Social-networking phenomenon makes it easy for donors to promote their favorite causes online

A very informative article from the Wall Street Journal on social networking and how it's evolving the online fund raising e-landscape. Some excepts from the article:

Charities are setting up sites that make it easy for people to pass along information about causes to their friends and urge them to donate. And people on traditional networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are using the sites to send charitable requests to friends (and friends of friends).

People are 100 times more likely to donate when asked by a friend or family member than an anonymous solicitation, according to a recent survey by the blog About Micro-Philanthropy, which advocates for charitable networking.

Over roughly the past two years, the networkers raised about $44 million, according to About Micro-Philanthropy. That's just a drop in the philanthropic bucket; overall, charitable giving hit a record $306 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the Giving USA Foundation, a nonprofit educational group in Glenview, Ill.

But there are signs that charitable networking may be due for a boom. For one thing, overall online giving -- which currently represents 2% to 3% of giving in the U.S. -- is increasing by some 50% per year. So, the charitable networkers may rise along with the Internet tide.

In addition, charitable-networking sites are reaching a group of people, typically in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who haven't previously been donors. Advocates for online philanthropy hope this group will evolve into a mainstay of funding, much as an army of small donations has sustained Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

...one strategy has been particularly effective: giving donors a pat on the back. On Facebook Inc.'s network, for instance, users' home pages show the charities they've given money to, and the charities' own Facebook pages list donors by the size of the donation.

The article goes on further about the Kevin Bacon site sixdegrees.org and how it popularized charity social networking.