NetworkforGood, Hanes Inc, and Kevin Bacon Launch New Round of Matching Grants for Person-to-Person Fundraising

Last week, SixDegrees.org announced new matching grants of $10,000 for the six charity badges that recruit the greatest number of individual donations between July 19th and September 16th, 2007.

SixDegrees is a web site that permits anyone with an internet connection to create a person-to-person fundraising campaign in support of a non-profit organization registered in the United States.

Person-to-person fundraising campaigns are supporter-driven efforts to raise money for an organization through the use of blogs, video, images, widgets, and social networking web sites. SixDegrees is one of sixteen platforms for person-to-person fundraising.

NetworkforGood launched SixDegrees in January 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival with the endorsement of Kevin Bacon and other Hollywood stars. At the same time, the organization announced its first round of matching grants. The combination of celebrity-appeal, matching-grants, and a fixed deadline for raising funds resulted in $600,000+ in charitable giving, most of which arrived in the final days of the competition.

With the marketing reach of Hanes, Inc. along with improvements to the underlying technology of the SixDegrees charity badges, the new matching grants are poised to generate at least as much in charitable giving ahead of the September 16th deadline.

The winners of the first round of matching grants received between 795 and 2,313 individual donations.

Assuming the bar remains at the same level, winners of the second round of matching grants will have to recruit 50 times the benchmark average for individual donations to a group fundraising campaign and five times the benchmark average for individual donations to ‘successful’ group campaigns.

See Show Me the Numbers: Can Group Fundraising Help You for more information on the benchmark figures and a definition of ‘successful’ group fundraising campaigns.

Since SixDegrees.org emphasizes the number of donations as opposed to the amount raised, it is not surprising that the average donation size to the winning charity badges is lower than the benchmark average of $43.30. The winners of the first round of matching grants averaged donations of $21.22.

The lesson for participants in the second round of SixDegrees matching grants: Ask for very small donations from everyone you know, and then ask everyone you to ask everyone they know!

More tips can be found here.

A $10,000 matching grant can do wonders for a small non-profit. The benefits for participating organizations, however, have more to do with deepening the relationship with loyal supporters while reaching new ones.

If your organization’s supporters are like Robin Maxwell, who won a SixDegrees matching grant for her local chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, they might end up on the evening news of the E! Entertainment Network.