Autism Speaks

Autism Speaks is the nation's largest autism science and advocacy organization, dedicated to funding research into the causes, prevention, treatments and a cure for autism; increasing awareness of autism spectrum disorders; and advocating for the needs of individuals with autism and their families.

About 50% of Autism Speaks Walk Now, Team Up and Autism Speaks U event revenue comes in online. Field volunteers, walkers and staff were looking for new ways to raise money. Like many participant events, nearly 50% of walkers don’t raise any funds. In response to field requests, Autism Speaks looked at multiple social media tools for a way to move non active participants up the engagement ladder and decided to try Boundless Fundraising™ for Facebook among other social media tools.

Services Used

• Boundless Fundraising™ for Facebook

How it Worked

• Used Boundless Fundraising™ for Facebook in 2010 for Walk Now, Team Up and Autism Speaks U.
• Autism Speaks actively promoted the adoption of the Facebook application to participants through their Headquarters page, registrations confirmation page, recurring emails, and goal achievement notification.
• When participants downloaded the Facebook application from their Headquarters page, they had the option to post the badge directly on their Facebook wall for all their friends to see.
• After that, Facebook friends could donate or register for the Walk themselves.
• The application showed how well the participant was doing by displaying their total dollars raised against their fundraising goal.
• The Facebook application also sent a stream story to participants and their friends every time they made progress toward their goal, which had a significant impact on directly sourcing donations, registrations, and requests for information. 

Results

• Fundraising Lift: Repeat walk participants, from 2009 to 2010, who used Boundless Fundraising™ for Facebook, increased their fundraising by 22% versus repeat participants who didn’t use the tool, who averaged an 11% drop in fundraising year-over-year.
• Adoption: About 37% of repeat participants used the application in 2010. About 60% of participants added the application through the Headquarters page. 40% added through an email prompt.
• Recruitment: 3363 New participants joined through the application
• Fundraising: Donations through the Facebook application represent 5.8% of online Walk revenue and 3.4% of the total Walk revenue.

Case Study Conclusions

• Participants using Boundless Fundraising™ for Facebook outperformed their peers in nearly every core metric year-over-year: emails sent, amount raised per participant, and donors per participant, improving their annual lift over non-Boundless Fundraising participants
• Top participants actively use Boundless Fundraising™ for Facebook, which improves the performance of your top performers: team captains, repeat participants, best fundraisers
• Promoting the social media tools to participants through emails, the registration process, event posters, and on their fundraising pages increases adoption