Granger 1Auden Granger

Mr. Livoni

Economics period 1

8 February 2015

Senior Capstone

Volunteer and Donor Engagement in American Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations have long been struggling with the difficulty of garnering

enthusiasm for social activism work. While just over a fourth of Americans completed some

form of volunteer work for an organization and half of all American citizens donated at least $25

to a charity organization in 2013 (“Volunteering In America”), one of the primary focuses of any

nonprofit continues to be increasing and maintaining engagement in and support for the work

completed by that organization. This difficulty in volunteer engagement stems from several root

causes, including a perceived disconnect between the population involved in activism work and

the population affected by that work. Potential volunteers do not see the ways that their work

will have a positive impact on their own lives, and so choose to spend the limited resources of

their time, money, and enthusiasm on pursuits that have a clear and direct positive personal

impact. Another reason is that service organizations lack the resources and advertising strategies

to attract potential volunteers and donors in a competitive marketing environment. For-profit

companies simply have more resources to attract potential customers and use more effective

advertising strategies to engage their audiences in entertainment and consumption. Most

nonprofit organizations do not devote enough attention to social media or online platforms, or

lack a complete understanding of how to best utilize these platforms. The Harry Potter Alliance

(HPA), meanwhile, represents a successful strategy for increasing and maintaining interest in

Granger 2social activism work. The Harry Potter Alliance incentivizes action through connections to

popular media, utilizing existing enthusiasms and clear connections of various celebrities and

various community structures to draw attention and appeal to the service work completed by the

HPA. Additionally, the Harry Potter Alliance’s ideology is of facilitating application of the

message of stories inspires strong emotional responses in potential volunteers as it associates

engagement with the support and approval of idolized characters. A strong social media presence

and an organizational structure deeply rooted in the structure of the communities it appeals to

solidifies the HPA as an effective model of volunteer engagement.

As a result of poor marketing strategies, especially in regards to social media, coupled

with a perceived disconnect between volunteers and those affected by volunteer efforts, many

nonprofits are struggling to inspire potential volunteers and sponsors to connect to their

organization. The top reason that US donors gave for one-time donations to an organization,

according to the 2012 Donor Engagement Survey, was that they or a loved one were directly

affected by the primary cause of the organization. The second highest reason for donation was in

order to sponsor or support a friend or colleague who was participating in an organization’s

event or fundraiser. When these one-time donors were polled as to what would inspire them to

donate regularly, the second highest reason was enthusiasm for the organization’s work, with

proof that their contributions were impactful as the third (the primary reason was an increase in

personal finances) (Cross). When individuals have a direct connection to those affected by

volunteer work or donation and see the impacts of their contributions in the community, they are

more motivated to both one-time and regular giving. A disconnect from those affected and a

subsequent lack of passion for the organization’s work limits donations and support.

Granger 3Email opening rates have been declining dramatically over the past few years. Between

2012 and 2013, response rates to fundraising messages fell from 11% to 0.7%, and responses to

advocacy messages (emails that ask recipients to sign petitions, send an email to a decision-

maker, or take a similar online action) fell from 25% response to 2.0% (NTen). Young people

especially are disconnected from advocacy and donation. The Donor Perspectives Study put total

average donation for US donors age 25-34 at about $800, with individuals 34-44 and 45-54 both

at about $1,390. No data was provided for donors under age 25, which is indicative of the lack of

focus of nonprofits on younger people, also shown in the lack of successful social networking

and poor youth engagement strategies that lead to such declines in response to calls for action

(Cross). Many organizations neglect to put focus on their online image, instead functioning

primarily on a local, offline level, even though online revenue increased by 14% in 2013, clearly

showcasing the benefits of focusing on online platforms (NTen).

Online fundraising strategy, quality email content with targeted messaging, and strong,

varied social media content is an important element of organizational success (Andresen). It is

just as necessary for nonprofit organizations to focus on website participation and social media

engagement as to focus on email blasts. Monthly website traffic for participants in the 2014

Nonprofit Donor Engagement Benchmark Study grew by 16% in 2013, even as email response

rates fell (NTen). Increases in social media audiences are dramatic- the average number of

Facebook fans grew by 37%, while the number of Twitter followers increased by 46%- and are

far larger than the growth of email audiences. Effective use of these platforms allows an

organization to access a steadily growing audience. However, many organizations lack a social

media marketing strategy and do not take full advantage of these platforms (Fogel). Effective

use involves providing a variety of content instead of simply requesting donations. This can have

Granger 4a strong impact on the response rate of volunteers to communications. For instance,

Environmental groups on average sent more advocacy messages, addressing legislative changes,

climate change, deforestation, etc., than fundraising messages. As a result, Environmental groups

saw a higher average response rate for advocacy emails than other organizations (NTen). Many

nonprofit organizations merely use social media to broadcast events, news, or campaigns, but, as

Elaine Fogel states in her article “Three Ways to Increase Your Nonprofit’s Social Media

Engagement,” “the broadcast approach is what organizations did before the advent of digital

marketing… [while] social media… was created to encourage dialogue, feedback, sharing, and

much more.” Neglecting to engage followers in conversation regarding the organization’s focus

distances them from the work being done and leads to general disinterest. Many successful brand

marketers follow the ‘rule of thirds.’ The rule of thirds states that social media posts by

businesses and individuals should be composed of three categories, spread fairly evenly between

the three- one third of posts should be about the individual or brand, one third should be about

the industry and should incorporate content from an outside source, and one third should be

made up of direct interactions with followers (Shattuck).

It is also necessary for organizations to take advantage of current events and occurrences.

Three examples of successful application of current events are emergency response funds,

elections, and popular media releases. In 2013, many humanitarian aid organizations saw

particularly high levels of monetary aid due to the crisis of Typhoon Haiyan. Disasters of this

scale have the potential to drive more traffic and attention to aid work completed worldwide

throughout the year. In 2012, many human rights groups in the United States experienced a rise

in fundraising and volunteer work due to the focus of the presidential election on reproductive

choice and electoral campaigns for same-sex marriage campaigns (NTen). Organizations like the

Granger 5Harry Potter Alliance rely heavily on popular media events, and can particularly benefit from a

movie release or piece of news. An effective campaign might be focused around the release of a

new piece of content (Granger). In fact, the Harry Potter Alliance has been lauded by Henry

Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California who has extensively studied the

HPA, for creating a structure that “can… evolve over time as the cultural references change”

(Rosenberg). Harnessing the power of current events and popular media helps organizations to

maintain relevance while boosting donor engagement.

Another element that many organizations neglect to attend to is youth engagement. The

benefits of engaging young people are clear- organizational sustainability and vitality, long-term

success, new strategies and ideas, and intergenerational conversation are all reliant on involving

young activists- but many organizations struggle with how to effectively engage young

volunteers (Sumac Research). Many organizations create a Youth Chair or Youth Advisor role in

order to represent and acknowledge young people, but neglect to give this individual a space to

participate in the governance of the organization. In most organizations, the Youth Advisor

becomes merely an observer, but the role was created to give young people a voice in the

running of an organization and ensure that the organization addresses the needs and interests of

young people. By seeing youth engagement solely as a benefit for the teens and young adults

involved in the project, the organization loses the opportunity to reap the benefits of youth

engagement itself. Additionally, when youth volunteers have no input in the organization, they

feel their work has little impact and are less inspired to activism, as evidenced both by the lack of

data for youth engagement described earlier and in an article published by Philanthropy Journal,

“Harnessing the Power of Youth for Your Nonprofit” (Sumac Research).

Granger 6The Harry Potter Alliance is a nonprofit organization that uses parallels from popular

media (like Harry Potter) to garner enthusiasm for social change issues. By connecting to

popular media, the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) reexamines the nature of traditional nonprofit

work and, through the utilization of the enthusiasm and passion that individuals show for popular

media, engages a demographic that traditionally feels disconnected from service work in

working for social change. While the HPA was created to draw attention to human rights

violations in Sudan, the organization’s focuses now include literacy, US immigration reform,

global hunger, climate change, net neutrality, and labor rights (Bird). These seemingly disparate

concerns are brought together under a common methodology of fan activism. Fan activism refers

to the application of the enthusiasm surrounding ‘fandom’ for social change work, either through

use of the ideas expressed in fiction as inspiration for service or through the use of existing fan

communities as platforms for activism work around any subject, especially but not limited to

works that directly connect to the stories that bring those communities together (Jenkins). Other

examples of this methodology include the Hero Initiative, an organization founded by fans of

comic books dedicated to helping ailing comic book creators in need of financial support and

assistance regaining paying work (“Helping Comic Creators in Need”). Another example is the

Box Scene Project, organized by Glee fans in an attempt to achieve equal representation for

characters, actors, and issues that affect marginalized identity groups on network television

(“LGBT Stars Team with the Box Scene Project to Celebrate LGBT Media Representation”).

The HPA functions on an international and local level, with nearly 200 local chapters worldwide

that participate in organization-wide campaigns as well as smaller scale local projects

independently or with partner groups (Slack). Some international, full-organization Harry Potter

Alliance campaigns include Accio Books!, an annual book drive project that has to date collected

Granger 7over 50,000 books to build a library in an impoverished area, Helping Haiti Heal, which

collected and sent several cargo planes full of supplies to Haiti, Not In Harry’s Name, an

awareness campaign for fair trade goods as well as a push for Warner Brother’s to switch Harry

Potter chocolate products to fair trade, and Wizard Rock the Vote, a partnership with Rock the

Vote focused on Harry Potter-themed conferences and events.

The Harry Potter Alliance uses direct connections and parallels to popular media to

incentivize action. The Harry Potter Alliance, the largest example of fan activism work, uses

active partnerships with various organizations within fan communities to engage its potential

volunteers. Some partnerships include the International Quidditch Association, the National

Novel Writing Month program, famous author and YouTube personality John Green (and his

brother, Hank Green), and Harry Potter news platform sites MuggleNet and the Leaky Cauldron.

The Harry Potter Alliance is intrinsically tied to the communities it works to engage and does not

have to struggle to engage community members as an outside force. The Harry Potter Alliance is

strongest when its campaign aims are so deeply integrated into the source material they reference

that potential volunteers feel a strong emotional response to the campaign structure and associate

engagement with the ideology of the stories they love. This can also involve associations with

virtues of idolized characters and the heroism they espouse, as in the example of campaigns like

What Would Dumbledore Do? and in the Harry Potter Alliance’s two primary taglines- “we turn

fans into heroes” and “we are Dumbledore’s army for the real world” (Morales).

The Training and Resource Development branch of the Chapters Department of the Harry

Potter Alliance works to improve the connection between the wider organization and the local

chapters as well as to provide resources, training, and information for chapter organizers and

members in order to facilitate more effective social change work through fan activism. Within

Granger 8this branch falls the Fandom Forward project, where teams of about 135 people total work to

create resources, documents, projects, and project suggestion lists for various fandoms and

pieces of media. These teams each focus on a specific piece of popular media, such as Doctor

Who, the Hunger Games, Star Trek, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In order to take advantage of

outside events, these resource packets are built to be released around the premieres of new

content- for instance, this spring will see the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Fandom

Forward Marvel Cinematic Universe toolkit, as well as the release of the Paper Towns film and

toolkit. The most difficult element of the process of developing tools for social change is

maintaining a direct, sensible connection from social change focus to source material. While the

comparisons between economic inequality in America and The Hunger Games are clear and easy

to apply to advocacy and education (Odds in Our Favor), connections between Star Wars and

mental health advocacy are more difficult to justify (Granger). However, successful applications

inspire dramatic responses from a demographic that traditionally does not associate itself with

service work.

Additionally, as a result of the HPA’s Chapters program, the Harry Potter Alliance does

not just exist online or just in a specific location, but is accessible from almost anywhere,

representing an effective use of online and offline platforms. The Harry Potter Alliance has a

strong social media presence that functions side-by-side with offline actions as opposed to one

dominating the other, as is common in other service organizations (NTen). By posting varied

content, the HPA ensures that its social media postings remain interesting and relevant. While

some posts are traditional calls for donations, most are timely responses to events occurring in

the fan community (like a casting announcement or film release) or to world news. Also included

are updates on current campaigns, photos from Chapters’ projects, and inspiring quotes or

Granger 9messages about fan activism and social engagement, often accompanied by professional looking

graphics. Each social media platform conveys a different message- the Harry Potter Alliance

Chapters Facebook page, for instance, is primarily directed towards potential donors, and carries

a more professional tone. The HPA Chapters Twitter, meanwhile, is aimed towards organizers of

local chapters, and is business-like and practical. The primary Harry Potter Alliance Facebook is

more playful, while the Tumblr blog is used mostly to share narratives from staff members and

volunteers about the work done by the HPA and its partners, as well as opinion-based responses

to world events and fan events. Regular email blasts collect information from the various social

media sites, emphasize specific events, and announce new campaigns. This multiplatform

method, featuring a variety of posts that are engaging even when separated from the charity,

gives the Harry Potter Alliance an edge over organizations which use social media as a way to

repost email blasts, especially since the Nonprofit Donor Engagement Benchmark Study reveals

that for every 1,000 email subscribers, most nonprofits have only 53 Twitter followers and 149

Facebook fans (NTen). The incorporation of various tones in social media ensures that the

variation intended in the Rule of Thirds, described earlier, is carried through. Simply reposting

the content of email blasts means providing the same information to a smaller, overlapping

audience, while the Harry Potter Alliance’s method encourages increased followings on social

media while avoiding disengaging audiences with repetitive content. The HPA’s social media

structure is based on engaging with its followers rather than merely broadcasting, emphasizing

the human element of the organization and encouraging dialogue and attention to the work at the

Harry Potter Alliance does (Fogel).

The Harry Potter Alliance’s recent ‘Not In Harry’s Name’ campaign is a strong example

of what makes the HPA’s strategies effective. Not In Harry’s Name was a series of actions aimed

Granger 10to ensure that all chocolate sold under the Harry Potter brand (“in Harry’s name”) would be

ethically sourced. After four years of campaigning, Joshua Berger, Warner Bros.' Harry Potter

Global Franchise Development president, announced that “by the end of 2015, and sooner where

possible, all Harry Potter chocolate products sold at Warner Bros. outlets and through our

licensed partners will be 100-percent UTZ or Fair Trade certified” (O’Brien). Not In Harry’s

Name involved collaboration with the anti-slavery organizations Free 2 Work and Walk Free, as

well as the fan community created by author John Green, Nerdfighteria. The use of creative

social media, including videos to Warner Brothers and to potential volunteers called ‘Muggle

Howlers’ (based on content of the Harry Potter books), was a key contributor to this success.

Alyssa Rosenberg of the Washington Post emphasizes the value of the Harry Potter Alliance’s

social marketing strategy of “developing messaging tools that can be adapted to any number of

causes, rather than identifying campaigns and then developing strategies for them” (Rosenberg).

Nonprofit organizations throughout the United States struggle to attract potential

volunteers and donors. Potential volunteers do not see a clear connection between the work they

do and the population affected by that work, and so do not feel enthusiastic and motivated about

the work of various activism organizations. Volunteers feel unable to connect to an organization

and the focus of that organization. Additionally, nonprofit groups do not place significant focus

on social media or online platforms, limiting the effectiveness of their marketing and

disconnecting potential volunteers from their organization. Even organizations that do place a

focus on social media do so uneffectively, and have a limited understanding of how to use these

new platforms to their fullest extent. By using social media for more than just broadcasting and

by providing direct connections between volunteers and an organization, service groups can raise

and maintain the enthusiasm of their volunteers and donors. The Harry Potter Alliance represents

Granger 11this idea thoroughly through its effective use of social media and existing passions and

community structures to inspire consistent social change work.

Granger 12

Works Cited

Andresen, Katya. "Key Findings on Nonprofit Social Media, Email and Online Fundraising." Networking for Good. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.

Bird, Lauren. The Harry Potter Alliance. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.

Cross, Fernandez, and Riley. "Orlando CPA." Understanding Donor Engagement. Orlando Accounting Firm, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2015

Fogel, Elaine. "Three Ways to Increase Your Nonprofit's Social Media Engagement."MarketingProfs. N.p., 13 Feb. 2014. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Granger, Auden. "Fandom Forward." HPA Chapters Community. The Harry Potter Alliance, 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

"Helping Comic Creators in Need." The Hero Initiative. N.p., 22 Oct. 2014. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.

Jenkins, Henry. "How “Dumbledore’s Army” Is Transforming Our World: An Interview with the HP Alliance’s Andrew Slack." University of Southern California, 23 July 2009. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

"LGBT Stars Team With The Box Scene Project to Celebrate LGBT Media Representation." Box Scene Project. N.p., 14 July 2014. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.

Morales, Claudia. "What Would Dumbledore Do?" The Harry Potter Alliance. N.p., 2009. Web. 21 Jan. 2015.

NTen, and Charity Dynamics. "Nonprofit Donor Engagement Benchmark Study: Insights into Donor Engagement Behavior and Preferences." (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 10 Jan. 2015.

O'Brien, Kara. "Not in Harry's Name Campaign." The Harry Potter Alliance. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

"Odds in Our Favor." The Harry Potter Alliance. N.p., 2014. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.

Perkins, Daniel E., and Claudia C. Mincemoyer. Say Y.E.S. to Youth: Youth Engagement Strategies. By Julie A. Scheve. N.p.: Pennsylvania State U, n.d. N. pag. Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development, 2006. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Granger 13

Rosenberg, Alyssa. "How ‘Harry Potter’ Fans Won a Four-year Fight against Child Slavery." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 13 Jan. 2015. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.

Shattuck, Steven. "The "Three A's" of Nonprofit Social Media Engagement." Where Marketers Go to Grow. HubSpot, 23 Jan. 2014. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Slack, Andrew, Paul DeGeorge, Lauren Bird, and Matt Maggiacomo. "Harry Potter Alliance Long-Term Strategic Plan." The Harry Potter Alliance, Sept. 2014. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

Sumac Research. "Harnessing the Power of Youth for Your Nonprofit." Philanthropy Journal. N.p., 2 Apr. 2013. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

"Volunteering in America." Volunteering and Civic Engagement in the United States. Corporation for National & Community Service, 2014. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.