Facebook : People raise $300M through birthday fundraisers in first year

By Asha Sharma, Head of Product, Social Good

Today we're sharing some major milestones for the first year of birthday fundraisers on Facebook and announcing plans to help people more easily find nonprofits to support in the year ahead.

• People raised more than $300 million for the causes they care about using birthday fundraisers.
• St. Jude, Alzheimer's Association, the American Cancer Society, Share Our Strength - No Kid Hungry, and the ASPCA are among the top beneficiaries of birthday fundraisers.
• Based on feedback from the community, we added new tools to nonprofit fundraisers, like the ability to match donations and add organizers to your fundraiser. Pages - including those run by brands, public figures, and nonprofits themselves - can now create and donate to fundraisers. And we added a tool so people can make recurring monthly donations to the organizations and causes that are important to them.
• Since November 2017, we waived fees, so 100% of all donations made to nonprofits on Facebook go directly to the nonprofits they are supporting.

New Nonprofit Selection Tools
Many people have told us that they want to dedicate their birthdays to a good cause. But with over 750,000 nonprofits on Facebook, it can be difficult to choose. To make this easier, we will soon provide more information: when you click on a nonprofit in the list, you can learn more about the organization, their mission, location and how many people like their Page. We also plan to share more relevant information, like popular search terms in the nonprofit selection tool.

We hope that this tool will help more people find causes they care about, joining the millionsof people who dedicated their birthdays in inspiring ways over the past year, including:

• Yuriko Shotter, who raised $7,201 on her birthday for 13th Street Cat Rescue to help the cat shelter in her local community build a warmer shelter for cats.
• Valentine Toohey Smith, who raised $1,914 on her daughter's 12th birthday for charity: water, an organization whose mission is to bring clean water to people all over the world.
• Aldo Billingslea, who dedicated his birthday to the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco and raised $7,066 to support local theater and the arts in his community.
• NBA star Stephen Curry, who celebrated his 30th birthday by raising $82,512 for Nothing But Nets to help combat childhood malaria.
• And Madonna, who recently launched a fundraiser for her 60th birthday, benefitting Raising Malawi's work at Home of Hope orphanage located in a rural, high-need area of Malawi.

We're excited to see the impact that people will make over the next year, and we're inspired to help make future fundraisers and birthdays even more memorable.