Fundraisers is a platform provided by Facebook for its users to contribute towards causes that they care about. Fundraisers can be created by individual FB users or even Non-profit orgs for a cause. These fundraisers created by individual users are made available to friends in a user’s n/w and even beyond through organic reach to make contributions towards. Non-Profit org created Fund raisers are made visible to users either on a user’s feed based on their interests or when users specifically search for fundraising events. FB does not charge non-profit orgs for fund raisers. Whereas fundraisers by individual users are charged a tx fee of 6.9% and 30cents per donation. Donors can make contributions through direct bank transfer from backs that are approved by FB, Credit cards, Paypal and Google Pay Fundraisers has been in existence for around 3 years in the FB platform and can be accessed on the mobile app as well as web version

Clarifying Questions:

• Can fundraisers be created through other events/features such as FB birthdays?
• Apart from transactional fees and location of payment accounts , is there any other difference to be taken into account b/w Fundraisers created by individual users vs. Non-profits for eg: restriction on visibility to users?
• Not all fund-raisers have a time limit?
• All fund-raisers have a target amount?

What is the goal of FB fundraisers and how does FB fundraisers tie to the overall of FB mission ? FB Mission : Give people the power to create community and bring the world closer together. People use FB to stay connected with their friends and family, know what’s going on in the world, express and share what matters to them

Fundraiser goal: Building strong communities by bringing people together through causes that matter and meaningful engagement. Additionally, Fundraisers is also a great way to bring back users who Facebook may have lost over time. FB is at a stage today where users are not spending as much time on the platform to just see what’s happening within their network or even looking at their news feed, resulting in lesser engagement and possibly even loosing its users. By driving meaningful and purposeful engagement Fundraisers brings back users to the platform and retains them It ties back directly to the mission of FB i.e the power of community and bringing the world closer together through things that users truly care about. I am going to rule out monetization as a goal of fundraisers for two main reasons :

1. it is anti-thetical to the purpose of what a fundraiser means
2. Can be viewed as misuse of fundraisers as an avenue by FB to drive revenue under the guise and harmful to the overall mission of and image of FB

User segments:

• Creators : Individual Users, Non-profits
• Donors : All users of FB

Partners : Payments: Banks, Credit Card companies, Payment processors (Stripe, Paypal, GooglePay) . Assumption: Security of transactions will be handled inherently through the payment partners themselves

Customer journey per user segment: Creator : Activation Clicks on create fundraiser > enters details of the fundraiser such as Cause, Target amount to be raised, Date by which the amount must be raised, adds pictures and other content > publishes the fundraiser

• Individual User : Posts to profile
• Non-Profit : Posts on their page

Engagement Visits Fundraiser page > likes reactions, responds to comments (thank you or answers questions) > shares updates on the progress of the fundraiser towards target Retention Returns to Fundraiser page : shares updates on the progress of the fundraiser towards target > shares fundraiser to widen outreach Visits other fundraisers to make donations > shares Conversion Target amount for fundraiser achieved Donor: Activation: clicks on notification received for fundraiser created by FB friend OR Clicks on Fundraiser by non-profit that appears on feed/what friends are contributing towards OR Searches for Fundraisers by cause Engagement: Visits Fundraiser page > likes reactions, comments > shares the fundraiser on their own wall to increase outreach > enters their own plea to donate Retention: Returns to fundraiser page to see progress of fundraiser progress > shares further Creates own fundraiser for a cause Conversion: Makes a donation towards one or many fundraisers through bank account or cc or other payment methods

Identify/define metrics:

Fundraisers created

Fundraisers created by individual users

Fundraisers created by non-profit orgs

of fundraisers meeting goal within target

of donations made per fundraiser

MAU (Users clicking on a fundraiser and performing any action such as reactions, shares, comments, donations) Engagement rate : #of shares and comments/# of users visiting a fund raiser

of shares per fundraiser

Success goal/NSM : #donors/#of users visited fundraiser page. This gives an all round view into conversions, outreach of fundraisers and engagement driven

I’d be tempted to just track the number of impressions, visits or engagement through reaction, likes, shares and comments of the fundraiser, but ultimately if they do not result in any contributions then the fundraiser would fail and impact the true conversion of what the engagement is helping drive

Hence in addition to my single NSM or success goal, I’d also like to track guard-rail metrics such as :

• MAU (Users clicking on a fundraiser and performing any action such as reactions, shares, comments, donations)
• Engagement rate : #of shares and comments/# of impressions

Trade offs, Risks and counter/guard-rail metrics:

• Tracking just the # of donors contributing gives a great view into the participation and engagement, however, a step further into tracking success rate tracking of how many fundraisers have actually met their goals with # of fundraisers meeting goal within target
• Authenticity of fundraisers : close watch on fake fundraisers – which may hamper the brand image and scare users away if they see users reporting fake requests for contributions
• Additionally, it might also be good to track the engagement rate with a fundraiser to address how fundraisers can be made more successful through engagement
• Categories of causes : assess which do not generate more user engagement and potentially find ways to address them
• Categories of creators : which drives more engagement – individual or Non-profits

Facebook Fundraisers Mission: Build a stronger community by letting people contribute in times of need

Fits in well with Facebook’s larger mission of giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

A few things to note/assumptions:

• It’s a 3 sided ecosystem – people raising funds, people donating, causes/charities to which donations are going
• Fund raising may happen 1x or 2x a year by a single person (It’s not something you would do all the time).
• Donators may donate 3x or 4x a year on average so we should probably look at usage metrics over a longer time horizon than say MAU

Based on that, brainstorming a few metrics:

Usage/Growth bucket:

Number of people raising funds

Number of people donating

Number of available causes that users can contribute to

Transaction Bucket:

Gross Payment Value

Number of Donation campaigns

Conversion Bucket:

Number of Donations/ Number of impressions aka how many people decided to donate

Retention Bucket:

Number of repeat donators

Number of repeat people raising funds

Number of donators turned fundraisers

Quality Bucket:

Number of failed payments

Number of fraudulent payments

Although it’s important to track all these, I would go with Gross Payment Volume as my primary metric. It nicely folds in usage, growth and health of the product into one metric. Based on this number and the trend, we can tell if we are really making a meaningful impact in people’s lives.

Clarifying Questions/Statements:

• Clarify understanding of Fundraisers:
  • My answer: product that lets users create fundraisers for a particular cause, and invite/share it with other users to donate to that cause. Usually set for a certain target donation amount to be met, and a timeframe for which a user can donate to the cause
• Are we assuming the lifecycle of the Fundraisers product today? If so, then I’d focus on engagement, since we have a meaningful amount of users on FB app today.
  • My assumed answer: yes, focus on engagement

High-level product strategy discussion:

• FB’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together
• The concept of fundraising, even outside the context of FB, drives very much to both aspects (community, world closer) of FB’s mission
  • Communities often come together to contribute money towards a common cause that the community is passionate about
  • As a result of rallying behind a common cause, that community is closer together
• From a business standpoint, Fundraisers also make sense because it strengthens FB’s moat via its Social Graph
  • As more users express interest, share, and contribute to fundraisers, FB is able to gather more data on user interests, people they may be interested in connecting with, etc.
• Ultimately, the northstar, qualitative goal of Fundraisers is to be the most trusted platform for people to contribute to causes they’re passionate about with others also passionate about the same thing

Actions a user can take in Fundraisers:

• My approach to identifying success metrics for Fundraisers will be to first identify key actions users can take as it relates to Fundraisers, then prioritize which actions we’d want to focus on for engagement
• Actions a user can take
  • Fundraiser admin
    • Create fundraiser
      • Set terms (amount, timeframe)
      • Fill in info
    • Share fundraiser with initial group of users
    • +everything a Fundraiser donor or potential donor can do
  • Fundraiser donor or potential donor
    • Share fundraiser with users
    • Browse fundraisers
    • Contribute to a fundraiser
    • Post on a fundraiser page
• I’d want to focus on actions that drive towards the value prop of Fundraisers (i.e. understanding a cause and donating towards it). I.e.
  • Viewing a cause
  • Donating towards a cause
• Since we’re prioritizing engagement, given the lifecycle of the product (i.e. launched and presumably already has a large amount of regular users), I’d want to focus on depth. I.e.
  • Avg. number of fundraisers viewed per user
  • Avg. number of fundraisers contributed to per user
• I’d also still want to keep in mind general health metrics of the product to make sure it’s not falling apart
  • MAUs
    • Active defined as interacting (viewing, sharing, commenting in one, donating, etc.) with fundraisers in some way
    • Chose monthly because weekly seems to be the natural frequency for which someone may contribute to a cause
  • % of fundraisers that are successful
    • Successful defined as the average percentage of the total amount of money asked that admins would say for their “successful” fundraisers
      • E.g. if we ask admins if they felt their fundraiser was successful, and the average amount contributed to the fundraisers of those admins was 76% of total requested, then a fundraiser with at least 76% of total amount requested donated would be considered successful
  • Number of fundraisers created per month
• If I had to choose one metric to prioritize, it would be average number of fundraisers viewed per user.
  • If we see this metric grow, we know that we are driving towards our northstar, and doing it well since people are finding a lot of value in the product
  • It is also worth considering the downstream effects of greater engagement with Fundraisers that drive towards FB’s mission
    • The more people view and contribute to Fundraisers, the more likely they are to come across and meet new people that share a passion, become friends, DM each other, etc. ultimately bringing the world closer together

Considerations:

• If we over optimize for the metrics above, we might miss out on some key things:
  • Integrity
    • We’d want to make sure that the Fundraisers that people are creating are actually for safe/worthwhile causes
    • One way we could track this is through user reporting of Fundraisers
  • Cannibalization
    • If people are spending too much time browsing and contributing to Fundraisers, that may take away from other valuable parts of the FB product
    • We can control for this by also tracking non-fundraiser related actions for Fundraiser MAUs