It’s been a minute, but we’re hyped to be back at it. This time, we’re taking a look at the newest round of updates to Facebook Giving Tools from Meta.  

This set of updates, slowly rolling out to North America nonprofits who have Giving Tools turned on over the month of October, fundamentally changes the way social fundraising will be leveraged moving forward.

Facebook Messenger moves to “opt-in” by default
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With a major update rollout that started on September 27th and will continue through the end of October 2022, Facebook Giving Tools shifted default Messenger settings from “Opt In” to “Opt Out” on the Stay Connected screen in Messenger.

In other words: users will now automatically be opted in and will need to choose to opt out if they do not want to “stay connected.” 

Generally, it’s understood that 80-95% of people stick to default options when it comes to software, so this new update has the potential to multiply the amount of subscribers that your nonprofit has by nearly 3x-4x.

A real-world example: For every Birthday Fundraiser that brings along 4 people that contribute, you can expect to have 3 of those net new leads available to continually nurture through Messenger. 

That’s high intent supporters that now have been turned into instant subscribers to your nonprofit’s mission while obtaining key data points and emails.

Sheesh, that’s a massive win for you and your organization.

Here’s a quick example of what that will look like for supporters within Messenger:

• After supporters donate or create a fundraiser on Facebook, they are shown a screen with different options for how to stay connected with your organization:

• Follow a Facebook Page
• Get messages (from a nonprofit organization, if Facebook Messenger is turned on for your Facebook page) 
• Share your email

• Previously, US-based supporters had to opt in. On average, we expect that 20% of supporters actually opted in for additional messaging after an event was completed. This left as much as 80% of supporters that never had the ability to be contacted to build relationships and drive repeat activities & giving. 
• Now, with the shift to “opt-out”, supporters have to click a button to opt out of being connected to a nonprofit. This unlocks a whole new audience to grow relationships with that can result in repeat giving through the course of the year(s)]

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Automate the “Thank You” to your birthday fundraisers
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Earlier this month, Facebook launched a specific type of Automated Thanking for Birthday Fundraiser creators. Where doing this in the past has required a good amount of manual effort, this automated feature can now be set up in the Settings tab of Nonprofit Manager. 

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The 411:

• Admins must be logged in to their organization’s Facebook Page to access Nonprofit Manager.
• This Automated Thanking update is available globally where Charitable Giving tools are available.
• Automated thanking is a feature that allows your clients to automatically post on every fundraiser created for their organization. With this new feature, your clients can set up different Thank You messages for generic and birthday fundraisers. 

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More insight into recurring donors
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Finally, Facebook released a set of new updates to their Recurring Giving tool that’s aimed at providing deeper insights into recurring donors, including:

• The ability to see a tag and be able to filter for Recurring Donors in the Supporter List tab of Nonprofit Manager
• As of September 27th, nonprofits will have the ability to see Recurring donors broken out in transaction reports (which can be pulled from the ‘Fundraising campaigns’ tab of Nonprofit Manager). This update will be retroactive - you’ll be able to see any historical recurring donors on Facebook

• Recurring donors will also be broken out in the Insights tab of Nonprofit Manager starting on or after October 3rd. 

See what else is new with GoodUnited x Meta
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You can keep up with GoodUnited and Meta’s official partnership by visiting our blog. Have ideas for how we can improve GoodUnited’s platform? Many features just like these come directly from customer feedback. Drop us a note or tweet us at @GoodUnitedio to share yours.

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