You've probably heard challenge pledges on the radio before: "If we raise an additional $1000 in the next hour, then Mr and Mrs Jones from Anytown have pledged to match that."

Fundraising on facebook has been geared around the traditional question of "will you give to my favorite cause?"

But traditional fundraising misses out on the power of social media.

We are building a facebook application that taps into the power of social media, and allows your supporters to issue a challenge to their friends which provides them a direct incentive to make a donation. With our application, your supporters will be able to tell their friends:

"I will give $100 to my local food bank, but if my friends donate a total of $200 by 4/15/2009, then I will donate an additional $200 myself. Bob, can you help by pledging $50 or more towards this goal?"

Everything underlined above is customized by your supporters. They setup the parameters they want to use for a challenge (you can suggest defaults to them), and they send it out to their friends. Their friends can choose to pay their donation right away at the donation page you specify, or they can wait until the challenge has been met, and then they will receive an email with a link to your donation page to fulfill their pledge.

It's a simple idea, but we believe it can greatly improve your ability to raise funds through Facebook. Anyone on Facebook will be able to setup a challenge to any charity or political campaign they want who has an online donation page. But if you are a charity or campaign, you can setup suggested challenges, and email your supporters a "starter code" which will do all the hard work for them. Then they just have to add it to their Facebook page and send out challenges to their friends.

Who is behind this?

Facebook Fundraising will be a free service. It is being developed by the same people who brought you Donor Town Square. Donor Town Square provides affordable and easy to use donation pages for charitable and political groups. While features will be added over time that will work best with Donor Town Square, this service is intended to work with ANY online donation page. You do not have to be a Donor Town Square client to use this Facebook app! Though we hope you will become a client! :)

The software for this application is also being written by the good people at OpenSource Connections. OSC is a software development consulting firm with a wide range of talented people and experience with all kinds of projects. If you need a custom facebook application, or any kind of custom software development, you should check in with us.