GiveForward - Fundraising Made Simple

One of the best ways to spread the word about your online fundraising page is to create a Facebook group where you can quickly share information among friends and ask people to donate.   The bigger your Facebook group, the more potential donors you have.  So here’s a useful tip on how to get lots of people to join your Facebook group.

Step 1. Find a donor ahead of time willing to match up to $500, $1000 or some similar amount.  If you don’t have a single donor willing to contribute this amount, try asking 5 friends to each donate $200 and pool the money for a total of $1000. read more…

Though GiveForward users are clearly hip to the advantages of online fundraising, we’ve seen a great number of them also throw offline fundraising events to help a loved one pay for medical expenses. These users have proven that offline fundraising events can be a great way to supplement online fundraising efforts.

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GiveForward co-founder Ethan Austin has yet another fun and insightful guest post up on StepByStepFundraising.com, and this time it’s all about using Facebook to raise money. It turns out the website perhaps most commonly used in direct opposition to productivity can actually be used to great benefit by organizers of medical fundraisers.

In this blog, Ethan suggests four of the best, most simple strategies to apply to your Facebook usage as you work towards achieving your goal. The four things I would like to suggest you do now: read the post, adopt the techniques, raise those funds, and poke us.

GiveForward users new and old can benefit from reading the six online fundraising tips our Co-Founder Ethan Austin provided in his guest blog on StepByStepFundraising.com. Ethan based these steps on the things he has seen since GiveForward’s inception. Many of them came from GiveForward users themselves, so you know they’re good ideas. Now stop reading this blog for a few minutes and go read that one.

Normally, on the GiveForward blog, we try to give our users useful fundraising tips to help them raise money for their medical bills. Well, today we are giving an anti-fundraising tip.

Why an anti-fundraising tip? Because when you, a friend or a loved one is facing huge medical bills, the reality is that fundraising is only half the equation. The other half of the equation is reducing your medical bills so you will not have to raise as much money — in other words, anti-fundraising. For example, if your medical bills total around $200,000 and you need to raise that much money on GiveForward, it can be a rather daunting task. But, if you can lower those bills to around $100,000 or even $75,000, your goal becomes much more attainable. We’ve seen a family raise over $85,000 for medical bills on GiveForward before, so we know it can definitely be done!

Previously I have mentioned patient advocate, Kairol Rosenthal, author of Everything Changes: The Insiders Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s, and her awesome expertise in the often confusing world of cancer. On her blog, Kairol shares tips on how to go about getting your medical bills reduced.  The first two tips include:

“1.  Have a positive attitude. Your odds are good: 50% of people who ask for reduced costs get them, plus your chances might be higher using these savvy strategies.

2.  Talk to the right person, face-to-face: Your doc, your doc’s or hospital’s office, business, or billing manager.  Don’t do it by phone or letter.”

Please visit Kairol’s blog for the rest of the tips.

As Kairol Rosenthal explains, haggling is no longer left to the savvy flea market customer.  While employing the eight tips will take time, effort, and as Kairol puts it, “chutzpah,” that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.  Consider it another step in reaching the medical bill trifecta– reducing costs, raising money, and ridding yourself of the bills once and for all!

To read more from Kairol, please visit her blog.

Normally on GiveForward we offer our readers tips on how to raise money online, however, one of our users gave us a good offline fundraising tip so we thought we’d pass it along.  GiveForward user Laura Wilson has let us know about another way to fundraise for medical expenses.  Laura Wilson and Chick-fil-A have partnered in order to raise money for Team Nicole.  How it works is, fliers are given to Team Nicole to distribute.  Then you take your flier to the local Chick-fil-A restaurant during a certain time period and 20% of the sales are donated to Team Nicole.   

There are many restaurants out there that are doing similar things for individuals and other non-profit organizations.  Panera Bread offers gift cards to be purchased at a discounted rate and then re-sold.  But if selling gift cards isn’t your thing, there are other options as well.
 
Chipotle, (a favorite spot of a certain second banana here at GiveForward) offers in-restaurant fundraisers similar to that of Chick-fil-A.  If you’re more into pizza than chicken and burritos, Cici’s Pizza will host your fundraiser at one of their restaurants and donate a portion of the proceeds to your cause.  My favorite option however is the FUN-Raiser offered by Sweet Tomatoes, one of the greatest places on earth.  They will donate 20% of the proceeds to your organization and provide you with fliers to pass out to friends and family.
 
Supplementing your online fundraising with hosting one of these events is a great way to get friends and family together for your cause.  It’s also a great way to kick start your online fundraiser and build confidence going forward with your fundraiser.

When a friend or loved one gets sick and is facing huge medical bills, the quickest and easiest way to raise money for them is through an online fundraising page.  Before getting started, however, it’s critically important to come up with an organized fundraising plan.

Since we know that most people raising money for their loved one’s medical expenses may be fundraising for the first time, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you by creating a step-by-step plan that will make it super-easy for you to reach your fundraising goal.  If you are about to start a fundraising page for a friend or loved one, please take the next 15 minutes to read through the plan — trust us, it will make a HUGE difference in the success of your fundraiser.

Step 1:  Build a Fundraising Team to Help Spread the Word

If you are thinking of raising money for a loved one, before you get started ask a few of your mutual friends if they would be want to help in the efforts to spread the word. With the assistance of a few friends all sending emails and Facebook messages out to their different networks your team will be able to reach out to 4-5 times as many potential donors as you could by yourself.

As the team leader or team captain, you will, of course, still be responsible for drafting the emails and coordinating the efforts, but your team members will be able to help you in spreading the word to a wider group of people.

Note — If you cannot get a group of friends to help with the efforts, don’t worry about it.  Creating a team of friends is definitely helpful, but is not absolutely necessary to be successful.

Step 2: Kick Off  Your GiveForward Fundraiser With a Donation From Yourself

Getting off to a good start is the single greatest thing you can do to make sure you reach your goal.

If you can afford to do so, the first thing you are going to want to do is set the tone for your fundraiser by donating yourself. Donate as much as you can afford, as this will show people how important this effort is to you and will set the tone for the rest of the fundraiser — if you set the tone by donating a large amount, others will do the same. read more…

In the world of online tools for people battling illness, nothing quite compares to those sites that help build a community around someone who is sick.  The two most popular patient websites are CaringBridge and CarePages, both of which provide free patient blog sites so friends and family can keep up on the progress of a loved one.

Two possibly lesser known sites take this sense of community to a new level, offering patients and their caregivers a way to connect and collaborate.

Lotsa Helping Hands, offers free online collaboration tools to help people to come together in caregiving.  A calendar, message board, blog, and event invitations make it easy for friends and family to volunteer to cook dinner, drive to doctor’s appointments, or schedule visits.

MyLifeline.org provides cancer patients with free blog sites to update friends and family.  They provide cancer resources and help build an online community for patients and their caregivers.

Much like these sites, GiveForward aims to bring people together to help a loved one battling an illness.  That’s why we make it easy for people to leave words of encouragement, email organizers, update stories, and list upcoming events.  But the real purpose of GiveForward is to help bring together friends, family, and strangers to contribute directly to the recovery of someone they care about.

Because of this, GiveForward is a natural complement to patient web sites like CaringBridge, CarePages, MyLifeline.org, and Lotsa Helping Hands.

To raise money on any of these sites using GiveForward.org, all you have to do is create a GiveForward page and paste the customized url for your project into the descriptions or links on any of these sites.  Then, friends and family who read about a patient’s updates can visit the GiveForward page to make a donation.

Soon GiveForward will make it that much easier to fundraise on sites like these.  Our widget (to be released in early April) will allow you to fundraise using the GiveForward platform all the while staying on your current website or blog.

Stay tuned for updates, but in the meantime if you have any questions about how to fundraise on a CaringBridge, CarePage, MyLifeline.org, or Lotsa Hands Page, shoot us an email at info@giveforward.org.

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While GiveForward may be one of the few sites focused on helping people raise money for medical expenses, the reality is that people have been raising money like this for years.

We’ve all seen change boxes at convenience stores collecting money for a child’s surgery or driven by a church hosting a spaghetti dinner for a congregation member with cancer.  Over the last 10 years, people have taken these fundraising efforts online, first sending emails and creating websites asking for checks via snailmail and later creating sites with PayPal buttons going into personal accounts.

The PayPal Donate button has become fairly ubiquitous across blogs and smaller non-profit websites.  So, it is no wonder that we are frequently being asked why GiveForward is better than a PayPal button.

Here is our answer…

1. Expertise – We understand the strategies that make peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns successful. We are constantly adding new tips and best practices to our blog and have fundraising experts on staff available to answer questions and provide fundraising tips to our users. PayPal is a merchant processor not a fundraising expert.
2. Ease of use – We have had users start fundraising pages and raise $15,000 within 24 hours of signing up for an account.  We made our platform very simple and straightforward.  If an individual can send an email, they can use GiveForward.
3. Superb customer service - Although we provide a turnkey platform that anybody can use, when a user does ask for help, we pride ourselves on our ability to assist. Whether this means providing fundraising tips and advice over the phone, recommending a useful cancer support organization, or even helping users draft press releases for their local newspaper, we do everything within our means to make sure our users achieve their desired results.
4. Trustworthiness – The GiveForward platform is more trustworthy than a PayPal system. Donors feel more secure knowing that they are donating through an intermediary like GiveForward that holds the donations in escrow rather than going directly to an individual’s PayPal account.
5. Ability to leave comments – Upon making a donation, the donor has the ability to leave words of encouragement for the beneficiary. We’ve heard on a consistent basis from our users that this moral support from friends, family and strangers throughout the world is equally as important as the actually monetary contributions.
6. Easily measured progress— Unlike a PayPal button, GiveForward pages track the success of a fundraiser, making it easy for donors to see and build off of the momentum of a well executed fundraiser.
7. Ability to donate anonymously or semi-anonymously—PayPal requires donors to give their name and email address, making it impossible for people to leave anonymous gifts.   GiveForward protects donors by allowing them to donate completely anonymously.  Or, for those donors who may not want to display the amount, they can leave their first name and comment but hide the amount given.
8. Integration with Social media—GiveForward provides seamless integration with Facebook upon checkout, allowing donors to help spread the word quickly about a fundraiser.
9. Visually pleasing layout – Users have the ability to add pictures, calendars and even video to their fundraising pages to help bring their messages to life.
10. Personalized URL – Each GiveForward user selects a personalized URL for his or her fundraiser (e.g. www.GiveForward.org/Johan) making it easy to share with friends and family around the world.
11. Emailing system – Each user has the ability to import contacts from Gmail Yahoo! and MSN accounts to easily spread the word to friends and family.
12. Added visibility – Because each fundraiser is in a searchable database, anyone who is browsing the GiveForward site may choose to donate to fundraiser.
13. Automatic thank you notes - Every time a person donates, the donor receives an automatic thank you note from the organizer of the fundraiser as well as from GiveForward.
14. Ability to thank donors individually – In addition to the automatic thank you, GiveForward users can send personalized thank you emails directly to their donors even if the donor is anonymous.
15. Automatic Donation Alerts – GiveForward sends an automatic donation alert to the fundraiser’s organizer every time a donation is made.
16. Technical support – GiveForward staff members are available to answer technical questions five days a week.
17. Automatic email receipts to the donors- If  a 501(c)(3) has been set up for the individual beneficiary, this email serves as a tax-deductible receipt to the donor.
18. Lastly, we have a strong reputation and proven results – The GiveForward name and feel of the website engenders a sense of community that encourages donations and generosity. The Chicago Tribune has labeled GiveForward “the future of medical fundraising in the Internet Age”.  And with numerous projects on the site raising $10,000, $50,000 and even $80,000+ we have the track record to back it up.

Over the past year at GiveForward, we’ve seen that there are often a flurry of donations in the two or three days before a fundraiser ends.  This happens because donors feel a greater sense of urgency towards the end of a fundraiser.  In other words, all those people you have asked to donate and who have procrastinated for weeks (or months) often seem to get their act together right before the proverbial  buzzer.

To help maximize the amount of money you raise for your cause, you’ll want to make sure you reach out to all your procrastinating amigos and family members in the final days before your fundraiser ends.   Here’s what we suggest you do to finish your fundraiser with a surge of donations: read more…