Facebook introduced a new ‘Donate Now’ call-to-action option on both link ads and Pages
Announcing this new development, Facebook For Business Admin wrote:
“We are excited to introduce a new ‘Donate Now’ call-to-action option on both link ads and Pages. Now, it’s easier than ever for nonprofits to connect with people who care about their causes and encourage them to contribute through the website of their choice.”
Facebook rolled out a ‘Donate’ button in late 2013 with specific partners like the American Cancer Society and The Red Cross. For nonprofit partners, the button was seamlessly integrated into pages and the donation took place internally with credit card info that could be stored on the site.
Since Facebook is opening the donate button to organizations that they are not specifically partnering with, they are making its stand known to potential donors that they donate at their own risk as they will not be held accountable for donations made to the illegal or un-popular non-profit organizations.
Now, when you click the ‘Donate Now’ button on a non-profit’s page you are first alerted that the organization is not endorsed by or affiliated with Facebook and then are redirected to the page’s external site where you can complete the donation.
TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney said, “Without the embedded payment processes, the button is really just a call-to-action link, which is valuable to these organizations advertisements I’m sure. In practice though, it pretty much just adds a click to the process of making the donation, as it berates you with a pop-up that Facebook doesn’t endorse the cause at all before it unexpectedly whisks you away to a new browser window.”
This is definitely a valuable tool for nonprofits, but in pushing users to external sites, this move kind of flies in the face of recent Facebook efforts to make an organization’s Facebook page the central location that a user goes to for information about a group.
The world and most non-profits might find this appealing and innovating but I always critically look at new technologies in the society and analyze how good or bad it might turn.
Since Facebook has introduced this donate now option for every non-profit organization (verified or unverified by them), which a group/person can claim once they select non-profit organization as their organization’s status according to Shana of Facebook For Business, therefore, this could lead to deliberate donations to extreme group by their sponsors.
I, therefore, advise Facebook to use the same method they applied in verifying Prominent Persons, Companies, or Pages before showing the blue “Check Mark” on their official page and verify organizations before allowing them to use the Donate Now call-to-action button.
Please, I will like technocrats and security experts to look into this option and other similar innovations as the case may be and advise accordingly.
We all need to put our hands together to check the illegal transfer of funds by any means to extremist groups.
Source: Facebook
