What are Facebook Causes?

Launch a social-networking-based fundraising drive for your cause .. promote it over your network and voila you are raising money. This is the result of one of the newest buzz topics over the Internet described as Causes . Non-profits using Facebook can now access this very original mini-application within Facebook. Causes presents users with the opportunity to ‘group’ features, recruit new members, accept donations and most importantly create causes or tout an existing one.

Causes was built by Project Agape. Project Agape was co-founded by Sean and Joseph. In addition to being a co-founder of Project Agape, Sean is also a managing partner at The Founders Fund. Previously Sean was a co-founder of Napster, Plaxo, and Facebook.

“Facebook Platform presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, most of whom are on Facebook, in seizing the future and making a difference in the world around us. Our generation cares deeply, but the current system has alienated us. Causes provide the tools so that any Facebook user can leverage their network of real friends to effect positive change.

There is a natural evolution of social networking. Leveraging real world social networks is an important part of activism, fundraising, and political campaigning. This is especially true of grassroots activism, local-chapter style nonprofit organizations, and the walks/runs used by many charities to raise money. Given all this, it’s a bit surprising that online social networks haven’t been more aggressively leveraged until now.”

According to digitaljournal.com:

“This is a good step for charitable foundations, and will be a defining move as more and more of these groups begin to pop-up on Facebook. There are many worthy charities already on the site, so I see this feature taking a huge lead and pushing some action with the groups. The demographic of Facebook users is also younger, thus more likely to donate to charity.”

In an interview, Joseph explains how Causes works:

“Anybody can create what we call a cause. We tie into the Guidestar database of the 1.5 million nonprofits, so the cause creator gets to pick an organization that we call the beneficiary of the cause. So you could have a hundred different breast cancer related causes and 25 of them might benefit Susan G. Komen and 15 of them might benefit the American Cancer Society and they might benefit different hospitals. They can benefit anything that’s a registered 501(c)3. So the idea is that there is this thing we call the marketplace of causes where, because it’s really easy and cost-free to create a cause, you can experiment and try lots of different things, and many causes will get created on a given topic, and a small number of them will get very large and many of them will just stay small, which is fine, or it could just be among friends. But the idea is to create a very simple, fluid system, and a system where it’s really centered on the issues people care about and their networks of friends — not the individual nonprofits as the middlemen.”

Yes, Sean and Joseph have indeed thrown the doors of innovation open! Great job! For more ideas to promote your non-profit on Facebook, here’s another resource: Promote your cause on Facebook in five easy steps.