Causes was built on the Facebook Platform by Project Agape.

A cause can be created by anyone on Facebook to organize people towards collective action. The creator of a cause can pick any issue for their cause to champion, from the global, like "End Poverty," to the local, like "Support the Berkeley Y.M.C.A." The goal of the cause can be conveyed by its creator in the title they choose, and in various fields they can fill out to describe what the cause stands for.

You can also start a cause to raise funds for candidates for federal office. These contributions are processed a little differently than contributions to nonprofits, as detailed below.

Two of the most central things any advocacy group needs to get people to do, online or offline, is publicly express their support and donate money. Any Facebook member can easily join the cause and feature it on their profile to express their support, and donate money through the cause using their credit card. But the real power of causes being built on top of the Facebook network is that supporters of the cause can easily multiply their impact by inviting their friends to join and donate to the cause.

When someone creates a cause they pick from U.S. nonprofits, Canadian charities, or federal political candidates to be the "beneficiary" of their cause. These include over 1.5 million registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations and over 83,000 Canadian registered charities. The beneficiary should be a nonprofit, charity or candidate that is working to further the same goals as the cause, and will receive the money donated through the cause. The cause creation process has browse and search functions to help cause creators find a nonprofit, charity or candidate that is a good match.

One of the primary motivations for creating Causes is to facilitate what we call "equal opportunity activism." Under the current system, most charitable organizations have to pay high up-front costs to consulting companies, before they ever raise a dime. These consultants reach out to potential donors using high cost methods such as telephone and snail mail, and nonprofits often end up spending 20-40% of the money they raise on soliciting more money. This paradigm means that it is very hard for new and small nonprofits to raise money. But because Causes allows anyone to promote their cause and raise money through existing social connections, causes succeed based upon the ideas and hard work of the people involved, not their ability to hire expensive consulting firms.

There is no up-front cost for nonprofits to use the system; a fee is only taken when money is actually donated.

Donations to U.S. nonprofits:

Donations to U.S. nonprofits are processed by our nonprofit partner Network for Good, an industry leader in processing online donations. Their 4.75% fee is used to pay banks, credit card companies, to distribute funds to nonprofits, and for other associated costs of donations through Causes on Facebook. For a $100 donation, $95.25 goes to the nonprofit and $4.75 goes to Network for Good. Network for Good does not profit from this fee.

Due to high rates of fraud, donations to U.S. nonprofits are not accepted for cardholders from the following countries: Ukraine, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Israel, Nigeria and Ghana. We apologize for any inconvenience, and are working hard to support donations from more of these countries.

Donations to Canadian charities:

Donations to Canadian charities are processed by the public charitable foundation CanadaHelps, the only donation portal providing access to all of Canada's charities. Donations can be made using Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Of the 4.5% transaction fee, 3% is used by CanadaHelps to cover credit card processing fees and the costs of distributing checks to nonprofits, and the remaining 1.5% is used by Causes to cover the costs related to running our application in Canada. For a $100 donation, $95.50 goes to the charity, $3 goes to CanadaHelps, and $1.50 goes to Causes.

Contributions to candidates are processed by ActBlue.com, for Democratic candidates, and ABC PAC, for Republican candidates. By partnering with these two PACs we are able to facilitate the solicitation and collection of low-dollar political contributions cost-effectively, while also ensuring compliance for the candidates, the PACs, the donors and ourselves with the rules and requirements that apply to raising campaign contributions for candidates.

By partnering with ActBlue and ABC PAC, we've been able to provide Facebook users with the means to solicit political contributions and have them collected at rates that are often lower than those charged for contributions made directly through a candidate's website.

Contributions to Democratic candidates for federal office are made through ActBlue, a non-connected political committee registered with the Federal Election Commission that collects and forwards political contributions. The credit card statement for a donor who gives to a Democratic candidate through the Causes applicatoin will reflect a charge to ActBlue; ActBlue is required to forward each contribution to the recipient(s) the donor has designated. For the purposes of federal contribution limits, each donation is treated as a contribution from that donor to the donor's designated recipient(s). ActBlue itself charges no fee for contributions it processes, but is required to pay a 3.15% credit card processing fee for each transaction. Aside from that credit card fee, there is no charge on candidate contributions processes through ActBlue.

Contributions to Republican candidates for federal office are made under similar terms through ABC PAC, a non-connected federal political committee that collects and forwards political contributions to Republican candidates. For these contributions, the donor's credit card statement will reflect a charge to ABC PAC; but otherwise the contribution is treated similarly; each contribution counts for limits purposes as a contribution to the ultimate recipient candidate, and similar processing fees are charged.

Donation security is provided by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a recognized authentication and encryption software. In other words, the site becomes locked while you are giving us your credit card information and unlocks only when you leave the secured area, and your credit card number is "encrypted" so it is unreadable to anyone outside the transaction process.

Your donation to a charitable organization is 100% tax deductible. After donating you will receive an e-mail that acts as your receipt.

For donations to U.S. nonprofits, Network for Good will provide an electronic receipt at the time of the donation. Both the receipt you see onscreen at the completion of the donation process, and the e-mail you receive shortly thereafter, meet all the IRS requirements as a record of donation. If you are asked to provide a paper receipt for IRS purposes, please send a request to donations@networkforgood.org.

For Canadian charities, your email receipt is valid for tax deduction purposes for any amount. The CRA will accept this email receipt for any donation.

Contributions to federal candidates are not tax-deductible.

We value your privacy, so your personal information is never sold or given away to anyone. For more information please refer to the Causes privacy policy.

Federal law requires candidates for federal office to use their best efforts to collect and report the name, mailing address, employer and occupation of anyone who contributes $200 or more to that candidate during an election cycle, and requires those candidates to collect, but not report, this information for anyone who contributes $50 or more during an election cycle. In order to ensure compliance with these requirements, we collect and transmit this information for any political contributions solicited and processed via Causes.

Causes supports over 1.5 million nonprofits. We obtain information about these nonprofits from a database maintained by Guidestar. GuideStar is the industry leader in collecting data about nonprofit organizations, which it obtains through annual IRS tax filings and through its direct communication with tens of thousands of organizations each year. GuideStar's database includes almost every registered 501(c)(3) organization in the United States, but does not include some of the most recently registered organizations. Causes also has a staff based in Washington DC that works with several hundred nonprofit organizations, who provide extra information to supplement the info obtained from Guidestar. If you are a nonprofit that wishes to work directly with Causes, please visit http://www.causes.com/partners/partners/new.

At present, Causes can process contributions to any Democratic or Republican candidates for federal office, and we're exploring ways to allow contributions to independents and candidates from other parties.

Only presidential campaigns are supported at this time.

Click the Causes link listed under your applications in the left navigational bar on Facebook. You can see which causes are currently featured on your profile, and click a link if you wish to not feature them on your profile. Likewise there is a list of causes you are a member of which are not featured on your profile. You can click a link to add any of these to your profile.

Anyone that you invite to the cause is accounted as a recruit. You can invite by going to a cause page and clicking invite. You can invite up to 10 people at a time. Additionally if someone joins a cause through your profile, they are counted as your recruit.

Any money donated by people you recruit is counted towards your fundraising total.

Donations made through Causes do not show up in your Network for Good donation history because we do not require you to login to Network for Good in order to make this donation.

1. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/causes/ to register for Facebook, or sign-in if you are already a member of Facebook.
2. Click the "Start a Cause" button.

Only a cause creator/primary administrator can delete a cause. If you want to remove your cause permanently, scroll to the bottom of the specific cause. Click on the "Delete cause" link in the bottom-right corner. A confirmation window will pop up for you to verify the deletion, so make sure to click on that as well.

Anyone on Facebook can create a cause. The person who creates the cause is free to choose the charity they wish to support.

Anyone on Facebook can create a cause. The person who creates the cause is free to choose the charity they wish to support.

To find details on donations processed by Network for Good, follow the link below:
https://www.networkforgood.org/Npo/reports/

Network for Good disburses donations on a monthly basis. Donations made to your organization will be sent to your organization's address as it appears in the GuideStar database.

If any of your information in GuideStar needs to be updated, you must contact GuideStar directly at http://www.guidestar.org. Network for Good cannot modify this information on your behalf.

Go to http://www.guidestar.org/npo/index.jsp and register your organization with GuideStar. Once you have registered and logged in as your organization's GuideStar contact, you will find instructions for updating your listing.

Currently, you cannot make a donation on Causes using PayPal.

For questions about donating on Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/help

For questions about Network for Good: http://www.networkforgood.org/about/

To contact Facebook, send an email to: info@facebook.com

To contact Project Agape, send an email to: support@causes.com

To contact Network for Good: http://www.networkforgood.org/about/contact.aspx