Recently at the Tides Center in San Francisco, Alix Johnson and Asiyah Abdul-Mu’min shared their stories of how, as young women working with The Body Positive, they began to transform their own isolation into self-acceptance.  Both young women now live in harmony with their bodies, free to pursue their passions and goals.

The Body Positive has become a presence at the University of California, Berkeley, among other universities across the country where students are becoming Body Positive leaders on campus. The organization conducts workshops to teach the four competencies of its Intuitive Health Model, which leads individuals to creating more positive and healthy relationships with their bodies. The ultimate goal is to support young women in overcoming the body hatred endemic in our culture so they can fully pursue their dreams and goals, and this can only be achieved through the promotion of programs such as The Body Positive.

Since 1996, The Body Positive has directly trained hundreds of high school and college women as leaders, to enhance their own body esteem and self-acceptance, and to support their peers. Further, they have provided education to thousands of parents to assist them in raising children with healthy body images, and distributed their BodyTalk video series for viewing by more than a million youth worldwide.

Photo Credit: larrydyer.com

From left to right:

Taira Jordan, Meredith Beam, Carmen Sobczak, Connie Sobczak, Dan Beam, Uma Teesdale, Elizabeth Scott, Alix Johnson, Jacquie Moore, Asiyah Abdul-Mu’min, Kath Delaney, and Nancy Tripathi

These highlights stand out:

• 400,000 people have made at least one donation
• $25 median donation amount
• 35,000 causes have received at least one donation
• $2.1 million raised by 2009 America’s Giving Challenge participants
• $4.5 million raised through the Birthday Wish feature

Read more about how Facebook Causes helps nonprofits with fundraising.

These are the slides from the presentation (with a few enhancements I made to them thanks to the feedback I got from participants). You can download the presentation if you prefer watching it offline.

• You may see a greater number of donations with a smaller average gift size.
• As much as the media talks of a possible economic rebound, prospective supporters will still be wary of donating to new causes.
• Email outreach will continue its upward trend, meaning more email in subscribers’ in-boxes.
• Recurring gifts will be a huge portion of online giving.
• As in the past, year-end gifts will account for a substantial percentage of total annual contributions.

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The event also served as a “send-off” for Assemblywoman Skinner as she heads to Copenhagen, Denmark this week for the 2009 United Nations Convention on Climate Change. This conference brings together 192 countries and 100 heads of state or government in negotiations to deal with the growing threats posed by global warming. Assemblywoman Skinner will represent California alongside State Senator Fran Pavely and other state leaders, and will speak about her energy efficiency legislation and California policies. She will also interact with the University of California delegation that is attending the conference to provide expert testimony through panel discussions.

Recognized as the California Assembly’s 2009 Rookie of the Year, Nancy authored landmark legislation this past year, including bills that will give foster youth better access to college housing, (AB 1393), make AC Transit buses more bike friendly (AB 652), and bring thousands of energy efficient jobs to California (AB758).

The Madera Group congratulates Assemblywoman Skinner for all of her achievements in 2009, and wishes her a victorious 2010!

Photo: CPUC Commissioner Dian Gruenich, Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, and Janice Lin from Stratgen Consulting
Photo Credit: Erik Johnson

Success in social marketing and fundraising means making our clients visible in a crowded online marketplace. Our agency works with clients to develop a strategy that not only uses social networks, but also persuades others to pass the word on. That means creating inspiring and thoughtful messages that work for both email inboxes and social networking sites. It means telling a story that communicates the meaning of the work we are describing, and showing the results that come from it.

The desired goal is to have the public, or the media, pick up a story and carry it even further — a bonus that is the reward for hard work and creative thinking.

Even better, is when an agency partners with a once-in-a-lifetime client who needs no introduction to the social marketplace — in our case, President Bill Clinton and his foundation, the William J. Clinton Foundation. On August 19th, President Clinton celebrated his 63rd birthday. To celebrate, The Madera Group collaborated with his foundation staff to launch an online birthday card fundraising campaign with the culminating message sent by his beloved friend Nelson Mandela.

By the way, it is not too late to send President Clinton a birthday wish and make a donation.

Happy Birthday President Clinton! We thank you and your foundation for all that you are doing around the world to fight climate change, eliminate childhood obesity, and give access to HIV/AIDS medicines to millions of people. Your work is an inspiration to us all.

When Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) approached the Madera Group, it had a steady base of supporters and donors built over the past 30 years. ALDF asked Madera to design and implement a fundraising program that would grow and engage its donors across multiple fundraising channels.

After going through a discovery process with their leadership team and analyzing past performance and operations, the Madera Group developed an approach for ALDF that combined web upgrades with a strategy for increasing online and high donor giving.

Over the course of this two-year engagement, Madera has:

•    Redesigned and updated the ALDF website, incorporating key web 2.0 capabilities, blogging, and search engine optimization features.
•    Managed the migration of online messaging materials to a new online messaging vendor.
•    Established a coaching relationship with ALDF’s executive director.
•    Organized online grassroots fundraisers online through web-based social networks.
•    Created a year-end online fundraising campaign.
•    Developed an approach to cultivate high donors.
•    Moved long-term direct mail donors into higher giving brackets.
•    Created new internal process to improved ALDF’s tracking of high interest potential donors.

The Results:

Over 12 months, the Madera-ALDF collaboration led to:
•    A doubling of website page views.
•    A tripling of the email fundraising response rate.
•    A tripling of the size of the active email list.
•    A 24 percent increase in online major gifts.
•    A significant increase in donations from individual donors.
•    Significant growth of their Facebook presence.
•    Well-attended donor events in regional markets.
•    Cultivation of significant number of high donors.

ALDF executive director, Stephen Wells: “Hiring the Madera Group to evaluate our fundraising and communications strategies and then to recommend and implement fundamental changes was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Madera has helped us make procedural and infrastructure changes that have increased our income, our impact and our capacity to protect the lives of animals. As a result of our work with Madera, we have also changed the way we incorporate development and communications goals into our program work—changes that will continue to pay dividends for ALDF for years to come.”

1. Optimize operations and resource allocation: Kiva President Premal Shah is focusing on “mind blowing efficiency” in his organization. Meanwhile, William Meehan, a senior director at McKinsey & Company, pointed out that nonprofits spend 20-30% of funds to raise money, while in the commercial markets, this figure is less than 1%.

While for-profit and nonprofit organizations have differing operating goals and milestones and measure success by differing values, social profit organizations can continually refine and optimize resources for impact. The most innovative social impact organizations hold this tightly in their operating philosophy.

2. Measure social impact, not moral value: Most panelists throughout the day emphasized producing measurable results, including program officers, social investors and executive directors. Interestingly, William Meehan suggested leaving the philosophical questions for another time and focusing on inputs and outputs for measurement. Ironically, most of us who give to charitable organizations do not ask for these figures or measurements.

3. Develop the appropriate strategy for your own organizational culture:
While highly innovative, the market for online giving marketplace is still in its infancy—well under $500 million in annual giving (from a survey of the largest online giving marketplaces including Network for Good, MissionFish, Kiva, and DonorsChoose). As a comparison figure, all foundation giving in 2007 was approximately $43 billion (Foundation Center).

4. Create picture and profile functionality: When building a giving marketplace, user profiles from a donor and beneficiary standpoint are very helpful and can cause significant bumps in online donor activity—as simple as the ability to upload photos and have donors write a few lines about their participation. People clearly respond to pictures, connectivity and interactivity. The success of profile functionality in donor response is another example of the narrative storytelling approach Madera Group emphasizes in our online communications and fundraising work with our clients.

5. Focus on trust and build transparency in the process:
Similar to more traditional fundraising, in online giving marketplaces building trust and creating transparency in the process is fundamental. Echoed by multiple panelists, one cannot emphasize the importance of supporting donor relationships with radical transparency about how their donations are put to use in supporting an organization’s mission and growth.

Neelu Jain
is an Organizational Strategist with Madera Group. She brings expertise in social capital design, operations, and investment strategies for nonprofit and for-profit clients. She received her MBA from UCLA Anderson School.

We’re excited to be a part of the ongoing learning about socially beneficial online giving that’s growing worldwide.

Following are highlights we’ve chosen from the conference program:

The New York Times has called DonorsChoose.org “the Wikipedia of hope.” Global Giving has been called “The Charity Long Tail.” Fortune was so bold as to title its feature article on Kiva, “The Only Nonprofit that Matters.” And home-grown, but similarly modeled organizations around the world such as Give India, Brazil Social Stock Exchange, Greater Good South Africa, Help Argentina, and many more have quickly become important actors in their respective philanthropic ecosystems.

At this one-day conference, the Stanford Social Innovation Review brings together the leaders of 16 global online giving marketplaces with philanthropy experts, so as to tap the pulse of what’s really happening on the frontier of philanthropy. What defines an online giving market? How will they transform the philanthropic sector in the near future? What opportunities exist to shape and accelerate this phenomenon?

9:00 – 9:45 a.m.
One Venture Capitalist’s Perspective
Randy Komisar, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former virtual CEO of Global Giving, interviewed by Mari Kuraishi, president of Global Giving Foundation

9:45 – 10:15 a.m.
A Wild Ride: Creating a New Marketplace
Premal Shah, president of Kiva

10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Online Giving Markets 101
Moderator: Lucy Bernholz, founder and president of Blueprint Research & Design Panelists: Venkat Krishnan, founder and director of GiveIndia; Carol Tappenden, managing director of GreaterGood South Africa; Clam Lorenz, vice president of operations at eBay Giving Works/MissionFish; Tom Williams, founder and CEO of Give Meaning

1:45 – 3:00 p.m.
Online Giving Markets: Niche or Revolution?
Moderator: Katherine Fulton, president of Monitor Institute Panelists: Jacob Harold, program officer, philanthropy, at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Brita Lombardi, executive vice president for strategic development at DonorsChoose.org, Mari Kuraishi, president of Global Giving Foundation; Jay Backstrand, cofounder and board memberof VolunteerMatch; Matt Halprin, partner at Omidyar Network

3:15 – 3:50 p.m.
Innovations in Philanthropy
Peter deCourcy Hero, former president and CEO of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley and visiting fellow at the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (starting January 2009)