Welcome to the new world of grassroots fundraising!  I’m Jeremy Sher, President of Grassroots Giving Group, and I’m your online guide to raising money by tapping into social networks.  Feel free to add to the conversation, ask a question or ask for help, just by clicking the Comments link right below each of these articles.  If you’d rather e-mail me privately, I’m at jeremy@grassrootsgivinggroup.com, or please feel free to call GGG at (888) 444-7030.

I know what some readers might be thinking: this is a pretty challenging time to start a charitable fundraising business.  Well, so it is, but it’s also a time when exciting new technologies are just emerging to make fundraising easier and more fun.  Our goal is to make America a more generous country by giving people easy and fun tools to approach their friends, family, co-workers and neighbors about giving money to causes they support.

Over four years using this technology for political fundraising, we’ve found that people give more, and they give more often, when they’re asked to give by someone they know and trust. These conversations can happen at any time, but it can be awkward to ask people for money.  Online social networking is a great medium to make those conversations easier.  People can look at a friend’s fundraising webpage at their leisure, so nobody’s put on the spot as they would be in a verbal ask.  At the same time, the page accepts credit cards, so the donation can happen right away, in any place and even on impulse, without the time-consuming formality of getting out the checkbook.  So online social networking gives us the best of a number of different worlds: the convenience of online commerce, the privacy of being able to give without having to respond in real time with a yes or no, all while maintaining the strong social connections that cause people to trust other people’s opinions.

Even in this economy, people can still give their $25 or $50 donations.  While high donors are giving markedly less, lower-dollar donors are still giving, and this software has demonstrated in politics that there’s a vast untapped pool of grassroots donors who won’t respond to institutional solicitations (or won’t turn up on fundraising lists) but will respond when friends or family ask them personally to support an important cause.

Want to know more?  Why not contact Grassroots Giving Group today?

Thank you for reading, and please continue to check back for updates, thoughts, applications and observations of the new world of online grassroots fundraising.