Fundraising

How to Raise Money for Your Library Using Social Media

Joyce V. Garczynski

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780081020036
• eBook ISBN: 9780081020043
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Social Sciences

Fundraising: How to Raise Money for Your Library Using Social Media introduces the phenomena that many members, supporters and fundraisers are not using social media to fundraise for their libraries, and may not be aware of its strengths and pitfalls. The book discusses why social media should be used to fundraise and how to successfully employ social media campaigns, also providing examples from library funding initiatives that libraries can follow. Since social media changes relatively quickly, library staff members, supporters and fundraisers need up-to-date information on how to craft messages for the platforms that they use.This book presents less on best practices for specific social media platform, focusing more on library social media fundraising strategies that have been found to be effective (for example, how libraries have successfully created fundraising campaigns with hashtags).- Discusses why social media should be used to fundraise- Outlines how to successfully employ social media to fundraise- Presents examples from successful library funding campaigns via social media that other libraries can follow

Chapter 1

Why Should Libraries Use Social Media to Fundraise?

Abstract

While fundraising on social media may have some critics, this chapter will examine why libraries need to raise money from individuals and why they should pursue fundraising on social media channels. In an era of stagnant or even decreasing budgets, libraries need to explore new ways to reach individual donors and social media can provide a mechanism for libraries to build and maintain a relationship with donors, especially those from Generation X and the Millennial generation. As outlined in this chapter, when libraries look at the fundraising process holistically and seek to build a community with donors and potential donors before asking for money, social media fundraising can flourish.

Keywords

Fundraising; social media; Millennials; Generation X; Baby Boom generation

When I was growing up, one of my earliest memories was of my mother encouraging me to be patient. I was 4 and wanted to be a grown-up, stay up late, and eat ice cream for dinner but my mom reminded me of the old adage that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” (Tobler, 1895, p. 42), and my adult life similarly needed time and the wisdom that comes with seeing the bigger picture to blossom.

Fast forward over 30 years later and here I am in my new role as the librarian in charge of my library’s social media and library fundraising. I have a background in communication so I had taken control of the library’s social media when I first arrived at this library in 2009, but now my boss had designated fundraising to be half of my job. In addition, we had new university leadership who were very interested in increasing the amount of money the library and other units on campus brought in. Basically, I wanted to raise money for the library and raise it quickly in order to demonstrate my success in my new role, but I kept hearing my mother’s sage advice in my head to be patient. I needed to take my time and get to know the fundraising landscape at my institution and within the broader nonprofit world. I also needed to figure out how I could take the skills and knowledge that I did have in communication and social media and apply them to help me be successful in order to see my new career blossom.

One of the first things I did when I anticipated that fundraising would play a bigger role in my duties was to survey the academic library fundraising landscape. Specifically I wanted to know what the recommended practices for libraries fundraising on social media and whether or not academic libraries were following those practices. I first searched the library literature for best practices and did not find any, so I then looked at the nonprofit fundraising literature and found copious suggestions for how to fundraise using social media. Then I conducted a content analysis of 276 posts on the social media accounts of 16 academic libraries to determine to what extent they followed the best practices most prevalent in the nonprofit literature (Garczynski, 2016). I found that many academic libraries were in the same position that I was; they seemed to be in the beginning stages of using their social media to fundraise (Garczynski, 2016). Given the lack of information on how libraries could use social media to fundraise, I decided to read all I could that was related, experiment, and then share the results in this book. I hope that reading this first chapter and ultimately this book will persuade and ultimately inspire other library social media managers to attempt to fundraise using their platforms and other library fundraisers to explore using social media channels to bring in donations.

Why Do Libraries Need to Fundraise?

From serving as the information repository of kings to teaching those who are homeless how to read, libraries have a history providing valuable resources to their communities (American Library Association, n.d.; Krasner, 2001). In an era of global financial difficulties, however, libraries of every type have faced budget shortfalls and have needed to cut resources or even close. In the United Kingdom, budget shortfalls have resulted in almost 8000 libraries jobs disappearing over the course of 6 years and 343 libraries closing (Wainwright, Bradshaw, Sherlock, & Geada, 2016). Academic libraries have faced tough budget situations as well. A 2015 report on US library financials found that 55% of libraries reported flat or decreasing budgets, but the average price increase of journal titles was 6% per year for that same time period (Bosch & Henderson, 2015). This has meant that academic libraries have needed to make some tough choices about what resources they are able to provide and in some cases the resulting cuts have resulted in user anger. For example, when Memorial University in Canada announced that they would be cancelling thousands of journal title subscriptions due to their rising cost coupled with a weak Canadian dollar and stagnant library budget, outraged graduate students voiced their displeasure to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Cooper, 2015). Corporate and government libraries, such as the National Library of Australia, also have faced extensive personnel and resource cuts (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2016). Libraries in schools, however, have faced some of the most devastating cuts. For instance, Philadelphia, PA, the largest school district in the United States, has reduced the number of certified librarians in the system from 176 in 1991 to 8 in 2017 (Graham, 2017). Thus, it has become more the rule than the exception for libraries to face flat or even decreased budgets.

In response to these financial challenges, many libraries have begun to focus on advocacy and communicating their value to supporters and administrators. The American Library Association (2017) has a section of their website devoted to demonstrating library value and it includes research summaries on library impact, statistics on library services, and a value calculator that allows libraries to place a dollar figure on how much each of their resources is worth to the people that they serve. Similarly, the Association of College and Research Libraries issued the Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report in 2010 in an effort to enable academic libraries to better document and articulate the contributions they make to their universities (Oakleaf, 2010). This is a significant first step in libraries’ fundraising efforts because being able to articulate the value of libraries, specifically the value of the library trying to raise the money, is necessary in order to successfully fundraise.

Libraries have typically employed these advocacy tools and others in order to fundraise in three specific spheres. They have advocated for additional funding or the restoration of funding from the larger government, corporate, or educational entity that oversees them; they have applied for foundation, government, or corporate grants; and/or they have attempted to raise money from individuals. The library literature contains a plethora of theoretical and practical approaches related to the first two spheres, but much less is known about the third. For example, a search in Google Scholar for library advocacy yielded 631,000 results and a search for library grants yielded 1,400.000 results, but a Google Scholar search for library fundraising, however, produced only 74,300 results (Google, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c). Because of this gap in the library literature, this text will explore how libraries can craft and deploy messages on social media platforms in order to raise money from individual donors to help meet the demands imposed by shrinking or stagnant library budgets.

Why Should Libraries Fundraise Using Social Media?

While it may not be so difficult to convince library administrators that they need to raise money, persuading them to attempt to raise money via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat is a different story. After all, it is relatively easy to come up with thousands of reasons why not to try something new, and some nonprofit fundraising professionals have been reluctant to embrace a social media strategy. Since these reluctant fundraising professionals have been quite vocal, I will discuss the two main arguments they have made against social media fundraising and attempt to refute them as part of my effort to convince libraries that it is a fundraising channel that they should employ.

But Social Media Will Not Reach Current Major Donors!

One of the main arguments against nonprofit organizations, including libraries, using social media to fundraise is that these channels do not reach those who typically give and have the capacity to make what are known as transformational gifts, meaning that the donor and the organization work together to shape large gifts that significantly benefit all parties involved including the organization, the donor, and individuals who are in need (Christ, 2013). This argument is rooted in nonprofit giving data and those who make it note that 70% of those who contribute to charities are from the Silent/Mature generation (born before 1945) or the Baby Boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964) (Chung, n.d.). It is as “fundraising wizard” Sean Triner said: The best way to reach donors under the age of 40 is to wait until they are 40 (Brooks, 2016, para. 1). Older donors have higher average donations, are more likely to be repeat donors, and have a higher lifetime value to a nonprofit organization (Brooks, 2016). So this strategy recommends that fundraisers should, “Focus [their] fundraising on older—and getting older—donors” (Brooks, 2016, para. 8).

Even though some of the donors in these generations are willing to give online—30% of Silent philanthropists have given via a website and (Dunham+Company, 2017) and 42% of the Baby Boomers have done so (Pond, 2016)—they are not the primary users of social media. According to data collected by the Pew Research Center in November 2016, 34% of the Silent generation and 64% of the Baby Boom use social media compared to 80% of the younger Generation X and 86% of the Millennials. Likewise, according to the “Global NGO Online Technology Report,” 43% of Millennial donors said they were most inspired to give by the content they saw on social media (this was greater than any other fundraising channel, double the 21% who said they were most inspired by e-mail), but only 21% of Baby Boomers said they were most inspired to give by social media appeals (Nonprofit Tech for Good, 2016). In other words, this argument contends that it would be a waste of fundraisers’ time to pursue social media because they would not be able to reach those older Silent and Boomer individuals who have the ability and the willingness to fill their immediate budgetary needs.

Social Media Will Reach Current and Future Donors

Social media may not be where all the library’s major donors are, but it is where some of their current and most of their future donors are. While it is true that the Silent generation has been slow to adopt social media, the Baby Boom generation has steadily increased their engagement with select platforms over the past few years. It is probably unlikely that most Boomers will pick up the Snapchat app anytime soon, but that generation is on Facebook in increasing numbers (Pew Research Center, 2016), and they are 19% more likely than other generations to share content on Facebook (Chang, 2016). In fact, because Facebook has so many users from across all generations, the social media management company Sprout Social recently released a report contending that “the Facebook generation is officially every generation” (Morrison, 2017, para. 2). Thus, social media may not be the way to reach all of a library’s current Silent and Boomer generation donors, but some channels, especially Facebook, will allow a library to reach at least some of them.

Social media also allows libraries to reach their future major donors who are in Generation X (born 1965–80) and the Millennial generation (born 1981–95). Not only are these age groups the ones who are most likely to have social media accounts (Pew Research Center, 2016), but they also spend the most time engaging with these channels (Casey, 2017). On average, Generation X spends almost 7 h per week on social media and Millennials spend just over 6 h per week on these platforms (Casey, 2017). In fact, the amount of time spent on social media by everyone over the age of 18 continues to increase, up 36% between 2015 and 2016 (Casey, 2017) so these generations are using social media platforms now more than ever before. While the social m...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Chapter 1. Why Should Libraries Use Social Media to Fundraise?
• Chapter 2. How Does Social Media Fundraising Fit in?
• Chapter 3. How Should Libraries Encourage Donors to Give?
• Chapter 4. How Can Libraries Acquire and Cultivate Donors Using Social Media?
• Chapter 5. How Can Libraries Craft A Fundraising Campaign?
• Chapter 6. How Can Libraries Craft Appeals for Facebook?
• Chapter 7. How Can Libraries Craft Appeals for Twitter?
• Chapter 8. How Can Libraries Craft Appeals for Instagram?
• Chapter 9. Where Is Social Media Fundraising Headed?
• Chapter 10. How Can Libraries Determine Success?
• Index