How to Fundraise Using Facebook

Facebook now lets you create personal fundraisers for yourself, friends, and family. If you're hoping to raise money for a good cause, but it isn't tied to a specific organization, Facebook just changed the fundraising game.

The social media giant has expanded its fundraisers tool, now letting users create personal fundraiser pages to raise money for themselves, friends, and people or things not on Facebook. Previously, users could only raise money for a registered nonprofit on the platform.

As a way to stick to social good, the new personal fundraisers can only fall under the six categories below, however, Facebook hopes to include more categories and evolve them over time:

1. Education (like tuition and books)

2. Medical (like procedures and treatments)

3. Pet medical

4. Crisis relief (like natural disasters)

5. Personal emergency (like house fires or theft)

6. Funeral and loss

According to Facebook’s VP of Social Good, Facebook created this as a way to support people’s fundraising for personal causes. Additionally, 56 percent of users who have already fundraised for nonprofits on Facebook said they also wanted to donate to friends and family.

The product will roll out slowly over the next few weeks to U.S. users who are at least 18 years old. Once it's live, you'll be able to select the menu at the top of your News Feed and tap the "Fundraisers" button, which will bring you to the fundraiser hub. The "Discover" section lets you find out about new and popular fundraisers, while the "Manage" tab lets you keep track of fundraisers friends have invited you to in the past.

Verified Pages

In addition to personal fundraisers, the company also announced Thursday that verified pages can add a Donate button to Facebook Lives to increase giving and already some celebrities have created Facebook "Live-A-Thon" to support the ACLU.

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Steps to Create a Fundraiser

1. First question you're asked is, "Who are you raising money for?" You can choose a friend on Facebook, a nonprofit, yourself, or "someone or something not on Facebook" (like a pet or a young child), incorporating all the tool's functionalities into a single flow.

2. Once you choose who you're raising money for, you select one of the six categories and fill out a short description.

3. All personal fundraisers need to be submitted first for a 24-hour review process, in which Facebook ensures all fundraisers meet its policies and community standards. This process has some automation but is led by actual staff to ensure that everything in personal fundraisers are for a good cause.

4. Once a fundraiser is approved, users can display a cover photo, a "beneficiary card" showing the person receiving money, a "thermometer" that fills up according to how much money is raised in real-time, the story behind the fundraiser, and information about the creator. Since everything's on Facebook, visitors to the page can click on the profiles of the creator and the person receiving donations, to learn more about them and feel secure in the fundraiser's credibility.

Payment

Users can pay through Facebook's existing payment platform infrastructure. Facebook doesn't want to make money off the tool, but it does charge a 6.9 percent fee, plus a standard 30-cent transaction fee, to cover payment processing, vetting, and security.