Organization Spotlight: Foursquare
Foursquare was launched in 2009, and already has a community of over ten million people worldwide. It is a location-based mobile platform that allows people to “check-in,” using a Smartphone app or SMS, at different locations, share their location with friends, and collect points and virtual badges based on these check-in points. There are over a billion check-ins with millions more every day, and over 500,000 businesses using the Merchant Platform. Its platform can also be utilized by non-profit organizations to bring awareness and donations.
At BART stations in the Bay Area in 2010, commuters were encouraged to check-in on Foursquare to posters placed by Earthjustice, a non-profit focused on environmental awareness, as part of an effort to gain traction in the technological community. Foursquare uses GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application to assess the location of the participant. A private donor pledged $50,000 if Earthjustice achieved 5,000 check-ins. By a few months, they hit 6,000 and got the full donor amount as well as brought awareness to three different environmental topics—the BP oil spill, protecting endangered species in California, and protecting Lake Tahoe.
“We didn’t want to do just another ad. We wanted to engage people on environmental issues that are important to Californians, and do it in a way that’s fun and cutting edge,” Georgia McIntosh, Vice President of Communications for Earthjustice, said. “Location-based technology like Foursquare is definitely at the cutting edge right now.”
Foursquare can be a great tool for a lot of nonprofits seeking to gain more support and awareness for their cause. Especially in instances that are centered around one location such as a fundraising marathon race.
“The great thing about it, and why we recommended implementing a Foursquare campaign [to a nonprofit wanting to use Foursquare in their marathon campaign], was that at the beginning of the race, everyone is gathered around this one, centrally located area. They were going to see if they could put a billboard there, a very big one that basically said, ‘Hey, racers, check-in here. Each check-in, yields X amount of money from a corporate sponsor or a donor,’” Ray Wan, senior marketing manager of Earthjustice, said. “That made sense because it was a physical location and you had a huge number of people gathered in one spot. So that was a really great technique that we recommended they implement.”
Foursquare allows users to engage and participate in activities that yield results for the organization and for the participant.
“We just know that if you want people to engage with your ad; if you want people to do something rather than just look at it and turn away and forget about it 10 seconds later, [then] you have to provide them with an easy way of engagement,” Wan said.
Published by The Fundraising Journal 2011
Sources
https://foursquare.com/about/
http://streetfightmag.com/2011/11/08/oakland-non-profit-uses-foursquare-for-fundraising/
http://earthjustice.org/features/using-foursquare-for-environmental-causes
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