The last big news from Facebook was that, were it considered a country, its population would be larger than that of all the countries in the world, save China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. (It stands at 200 million.)
Diving into those demographics a bit, we recently learned that what was once, by design, the exclusive domain of college students, now counts its largest age group as those 35 to 54. Remarkably, the second largest age group are those 24 to 34-year olds (25.2%).
Those of approximately college age, 18-24, come in today at 25.1%—remarkably down from 40.8% from just this past January.
This just underscores important role Facebook can play in advocacy. It reaches an astounding number of people, but looking specifically at fundraising, it’s reaching those people most likely to have the means to give and not simply those in college already struggling to stretch their limited income.
As further evidence of this, the popular Facebook fundraising application, Causes, recently announced that they’ve raised $10 million in a little over two years. Interestingly, they’ve raised half of that, a full $5 million, in the past six months alone. Though it’d be very hard to report causality, this certainly corresponds to older users overtaking young college and grad school aged users as the primary users of Facebook.
Although we need to remember that Facebook doesn’t reach everyone, it’s increasingly becoming a more and more useful tool.
Read more at The Opportunity Agenda website.
