick clicks.
Also, I found it a little odd that the credit cards are processed in the UK so an additional 1% or so international processing fee is added on. I’m not sure how long it takes for the nonprofit to get the donation. Justgiving cuts them a check minus transaction fees, whereas with other vendors, the donation is directly deposited into the orgs merchant account immediately.

All in all, I think personalized fundraising pages can be a great way for nonprofits to raise money and it really builds on the whole idea that people give to people. Hopefully, you are taking a personalized approach in all of your fundraising efforts.

Are you using personalized fundraising pages? I’d love to hear what’s working for you.