Online fundraising ideas – donate your birthday to a cause

As I’ve written before online fundraising will benefit from innovative ideas not only broaden the scope of contacts that nonprofits can make but they’ll also better engage the public and take organizations nearer to their daily and annual goals. As technology zips forward so should the opportunities to not only crowd source (I’ll borrow that term if I may) but to raise awareness and help reduce the feeling some have that they can’t personally afford to support a cause. I’ve heard it said and studies have also illustrated that some potential donors don’t feel that a smaller contribution will help or is perhaps worth making but certainly every little bit helps. I believe that with proper planning online fundraising can bridge that gap for many who realistically can afford a dollar or two but have previously felt somewhat excluded. Closing that perception will greatly improve donor relations and the overall feeling of involvement. I see many new ideas appearing online that accomplish this chance to accept donations of all sizes and some even allow you – or any individual – to be the captain of your own small fundraising project.

One such idea has been launched by Razoo who already offer easy to use and fully secure platforms to use social media to help you run a private fundraiser, the new wrinkle which I quite like is the idea of ‘donating your birthday’. I appreciate that the idea isn’t for everyone and some might recoil at the idea of not acquiring an annual bounty of new possessions from friends and relatives to celebrate their birthday. I also know there are many like myself who feel that as adults we work and tend to purchase things as we need them so birthdays are something we acknowledge but for us the date no longer is associated with the childhood tradition of expecting a small pile of presents. If you’re perhaps edging toward the latter definition then the Razoo concept might appeal to you, you might even have already tried it or something similar.

The idea is as simple as it is efficient, registering your birthday as a small fundraising event is done through a painless online registration that takes only a few minutes. At that point you’ve created an online birthday fundraising page to which you can add a message, photographs and links including key space to profile a nonprofit of your choice. You can elect for the funds to be donated to almost any registered charity or even the one you work for. At that point social media such as Facebook and Twitter or email can be used to notify your friends and family that you’ve elected to donate your birthday to your special cause.  It’s quick, easy and requires no programming expertise at all. Returning to my earlier point about how people sometimes feel a small donation gets swallowed up in the general administration of fundraising; that’s not a hindrance to this however as Razoo apply a flat 2.9% to all transactions to cover credit card costs with no setup or maintenance costs to be applied at any point.

About Razoo: Razoo is a small team dedicated to making online fundraising easier by supporting networking and collaboration. The company have developed donation widgets that can be added to websites or blogs in addition to tools to make campaigns via social media easy to manage. To dates they’ve helped raise over $45 million for assorted fundraising campaigns.

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