Yes, more Facebook friends are asking you for money

Perhaps your college friend asked you to support her quarterly magazine for her birthday. Or maybe your neighbor nudged you to donate to his favorite food bank on “Giving Tuesday” the week after Thanksgiving. And then there’s that pesky public health nonprofit you’ve been charitable to in the past.

If you’ve gotten on Facebook at all this year, you’ve probably been asked to give money. And if you’re like many users, your newsfeed became particularly overrun by fundraisers during the last month or so.

How did we get here? And at what point did Facebook become a hub for this sort of thing?

Started with 19 groups

When Facebook rolled out a new button in 2013, it allowed people to contribute directly to nonprofits through the social media platform for the first time. At first, 19 organizations were listed as partners.

About two years later, officials began testing another new tool: Fundraisers. Using that feature, in tandem with an improved donate button, about three dozen organizations now had a place from which they could raise money for a campaign. And by June 2016, Facebook announced it would expand its Fundraisers tool to allow users themselves to raise money for more than 100 nonprofits in the U.S.

Less than five months later, that group of 100 was expanded to more than 750,000. Facebook teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Together, they pledged to contribute up to $1 million to Facebook Fundraisers — $500,000 from the foundation in matching funds and $500,000 in waived fees from Facebook.

A high point was Giving Tuesday 2017. The Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the United States has become a focal point for donations on social media in the past five years. In an apparent attempt to raise the bar, the Gates Foundation increased its matching contribution this year to $1 million. Facebook covered all the fees for the day.

What’s this about fees?

Before the Giving Tuesday promotion, Facebook took a 5 percent cut of the donations, according to media reports and archived versions of its informational pages.

When Giving Tuesday arrived, the company did away with the fees, and then, the next day, officials announced that those fees would be eliminated moving forward. (Donations made to personal fundraisers — like for a medical emergency — are still charged a 6.9 percent fee in the U.S. and are generally not tax-deductible.)

Do people like it?

In interviews, some Facebook users worried that it would take too long for nonprofits to get their donations.

Others groused that inviting friends to donate one by one was time-consuming. And a few said they were confused about whether they would be charged a service fee.

Still, users overwhelmingly said they were amazed by the ease, simplicity and effectiveness of fundraising on Facebook.

A bigger plan?

Facebook has framed the development of its Fundraisers tool as part of a broader effort to do “social good.”

Experts said that may be true. But they say there is almost certainly another motivation, too.

Keith Quesenberry, an assistant professor of marketing at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pa., said the social network needs to increase the amount of time users spend on its site if the company hopes to keep increasing its revenue. That’s part of the reason Facebook has pushed native video and probably part of the reason it built a platform that allows users to donate without leaving the site, he said.

Fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe have always relied on social networks to make campaigns successful, added Jeremy Littau, an associate professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., who studies social networks and civic action.

“This is Facebook deciding they’re no longer happy playing a middleman role,” he said.

Both Quesenberry and Littau said they consider Facebook’s decision to eliminate the donation fee to be a bold business move aimed at taking more market share and potentially putting competitors out of business.

“Any features that are popular on other networks, they just end up adopting,” Quesenberry said of Facebook.