Online donation patterns

I’m at the Advocacy Online session at the eCampaigning Forum where I’ve just listened to a presentation from FullCitizen about online fundraising strategies [more here]. They rather swiftly dismissed the fundraising power of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter in one of their slides – there’s little or no conversion into fundraising they argued.

Hold on, are they just doing the old, traditional stuff (e-mail, follow up calls) very well? Or are all of their online advocacy efforts just for campaigns that otherwise do not get wider media coverage?

Because (and sorry to return to it) the Atheist Bus Campaign managed to use basically only Facebook, Twitter and blogs for the entire transmission of its message, and that resulted in online donations of £153,523.51, with more than 9000 donors. OK, over the months the website has clocked up almost 600k individual visitors (see Google Analytics below), with 24k in the Facebook group and 3k followers on Twitter – that’s not a fantastic conversion rate into donations – but it’s for sure a social media generated fundraising effort.

For more on social media (and web) fundraising see Webdesigner Depot’s 8 tips for a charity website, and Mashable’s Twitter fundraising tips.

[UPDATE] I made an impromptu presentation about Atheist Buses in Duane’s training course. Slides I used for that are here (40mb).