Charity: Amateur fundraisers hit up contacts for money
$300 million-plus raised in first year of donation tool
Happy birthday to me! Can you donate to my pet cause?
Such is the pitch these days of amateur fundraisers, who are using social media to prod their contacts for money.
Before the Internet, only close friends knew someone’s birthday. Now, if a user chooses, his or her birthday gets displayed on services like Facebook, Amazon, Google and LinkedIn — and on Facebook, gift requests can go out to hundreds or thousands of people.
The Menlo Park company has enthusiastically peddled the concept, introducing a tool in August 2017 to
help people raise money for nonprofits on their birthdays.
When the social network began in 2004, birthdays were one of the few features it had. But it has struggled to turn those birthday notices into something more. In 2010, it closed a virtual gift shop that let friends pay money for digital icons. In 2014, it closed a service that encouraged people to buy gift cards.
Doing good rather than buying goods seems to have been the right move. On the tool’s, er, first birthday, the company announced it has raised more than $300 million for nonprofits around the world. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, celebrated by holding a multiday birthday fundraiser of her own, and by late August had raised nearly $50,000 for an organization called Feeding America.
The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito has received $30,000 from Facebook donations in the past year. The vast majority of that money came from birthday fundraisers, according to center spokeswoman Laura Sherr. With up to 500 pounds of fish being fed to animals each day during the busy season (February to May, when newborn and weaning marine mammals are vulnerable), $30,000 can pay for 15 tons of herring, or two months of food.
“We’re really lucky in the Bay Area here to have many like-minded people that love the ocean,” said Dr. Shawn Johnson, the center’s director of veterinary science.
Despite the millions of dollars raised so far, Facebook birthday fundraisers don’t sit well with everyone.
“My favorite thing on Facebook is when people that never interact ‘invite’ me to donate to their birthday fundraiser,” tweeted radio host Mac Dickson.
Sherr of the Marine Mammal Center acknowledged the tension: “It can be really uncomfortable for individuals to fundraise,” she said.
Facebook had initially charged nonprofits a fee of 5 percent on fundraisers, but backed off last year. It still charges a 2.9 percent payment processing fee for personal fundraisers not tied to a nonprofit.
Joyce Wang of San Francisco raised over 10 times her original goal when she got $3,680 in donation for her birthday fundraiser last fall for AnnieCannons, a nonprofit that breaks the cycle of human trafficking by teaching victims how to code. The cause is personal for her.
“When I was an attorney, I represented a lot of women who were in domestic violence situations, and I saw them relapse,” Wang said. “AnnieCannons takes victims of human trafficking and puts them in classrooms and teaches them how to code, and then because it’s the Bay Area there’s a million jobs.”
AnnieCannons CEO Jessica Hubley said such efforts make a big difference: “My cofounder actually told me about it in tears, because she was so touched,” she said.