Comment by xg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xg | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting article and I've been wondering how long it would take for someone to write about this.

Here is the post by Taproot ED on the real cost of Facebook Causes ($300 million in nonprofit employee time to raise $30 million): http://www.taprootfoundation.org/blog/2008/07/is-causescom-r...

I think the interesting point is that most nonprofits judge ROI over the life of the donor and use sophisticated CRMs tied in with their other online fundraising efforts to judge their efficacy.

Causes did a typical Silicon Valley move by disintermediating the nonprofits as nodes in the Causes network which robs the nonprofits of valuable data about their constituents.

While you might be right, Aaron's post (or mainly, your characterization of it) is really disingenuous. Taproot spent an estimated $3k of employee time setting up their Causes profile and has received only $30 in donations. Aaron extrapolates this out to the $3m that Causes reported it had raised at the time to estimate the nonprofits spent $300m in employee time to raise that $3m.

There's a number of potential issues with this:

  1. Tiny sample size
  2. Sounds like they setup the profile and forgot about it
  3. Not sure how they spent $3k setting it up
  4. Some types of non-profits are better suited for Causes
  5. Maybe they just suck at fundraising

My main point was more about how nonprofits judge ROI and donor relationship value and I only included Aaron's post as an interesting link that wasn't included in the Post piece.

I can say from my experience working with nonprofits that Aaron's account definitely passes the smell test of what many organizations have experienced (including those that raise a lot of money online through other channels).

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