JustGiving blog

Yesterday I spoke at the Social Media Academy’s Facebook PR & Marketing conference, and I was excited to share some new stats we had around the impact of Facebook on fundraising on JustGiving. If you’re interested in seeing an ROI on social media activity, then this post is definitely for you…

Back in September, we released an update to the site that enabled people to “recommend” JustGiving pages on Facebook (see new tools to help you raise more) using Facebook’s ‘like’ buttons. Since then, we’ve been monitoring how that has been used to drive more people to fundraising pages (and charity pages too) and updating our analytics tracking to see how many of them donated.

We can only use reliable stats from the 17th November, as that was when we updated Google analytics to track funnels better, but the results are interesting.

Here are the numbers from the 17th November to the 4th December:

5,986: the number of ‘likes’ of JustGiving fundraising pages

16,278: the number of visits to JustGiving fundraising pages from Facebook ‘like’ links

933: the number of donations from people who clicked on ‘like’ links in Facebook

Those of you who are keen on maths (who isn’t?!) will have worked out from that…

6% of visitors from ‘liked’ links on Facebook end up donating

On average, six ’likes’ are needed for one donation (the ratio of ‘likes’ to actual donations is 6:1)

One ‘like’ is effectively worth around £5 (assuming the average donation is like the rest of the site: £32)

If we extrapolate that further, and take the overall amount of 26,981 distinct ‘likes’ since their release on the 29th September and assume each is worth £5, ‘like’ buttons have generated £134,000 to charities on JustGiving in the last two months.

Now, this is not foolproof maths as we don’t know the exact value of each donation that was made and we’re assuming it matches the site average of £32. My gut feeling is that the average donation from Facebook will probably be lower, but in the coming months we should be able to say exactly how much has been donated from ‘like’ buttons. This is just the start – it could be more, it could be less.

In the meantime, check out the presentation below to find out more about how people on JustGiving are using Facebook to fundraise, how we’re helping them in new ways and how you can use Facebook’s tools on your website.

Oh, and if measurements and Facebook are your thing, you should check out our case study on how we used social media monitoring tools or some more of our recent talks on Facebook, listening tools and how small charities can use the web to punch above their weight.

Tags: donations, Facebook, Facebook like, JustGiving Facebook, JustGiving social media, like, roi, Social media