The following post is geared towards Facebook page owners and users of Cause-Related Applications like Causes and the WhatGives!? PayPal Donation Widget. If you aren’t using Facebook to raise money or participate in charitable activities, then read this post to find out how you can start!
On August 23rd, Facebook is rolling out some changes that may affect your charity’s Facebook page. The layout changes won’t be extremely noticeable to the passive Facebook user, but for actively involved page owners it will be.
So what exactly are they changing? They’re removing application boxes, which means that the “boxes” tab on your profile and the “boxes” application you use on your pages will be going away.
Now before you punch your computer screen or threaten to pull the plug on your social media budget, take heart and know that nothing is really going away. Things are actually going to be better. The things you do are just going to be more organized in one spot: your tabs. You’ll want to focus all your creative energy towards keeping your communications engaging and your tabs interactive and informational – since those are really going to be the core of the newly designed Facebook pages.
What This Means for Cause and Fundraising Applications
If you use the Causes application, you will receive a notification on your wall that alerts you to the upcoming change. All you need to do is click to accept the change and it’ll be added to your tabs as its own little doo-dad.
For users of the WhatGives!? PayPal Donation Widget (we love all of you by the way!), you should have received an email with a special announcement from our team yesterday, and a customer service rep will be made available to help walk you through the transition.
I can’t give it all away, but we are excited to be expanding our fundraising widget on September 1st to take advantage of this opportunity, and hope to help more charities achieve a much bigger impact with fundraising on Facebook. I can’t wait to keep you updated as we progress on the next phase of our awesome fundraising tool!
Anything else exciting happening in Facebook land?
Of course! Clearly, Facebook has been stepping up their game to provide for the 500 million users and growing demands of all of our constant interaction. Facebook recently launched Facebook Stories – a collective place for people to share inspiring stories that relate to Facebook – seems to have a ton of potential. Most of the stories are kind of cheesy, but some are actually quite moving. There’s also a newly-formed campaign Facebook and Stanford University worked to create called Peace on Facebook – a very cool look at some of the ways Facebook enables people from different backgrounds to connect and exchange ideas.
One more thing! Last week, there was a beta introduction of a new functionality (do those Facebook kids sleep?) called Facebook Questions, which appears to be a catch-all for the “yahoo answers” that we all seem to use. As the functionality rolls out, I’ll see if and how people are using it, and if it would be useful for your non-profit.
Rest assured, you will not miss a beat if you stick with the WhatGives crew. 
So my friends, what can we help you understand? What ingredient do you think your Facebook page is missing? Updates or not, how are your fundraising and awareness efforts going on Facebook in general?
Tell us in the comments, tweet us, or send us a comment on Facebook (of course!).
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Tags: Facebook questions, Facebook Updates, Fundraising Tools, Peace on Facebook
Where is the new widget?? Wasn't it supposed to come out yesterday?
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