Even if you don't follow fundraising trends, you may have heard of Kiva. Oprah and Bill Clinton are both big fans, and it's received a lot of media coverage of late.

What is Kiva? Well, it's an exciting web service that allows individuals to make microloans (literally, small loans – as little as $25) to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Microfinance institutions screen individual entrepreneurs, and post profiles of qualified ones online. Individual lenders are then able to browse the profiles and select who they'd like to support – perhaps the young man who wants to fix up his family restaurant, or the woman who needs a new sewing machine for her home seamstressing business. The entrepreneurs pay back their loans to the microfinance institutions, who return it, via Kiva, to the lenders.

In a true epidemic, studies show that there are always a few people who infect others at a much higher rate – the sneezers. For any number of reasons – hygiene, genetics, behaviour, etc – these people manage to spread the disease all too effectively. They're highly contagious!

In a typical fundraising campaign, we see the same phenomenon. If you're a fundraiser, chances are you've observed this yourself. Those people who know how to work their network, ooze charisma, and raise way more money than the average? Those are your sneezers. (I spoke about them recently in a Charity Village article, which you might want to check out too.)

Bottom line: if you're smart, you'll treat them differently.

No, I'm not suggesting you isolate them in quarantine... quite the opposite! Rather, a smart sneezer strategy looks something like this.

It’s hard not to notice when companies use celebrities to promote their products or champion their cause. Our heads turn when we see faces we recognize whether we respect them as an authority on an issue or not. There are many notable examples of celebrities promoting charitable causes as well. Chances are, you have noticed Bono and his work with (red) and Live8, Brad Pitt’s commitment to help rebuild New Orleans, or Mike Holmes’ campaign for SOS Children’s Villages.

Many charities are hopeful that a celebrity, or recognizable influencer of some kind, will advance their cause in a positive way. There is plenty of evidence to suggest they can!

At Artez, we get a lot of questions about this. People ask: "Is it a good idea? How can we maximize the opportunity? Should we approach them or wait to be approached? How do we align with a celebrity who believes as deeply in our cause as we do? Will we look like sell-outs?"... and so on.

This is a juicy and timely topic and worth a much broader discussion! For the purposes of this post, however, I offer my Top 5 Tips for Working with Influencers. These will be relevant to any group that is considering engaging with a celebrity to promote their cause in some way. Read on!

When I first came on board at Artez, our primary software offering was a reliable, user-friendly, secure way to manage peer to peer donations for event-based fundraising. Over the years we've really expanded both our vision of what online fundraising can be, and also the functionality and services that we offer our clients. These days, what gets me most excited about my work is the diversity of clients that I get to work with (definitely not just event groups anymore), as well as the feeling that I actually get to witness, and be part of, the evolution of fundraising online. I find it inspiring, and so I wanted to share three of my observations about the evolving world of online fundraising. Read on...