One charity, the potential for thousands of 'causes'.(FACEBOOK)

With 50 million users, approximately one-quarter of the 200 million Facebook users, Causes has proven that it can virally grow very quickly. "It's easy to start taking that for granted," said Joe Green, founder and president of Causes.

"We tried to make it very easy to get people into these groups," he said. The idea is to entice people who are at least interested in the topic. Green described it as a loosely qualified list, not people who previously donated to the nonprofit, or to anything for that matter. "There's a lot of potential people," Green said.

"The vast majority of donors are not people who would've donated offline," said Green, adding that the Facebook application is just as much about engagement as it is fundraising.

Causes has more than 8,000 official partners, with 50 to 60 new requests daily, according to Green. Approximately 50,000 different nonprofits have at least one Cause benefiting them that someone has set up.

As a partner, nonprofits have the ability to oversee all of the Causes that have been created for it. A Causes search for Ameri can Red Cross can yield as many as 129 different Causes pages. Of the 240,000 Causes in all, almost 40 percent are actually raising money through the Causes application, with a mean donation of $45 and a median donation of $25.

Donations going through Causes during the past 12 to 14 months have grown from about $3,000 daily to $40,000, according to Green. Causes has raised $7.5 million since it was launched almost two years ago. Almost $5 million of that total has come in its second year.

Green sees Causes as a way to level the playing field for smaller nonprofits that can't afford the initial investment of a massive direct mail campaign that large nonprofits utilize. "There are a lot more nonprofits out there that will have a shot to compete for more dollars, more efficiently, for more people," he said.

Once those relationships get built, Green said, develop your leaders because those people are going to raise money for you, and have the tools to do that. While people might measure success on Causes by how much money is raised, he said the application also could help with finding volunteers and with special events.

"Organizing is all about developing leadership and finding people who are interested," Green said. If someone has the wherewithal to build a Cause with one million members, "more likely than not, they're good at organizing and doing something well," he said.

"This is about building relationships first and foremost, from those can come longer-term benefits," Green said. Causes moves away from a top-down fundraising model, he said, deputizing people within the Cause and developing leadership and committees among a nonprofit's rabid core base of people to work on its behalf.

Younger people don,t have the income to make $5,000 or $10,000 contributions, but Green believes they can afford a few hundred dollars a year without it affecting their lifestyle. "It's just that no one asks them, or no one asks them particularly well," he said, with direct mail campaigns not likely to keep up with their more frequent changes of address.