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Crises often have a detrimental impact on charitable giving. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic presented an unexpected silver lining for digital peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising on social media. This blog explores how social media platforms like Facebook not only sustained fundraising efforts during the pandemic but, in many cases, helped them thrive.
Traditional fundraising typically suffers during economic downturns. For example:
Given this historical precedent, many nonprofits feared a similar outcome during COVID-19. However, social media fundraising bucked the trend.
Research revealed that the number of campaigns on platforms like Facebook surged during the pandemic:
This counterintuitive growth highlights the role of relationships in social media fundraising. Campaigns driven by personal connections proved more resilient to external shocks than traditional altruistic appeals.
Several factors explain why social media P2P fundraising thrived during COVID-19:
For nonprofits looking to optimise their fundraising strategies, here are key lessons:
Understanding how nonprofit organisations navigated the challenges of the pandemic requires a close examination of their fundraising efforts. This section outlines how the study gathered and analysed data from top NPOs to uncover key patterns and strategies. By leveraging public data from Facebook campaigns and employing robust statistical tools, the researchers explored the factors that shaped campaign success during an unprecedented global crisis.
Data Collection
The study used public data from Facebook campaigns by top nonprofit organisations (NPOs), identified through Forbes and the Deutsches Institute für Soziale Fragen (DZI). Campaign details were manually extracted from Facebook pages and organised using JSON files. Metrics such as social media engagement and organisation size were also included.
To address visibility limits—Facebook only displayed campaigns with donations over $50 pre-2020—the analysis focused on campaigns above this threshold. Validation with German NPO data showed over 87% of donations were captured.
Methodology
The researchers used statistical tools to identify patterns and examined how fundraising campaign volumes deviated from pre-pandemic trends.
The authors used two main steps to understand how the COVID-19 crisis affected peer-to-peer fundraising on social media. First, they looked at trends in how many fundraising campaigns were started each day, using a method (called ARMAX) to check for any big, unexpected changes when the crisis hit. They chose the start of the crisis by tracking a big spike in Google searches for “Corona” in the United States and Germany.
Next, they used an “event study” method to see how each nonprofit organisation’s fundraising changed once this crisis started. This involved comparing what actually happened with what would usually be expected, allowing them to see which organisations did better than others.
Finally, they dug deeper by running additional tests that looked at things like the organisation’s size, cause, and social media engagement, to figure out what made some groups more successful than others during that time.
This analysis revealed which organisations outperformed others and explored the reasons for their success.
COVID-19 proved that not all crises dampen generosity. By understanding the dynamics of social media P2P fundraising, nonprofits can future-proof their strategies and continue to thrive in challenging times. The key lies in fostering strong digital communities and leveraging personal relationships—lessons that remain relevant far beyond the pandemic.
This blog post is based on the study "When a Crisis Has a Silver Lining: Social Media P2P Fundraising at the Start of COVID-19" by Beatrice Martin and Christian Schlereth, originally published in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Volume 53(5), in 2024. The article can be accessed here.
For those interested in exploring the full study, additional details are available in the working paper version provided by the authors.