Editor's note: Social media has quickly grown from a fun pastime to a serious business tool. And it's not just major corporations or CEOs who are blogging, Facebooking, and YouTubing. Portfolio.com and bizjournals take a look at how nonprofits increasingly turn to this medium as a way to reach audiences they didn't have access to before. Tuesday, we began with a look at how smaller organizations are getting wide exposure. Wednesday, we saw how social media is leading more people to take action for good causes. And today, we learn about how social networking is encouraging novel forms of grassroots charitable giving and activism.

Social networking, a powerful fundraising tool for nonprofits, is also encouraging novel forms of grassroots charitable giving and activism.

Causes, an application mostly on Facebook, provides tools that allow Facebook users to tap their network of friends to volunteer or raise money for registered nonprofits. It has been downloaded by 90 million people and been used to raise $16 million since it was launched on May 25, 2007. The average contribution is $12.

“It’s a real change in how philanthropy happens,” said Causes co-founder Joe Green. “Up to now, it’s always been very top-down, direct-mail focused.” At one time, a Harvard College roommate of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Green started Causes with Sean Parker, a co-founder of Facebook, Napster, and Plaxo. It is run by Project Agape in downtown Berkeley, California.

Recently, Causes ran what it called “the giving challenge,” in which it gave $170,000 in prize grants to causes that raised the most money on particular days. Over a four-week period, the campaign raised $1.7 million for more than 7,800 institutions and causes, the majority of which are not even close to household names, Green said.

Good Causes

Some private companies are also embracing the fundraising potential of social networks directly.

Social-gaming company phenomenon Zynga Inc. said recently that in October its customers contributed $487,500 to help children in Haiti. They did so by buying “seeds” for use in Zynga’s FarmVille videogame, in which 63 million players worldwide manage virtual farms.

“The sheer scope and reach of social gaming to affect people’s lives in a positive way wasn’t even a reality a few years ago,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Zynga in a blog posting.

On the microblogging site Twitter, Häagen-Dazs ice cream has recently been helping honeybee research by sponsoring “tweets” through San Francisco’s TwitCause, a project powered by ExperienceProject.com, a social network on which people can connect and share experiences.

For a week, which is how long all TwitCause campaigns last, Häagen-Dazs donated $1—up to $1,000 a day—every time people retweeted “#HelpHoneyBees” on Twitter. Proceeds went to research at the University of California, Davis, aimed at stopping the decline of honeybee populations around the world. Other TwitCause campaigns have benefited environmental reporting, children’s playgrounds, animal rights, healthy-food promotion, and cancer programs, among other causes.

Also via San Francisco-based Twitter, volunteers around the world have organized two events this year in hundreds of cities to raise money for both local and international causes. Dubbed Twestivals, which began in London in September 2008, they are organized by local volunteers in each city.

In February, get-togethers in 202 cities raised more than $250,000 for clean-water projects in Africa.

In September, a similar number of cities held events to benefit local causes. One San Francisco event raised close to $6,000 for Operation Smile, enough money to fund 23 operations for children with cleft palates.

Most of those who attended worked at local technology companies, particularly startups, said organizer Krystyl Baldwin.

“It was a really good experience to see how the San Francisco tech community could join together and raise money for a good cause,” she said.

The next Twestival is planned for March 2010.

---

Patrick Hoge writes for the San Francisco Business Times.