How to Raise Money Using Facebook Groups

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.

Step 2. Create your group on Facebook with the message “For every person that joins this group, $1 will be donated to help [NAME OF YOUR FRIEND] fight cancer [OR FILL IN THE BLANK WITH ANY ILLNESS]“.  Ask your friends to ask their friends and spread the word to as many people as possible.  Also, make sure to let people know that the total amount will capped at $500, $1000 or whatever number you choose, so that your generous matching donor isn’t on the hook if 5000 people end up joining your group.  You might also want to set a time limit (e.g. two weeks).

Step 3. Once you have a large enough group, you can start asking group members for donations.  We’ve seen that the most successful fundraisers create a sense of urgency with their donors by creating time-sensitive “mini goals”.  For example, you might write something like:

“We’re trying to raise $2000 in the next 48 hours for [NAME OF FRIEND].  Please help us reach our goal by donating and spreading the word to your friends.”

Or if you can get someone to agree to become a matching donor, you might write something like:

“If we can raise $1000 in the next 24 hours, a generous donor has agreed to match it with another $2000.”

While this strategy takes a little bit of extra planning, we’ve seen it work incredibly well for our users in the past. Here is an example of a fundraiser on GiveForward that used this technique to create a Facebook group of nearly 4,000 members in just one week.  In total, they ended up raising over $88,000 on their GiveForward fundraising page.  Hopefully, this strategy will work as well for you as it did for them.