Via Non-Profit Marketing Blog, are a couple links to Frogloop, a blog whose goal is to “catalyzing expertise in nonprofit online communication.”

I haven’t gotten a chance to really look at the site, but Katya at Non-Profit Marketing blog linked to an interesting piece on using social networking sites like Facebook to fundraise. The short story is, it is too early in the process to tell if it will be effective. But the guys at Frogloop do a super job analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the practice. They also offer tips on how to position your organization to be most successful.

To top it all off they even provide a Return on Investment calculator to figure out if it is worth tasking an employee or volunteer to work on developing fundraising efforts on social networks.

I plugged in a few different numbers and as near as I can figure it, you pretty much already have to have a powerful fundraising machine at your disposal (think Sierra Club) to make social networking worth the investment. It seems the type of thing that will complement efforts by providing people with an alternative way to give and encourage others to do the same. It doesn’t appear that social network fundraising is going to provide leverage for small organization to raise big money unless the cause is already poised to take off.

I would be really interested to learn if someone (perhaps the good people at Frogloop) have created a similar calculator for direct mail, phone appeals and the other tools fund raisers use. I assume the tools are out there, I just haven’t seen them.

On the other hand, ignorance might be bliss. I might discover I would save money if I stopped asking for it. Though as Andrew Taylor pointed out back in May, some times fund raising events aren’t about making money.