The Washington Post recently reported that one to three percent of a non-profit group’s email list would donate when receiving an email from the group, and that the average donation is about 80 dollars. The article also reports that one percent of Cause members donate and the average user who gives to a cause on Facebook donates 25 dollars.

So, you’re probably thinking, “Why even try and raise donations on a Cause Page?” Well the answer is that it’s not always about dollars. Cause Pages can help create a lot of awareness since they are often featured on Facebook users’ profile pages and Cause administrators can update users’ statuses. With the average Facebook user having about 100 friends, the 25 million people that support causes are actually creating an impression on 2.5 billion people. With the costs associated with setting up a Cause Page—pretty much just time—getting 1,000 impressions per member is a better deal than most ads.

It’s also about engagement. Through using social media, donors and supporters of causes can see the heart and soul behind the organization. Supporters and donors can get a better understanding of how they can help, and how their donations help out. Building an engaging relationship with donors and supporters will help ensure that they donate and support the organization on a consistent basis.

But, I whole-heartedly believe that using social media can help increase donations, and on those social media sites. I think that the mistake a lot of organizations on Causes make is that they aren’t very transparent and they don’t offer a lot of support with fundraising initiatives or incentive to donate. Organizations would be more effective if they let members know where the money goes, for instance letting members know that a $10 donation will feed a family for two days, or a $50 donation will go to bringing clean drinking water to an entire village of 1,000 people for a day, etc. Non-profits also aren’t providing a lot of materials on their cause pages, such as suggestions for how to fundraise and collateral to hand out when you’re fundraising door-to-door.

Fundraising via social media can have a slow adoption rate, Facebook Causes has only been around for 2 years, but say a year or two down the road, an organization already has thousands of dollars in donations, thousands of members, is very transparent about where the money goes, provides materials on how people can help, and also engages with their members, they’re likely to see a really big pay off.

It’s proven that people look to others to determine how they should act, so when people join a cause at the end of  2010 and see that they had 50,000 members and 200,000 in donations and that countless people had recruited hundreds of people and raised hundreds of dollars for the cause, all those people are going to feel social pressure to do the same.

In my personal opinion, what I would say is that what most non-profits are doing with Cause pages would be similar to just sending out an email that simply said “Donate.” The reason they aren’t pulling in dollars is because they aren’t utilizing the medium effectively.