Convio, the leading provider of software and services to help nonprofit organizations use the Internet for driving support, recently announced the release of Convio Tributes, a “constituent-led fundraising solution” that lets a nonprofit effectively leverage supporters and take, as the company says, “Internet fundraising to a new level.”
With Convio Tributes, a nonprofit can provide its constituents with online tools to quickly and easily create their own highly personalized Web sites for fundraising in honor or memory of a friend or relative. Supporters also can use their Web pages to help recruit new constituents and put a personal face on the nonprofit’s mission.
Although many nonprofits provide such tools to people participating in events such as walks and races, Convio Tributes lets supporters raise money, generate awareness and recruit others on an ongoing basis, independent of a special event.
This is more than just a great idea. This is the idea of “friends-telling-friends,” or viral marketing, bent and shaped to near perfection.
In taking what is already a successful model – adopted by such pledge-based fundraising events as the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge or the Boston Marathon Charity Program – minus the event, Convio appears to have, in effect, built a better mousetrap.
This means a nonprofit organization doesn’t necessarily have to stage or be associated with a costly, complicated community extravaganza of any size, shape or form in order to exponentially, not just incrementally, expand its core audience.
This means the more passionate donors among us will have a powerful outlet for disseminating – and, ideally, propagating – their feelings on behalf of their cause.
I can’t think of a much better way for a nonprofit to involve so many of its constituents in its mission and to encourage them to evangelize on its behalf.
Like a good, old-fashioned blog, Convio Tributes seems to be using social software to make possible a new, mutually-beneficial global conversation that might not have occurred otherwise.
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