I just read a great post from Beth Kantor regarding the impact of Facebook on charitable donations. It raises the question of impact, but the data is still not complete. So, I’m going to take a stab here by analyzing the top charity app on Facebook – Causes.

Quick note on Causes: a “Cause” is something a Facebook member creates to drive awareness for an issue,and the Cause is tied to one specific Charity designated by the Member creating the Cause. For example, the most popular Cause,”Support the Campaign for Cancer Research,” generates donations for Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.

For more on Causes, see Network for Good’s article and materials from April 1 “Causes…” webinar.

By many measures, Causes is a success. Over 8 million Facebook users have installed the Causes app according to Appsaholic (a Facebook app that tracks Facebook apps). This is an estimate based on Facebook’s published daily active users and % of total installs that are active. Today it’s 80,411 active users at 1% engagement, equals ~ 8 million installs. The Active User count has actually been steadily declining over the past several months (at one point I recall 157,000 or so active users). It’s still the 69th most active according to Appsaholic, but it used to rank a lot higher.

What does this mean? A lot of people have installed Causes, but very few people are doing anything with it (e.g. low active user count). It’s kind of a dead app, even with the large installed base. Why? Well, you get Karma points when your friends look at your profile and see that you “support” Save Darfur (with 851,808 other FB members) or Stop Global Warming (with 1.8 million other FB members). However – how do you engage with these causes once you’ve installed them?

Where’s the Beef?

Awareness and Karma points are all great, but are the charities receiving donations? The number one “cause” on Causes is “Support the Campaign for Cancer Research” with 3.1 million members. Since the cause was published last Summer the total amount donated was $61,980. 3.1 million members – $62k in donations. That’s a depressingly low $0.02 per member. I contacted one of the charities linked to a top 5 Cause to learn if they were seeing a lot of impact outside of the small $ in donations reported on Facebook. The short answer was “not much.” Not that the money they’ve received is not valued (it is) or that the exposure to their issue was not valuable (it is). The “beef” just does not appear to be all that filling.

Here are the top 5 causes on Causes and their numbers…

1. Support the Campaign for Cancer Research: 3.1m members, $62k donated (2 cents per member)
2. Stop Global Warming: 1.8m members, $23k donated (1.2 cents per member)
3. Animal Rights: 1.3m members, $22k donated (1.7 cents per member)
4. Society Against Child Abuse: 1m members, $10k donated (1 cent per member)
5. Save Darfur: 852k members, $17.5k donated (2 cents per member)

Total donated in the top 5 causes? About $135k.

I’m going to go out on a limb here. There are thousands of causes in the Causes ecosystem on Facebook. Most have very few members and a small amount of donation volume. Assuming that some members donate to more than one cause, and that some members donate a lot to a single cause, my estimate is that the average donation per member since Causes got going was under $0.15. With 8 million members, that makes the dollar impact ~ $1.2. I’ll round this up to an even $1.5m just to be generous.

In aggregate, $1.5 million is a fairly good number. On a per-cause, per-effort, and per-member basis, it’s trivial. So, I’ll leave answering the question to you: Is Causes on Facebook a failure?