Can Facebook's new donate button help turn likes into charity cash?

The rise of social media has given all charities a unique (and mostly free) opportunity to connect with a wide audience. But many have learned the hard way that higher engagement does not always mean more money or meaningful action. Slacktivism as it’s been coined, was highlighted by Unicef during a 2013 campaign: “Like us on Facebook and we will vaccinate zero children against polio”.

Facebook was fundraising platform Justgiving’s top referrer in the UK in 2014, with more than £60m donated to good causes advertised on the site. But until recently, it hasn’t been possible to donate money directly on Facebook itself. Instead, users are directed to a third party (such as Justgiving), and the risk is that some donations will be lost during the time it takes for the other site to load.

Facebook has subsequently developed a donate button that charities can add to their pages and posts to collect money without followers having to leave the website. Katherine Woo, product manager for the social good team says the idea was conceived during the height of the ice bucket challenge craze: “I was tagged by a friend to make my own video,” she explains. “And I said ‘ok, I’m ready to donate … where do I donate?’ But my friend didn’t know. Our team thought that if we could create a simple way to donate on Facebook, it would be a lot easier and you’d end up collecting more money.”

The company first tested the functionality after the Nepal earthquake in 2015 – adding a donate button at the top of all newsfeeds. More than $15.8m (£12m) was raised from 750,000 users in a week. “That was way more than we expected,” Woo says, adding that while clearly effective for big disaster appeals, the team felt that just using the tool for this type of campaign wouldn’t fulfil its potential.

The functionality has been tested by 40 charities in the US (including WWF, the American Red Cross and Save the Children) since November 2015. As well as the donate functionality, there is also a new fundraising page for particular campaigns and tools to track progress. Woo says that Facebook are looking for European charities to test it further but cannot say when it will be ready for a full launch. Currently, the company does not take a processing fee (unlike JustGiving who take a 5% fee from all donations and charge charities a monthly £15 subscription charge), but are unwilling to rule this out in the future.

Ensuring that Facebook, and in turn the charities that use the platform, reach as many people as possible has also been high on the priority list for the social media company. Matt King, Facebook’s first blind engineer says he intuitively understood that “the company’s mission of connecting everybody in the world would be impossible with the current state of accessibility”.

Top of the list was an automatic photo captioning tool, allowing visually impaired people using screen readers, to hear a richer description of what the photo contains.

“People talk in pictures all the time,” King says. “A picture may be worth 1000 words to you, but it’s worth zero words to me. People with disabilities were being excluded from the conversation.” This new tool ensures that charities are not in danger of ignoring some beneficiaries when using Facebook.

Charities are also using Facebook to connect donors directly with beneficiaries, using tools such as instant messaging and Facebook Live Video. In 2014, acid attack victims in Bangladesh exchanged messages with supporters of ActionAid. More recently, the charity also ran a live blog from Kathmandu. “We got very high levels of engagement here as we were able to tell stories as they happened,” says head of digital, Sally O’Connell. “In such a crowded market it’s increasingly difficult to cut through.”

Mary Mitchell, who co-authored a report on this subject (pdf) for the International Broadcasting Trust and is doing a PhD on collaborative storytelling through social media, believes this trend will continue in the future – particularly via video. It’s a move that facilitates authenticity and transparency, which is particularly important for charities, she explains.

“We’ve got tools like Facebook live video, which are enabling charities to get a bit more hands on with storytelling,” she says. “I think drone and virtual reality technology will be of significance as well, because it will help charities tell stories from the ground.

“It’s a new way of showing how aid is effective. [But] for me, these storytelling projects need to be really rooted in the communities in which they’re based, and allow local people to tell their stories how they want them to be told. That’s really important.”