Lizzie Carse, Social Media Manager, NSPCC
StrawberrySocial partners with multiple charities and nonprofits across the UK. Many of these partners are running simultaneous Facebook Challenges to help raise needed funds for their work. We are involved in the support and facilitation of their efforts.
On 19th April 2023 Meta’s Facebook fundraising tool stopped collecting funds. Any user attempting to donate funds received the following message: “The Charity that you’ve chosen is no longer eligible for fundraising.”
The Moderator on duty for one of our charities currently running a Facebook Fundraiser began noticing a trend of comments which sounded as if they were having issues donating to the charity. Multiple community members were posting concerns that they had been scammed, that the charity had closed down, that it was a fake campaign, and that they had lost all the money raised.
The Team Lead was informed straight away, and immediately began to take screenshots of these comments to flag up to the client contacts. Because of the internal escalation processes developed with our clients, we were able to message them using multiple channels including mobile phones and various online channels.
Within the hour, after multiple attempts at contact, we were able to connect with clients and work together to develop an appropriate directive which included immediate responses to share with their community of users.
The community of donors and volunteers were messaged, alerting them to the fact of the Facebook Fundraising issue. The community’s reaction was of relief and gratitude:
It was at this time that we made the decision to contact all of our charity clients as this was an issue that could affect many of them at once. We shared this article in our escalations, which includes a message from Meta they were aware of the issue and working to correct it.
By taking immediate action we were able to restore the community’s trust in their chosen Charity, and saved the Charity from losing thousands of pounds in much-needed funds. In addition, because StrawberrySocial took the immediate initiative to contact our other charities we helped ensure they kept their strong level of trust with their own communities of donors without interruption.
The clients were extremely happy with how the entire situation was handled. Their message back to us was one of extreme gratitude we had our eyes (and our brains!) so focussed on their communities.
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