Facebook Can Be a Boon to Nonprofits—If They Get Verified

Organizations say they struggle with the social media giant's registration system and inability to reach a live person. 
folded dollar bill in the slot of a donation box
Photograph: Yvan Dube/Getty Images

In August 2019, Kara Kundert was ready to raise some money for Bluegrass Pride, an organization that promotes bluegrass music among LGBTQ+ musicians, where she is the executive director. The Internal Revenue Service had just certified Bluegrass Pride as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit. Now Kundert faced another important task: getting registered as a nonprofit on Facebook.

“It was just a natural fit for us,” she says. Many nonprofits use Facebook to build community and promote events. Once registered with Facebook as a nonprofit, organizations can run fundraisers on the platform and include a button that lets users donate money. For a small nonprofit like Bluegrass Pride, whose 2019 operating budget was less than $18,000, every dollar counts. “We wanted to take advantage of all the fundraising options that we could,” says Kundert.

Kundert hoped Facebook would approve her application in time for Giving Tuesday, an annual global fundraising day on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Weeks passed. Then months.

She sent a question to customer support via Facebook Messenger. After four months and 20 messages back and forth with Facebook—most of which she says seemed to come from a bot—her application still hadn’t been approved. Next she tried email, exchanging nearly 30 emails with the Facebook Charity Onboarding Team, which said it was “aware of the issue” and was “working on resolving it as soon as possible.”

Then, in March 2020, she was told she had to resubmit the documents because they were more than six months old. She resubmitted, then sent six more messages, but heard nothing back. “For me what’s most frustrating is just being in this completely anonymous, nameless, faceless bureaucracy,” says Kundert. “I’m completely powerless in this system.”

In 2015 the viral “ice bucket challenge,” in which people poured frigid water over themselves to raise money and awareness for ALS research, spurred Facebook to create fundraising tools like the donation button and birthday fundraisers. The company trumpets its accomplishments: In February, it said more than $3 billion has been donated to nonprofits through the platform.

Facebook hasn’t replaced traditional fundraising strategies like in-person events or mail campaigns, but it has become a regular source of money and engagement with supporters. That’s true for viral campaigns like a 2018 fundraiser for the immigration nonprofit Raices, which raised $20 million—three times the organization’s annual budget—in one week. It’s also true for smaller campaigns that raise a few hundred dollars at a time.

“It has really, really been a big benefit for us,” says Gina Brown, program director at Let Us Learn, an Indiana nonprofit that teaches food literacy, cooking, and nutrition to children and families. Brown says this year she’s gotten about $7,000 on Facebook through fundraisers she’s launched or from birthday fundraisers run by members of the community. “These donations really help us do the programming and help us with the overhead, the tools that we need to do our work,” she says.

But many small nonprofits say they’ve struggled to take advantage of those tools or, like Kundert, to simply get approved as a registered nonprofit.

It’s hard to know the extent of the problem, in part because organizations are reluctant to admit that they can’t negotiate what seems like a simple process. Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN, which helps nonprofits with technology, says she’s heard many complaints about Facebook and that NTEN itself had a hard time getting Facebook approval because the organization was founded under a different name. She also was frustrated by changes Facebook made to its algorithm in 2018 that lowered the visibility of nonprofit pages. To reach its community, NTEN would have to pay for ads or to boost posts. In July, NTEN left Facebook. “It wasn’t worth it to us,” says Ward. “It didn’t feel like a place that aligned with our values.”

This year, many nonprofits are leaning even more heavily on Facebook, as the Covid-19 pandemic limits traditional in-person events and fundraisers.

“It could be a real benefit, especially now,” says Kristin Dunn, executive director of Camplify, which runs affordable camps for underprivileged youth in North Carolina. The group canceled its annual fall fundraiser, a barbeque with a live auction and square dancing, because of Covid-19.

Dunn first tried to register Camplify with Facebook in 2019, but she was denied because the organization had changed its name. Facebook said it couldn’t verify that Camplify was the nonprofit it claimed to be—even though the change is documented in the group’s annual form 990 filed with the IRS.

In January, Dunn tried again to register on Facebook. She followed up in March, May, and August through Facebook Messenger and got no reply. Finally, in September, Facebook notified Dunn that her application “could not be fully reviewed at this time,” because Camplify hadn’t proved it’s the same organization as the one listed on the IRS forms Dunn submitted. The email also told her Facebook doesn’t consider her organization’s address valid, because it is a post office box. In place of the Donate button, Camplify’s Facebook page now links to its PayPal account. People can donate there, but Dunn worries that the process is too cumbersome, and she wonders if she’s missing out on donations as a result.

To apply for nonprofit status with Facebook, administrators have to show that their organization is a 501(c)(3) registered with the IRS. They also have to supply tax ID and bank account numbers, and addresses for both the organization and the executive director.

But, like Dunn, many organizations say they are turned down for reasons such as operating under a name different from the one they were founded under, even if that change has been registered with the IRS.

Every nonprofit applicant is vetted by a person at Facebook to make sure the organization is legitimate and to prevent people from holding fundraisers for fraudulent or scam campaigns. But nonprofits say the process shouldn’t be this arduous.

The IRS website offers a search tool to look up approved nonprofits, as does the private database GuideStar. Monica Kinsey, a consultant who helps nonprofits fundraise and promote their mission, says Facebook shouldn’t have a hard time verifying that nonprofits are who they say they are. “It shouldn’t be this difficult,” she says.

Kinsey has helped clients register on Facebook in the past, but she ran into problems working with one organization this year. She submitted the application in January. After hearing nothing from Facebook, she asked repeatedly via Facebook Messenger if there was a problem with the application. In August, Facebook told her she needed to reapply because the documents were now more than six months old. “You can’t get a human. It’s just through Messenger,” she says. “As many people as they employ, you just can’t get to a person.”

None of the 11 nonprofits WIRED spoke to had been able to contact a person at Facebook. “They refuse to speak to me on the phones,” says Kundert, of Bluegrass Pride. She tried typing insulting messages into the chat bot in an effort to provoke a response from a human; she failed. She says she’s received numerous form emails signed by “the Facebook Charity Onboarding Team” but never connected with a person who could respond to specific questions.

“By nearly every measure, these tools have been a success,” says a Facebook spokesperson. She says more than 90,000 nonprofits are registered with Facebook and more than a million organizations can fundraise on Facebook through donor-advised funds such as Network for Good. “We’ve enabled 45 million people to raise more than $3 billion globally.”

But many nonprofits say they are confused by the two systems and have a hard time navigating Facebook’s help center.

Even for those organizations that are verified, many nonprofit leaders complain that the platform is opaque. Rick Cohen, chief communications officer at the National Council of Nonprofits, says he hears at least a complaint a week from nonprofits about the platform. Cohen says organizations don’t get alerted when Facebook users set up fundraisers for them. Often, they only find out if they happen to run across the fundraiser on the group’s Facebook timeline.

For those that can’t get verified, there’s also an element of shame.

“A week went by, then another and another, and I started emailing them each week asking for a status update. I never got a response,” Andrea Smith, CEO of Senior Action, which provides services to around 5,000 senior citizens in Greenville, South Carolina, says via email. Smith does most of her fundraising through direct asks, mail campaigns, and events. But when Covid hit, Smith started getting inquiries from people asking why they couldn’t donate to Senior Action via its Facebook page. She says she fielded calls and angry emails telling her she was “incompetent” for not having the button set up. She’s been waiting two years for Facebook approval, and the company won’t respond to her complaints. At this point, Smith isn’t sure she wants the button anymore; she dreads dealing with Facebook. “But the public expects it and ties some sort of judgment about the organization to whether we have a button or not,” she says.

Some nonprofit leaders shy away from discussing the problems. “I haven’t really wanted to talk about this publicly, because it’s kind of embarrassing,” says Kundert. She and others want their organizations to appear trustworthy and competent. Admitting that you can’t register with Facebook doesn’t promote a capable image.

“Anything that in any way suggests lack of confidence for donors, you can’t ever say it,” says NTEN CEO Ward. Many of the nonprofit leaders WIRED spoke to did not know other organizations were wrestling with the same problem.

WIRED asked Facebook about Bluegrass Pride’s application on November 13. Three days later—15 months after Kundert applied—it was approved.

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