Wanted: new, innovative approach to fundraising for volunteer fire departments. future of department dependent on succes. Willing to pay $0. Only serious inquiries please.
I’ve written recently about issues surrounding the use of social media. I’ve yet though to really hit some of the major benefits social media can have for the fire service, particularly volunteer departments. Today I saw a very innovative approach to fundraising that took advantage of social media platforms.
Fundraising via social media
I first noticed the innovative approach on my Twitter stream the other evening. Via Twitter, I saw the following tweet from @bpvfd103: “WV Fire Dept trying to raise money for fire dept and get new volunteers 1800-fire-line http://bit.ly/dNHQ4k.” The tweet piqued my interest enough to click the link. I must saw I was impressed by what I saw.
The above link directs you to a Facebook page devoted to raising funds for the Bradley-Prosperity Volunteer Fire Department (official site). This fundraising approach provides a very convenient means to promote the cause and accept donations. According to the site, the fire department is raising funds to
“buy new bunker gear for our other members who have not got new gear yet. Also need to replace our rescue truck which got totaled on WV Turnpike in May 2009 and we did not have enough insurance on to cover the loss. any donation of $20.00 or more gets you one of our supporter t-shirts.”
The tool: Facebook’s FundRazr application
Facebook has created an ideal platform to promote fundraising activities. Via a neat Facebook application called FundRazr, you can easily create a fundraising drive. Within the FundRazr app, users are able to:
- see the reason for the fundraiser
- see the amount already raised
- select an amount they would be willing to give
- donate via a secure PayPal connection
- easily share links to the fundraiser via Twitter, Facebook, or HTML link
We’ve seen the success of using technology to improve fundraising activities following the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. Facebook now provides an easy and simple to use platform for volunteer departments to improve/promote their fundraising efforts.
Check out the site. If you don’t feel like sending any money to the department, just leave your $0.02 on the efforts in the comments section below.
