Inside Scoop on those Facebook Apps

So how many "apps" do you have on your Facebook page? One? Lucky. A hundred? More likely. There is an application for every possible interest and even non-interests.

I was in a meeting this past week with a nonprofit client of mine and we were talking about social networking media as a place to raise money. Well, it's definitely not a great place to raise money, but it is a great place to raise awareness.

So in case you were wondering how this whole "click here and we donate $ to save rainforests" thing work with FB apps, I got a little inside scoop this past week that I didn't know.

By the way, this ONLY applies to Facebook apps. Guess what, NO ONE donates ANYTHING by your passing on an email that you received from somebody else. There is no big brother looking over your shoulder at your inbox, ensuring that you forward something to five friends within five minutes, ready to strike you down with bad luck if you don't. Anyway, back to these FB apps...

Our nonprofit client has been approached by multiple corporations who want to "fund" a Facebook app for them. This means that the corporation will donate the money and/or pay for the resources needed to create said application. The application would state that by using the app, playing the game, whatever action the application requires, that $ will be donated to said cause. Now, this is indeed true: money is in fact generated for the nonprofit as people use the application. So yes, by using the "Lil Green Patch" application you are indeed making some corporation donate money to the environmental organization of choice, and ultimately "saving" the environment, one green patch at a time.

There are some catches, though.

For example, one of the more popular applications on Facebook has generated approximately $5,000 in donations for their chosen charity. While $5,000 is great, it is a penny in the bucket to the millions of dollars that the organization raises every year to meet their mission.

Also, if the application is too popular, there is typically a cap on the total donations that the corporation will make to the charity. So for our client, they've been told that the donations will be capped at $50,000. In the meantime, the application is out there, generating good will for the corporation who appears philanthropic because it seems that they are continuing to support said charity, even if they cut off the funding 200 users ago.

Maybe I'm a marketing geek, but I found this little inside business model of Facebook applications fascinating.