Social media: every charity’s new best friend
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There’s nothing new about involvement with a charity being a cornerstone of your life. The energetic volunteer motivated by social engagement, as well as doing good, has always been a mainstay - though as everyone’s time has got more pressured, they’ve been thinner on the ground. But the world is changing and it’s the potential of social media that’s behind the revolution.
In theory, this should be all good news. Instead of keeping an institutional distance, social media allows supporters and communities to really engage with the issues and to be the brand – setting the direction, as well as providing the donations. The power of the technology can let them see the impact of their efforts – who they’ve helped, what political commitments they’ve won. Virtual word of mouth can travel like wildfire, encouraging friends and contacts to join the campaign and to give.
New fundraising models and revenue streams are being created and it’s not just marketing models that are being redrawn. It’s business models too. More and more brands are relying on their Twitterati or Blogger loyalists to come up with campaign ideas and new marketing concepts daily. This can be a rich new source of marketing capital for companies. It’s less cost intensive than traditional advertising projects and its ‘crowd sourced roots’ mean that end results can achieve a level of authenticity that client and agency-engineered projects sometimes struggle to create.
But being successful and committed to social media means a whole new attitude of mind on the part of charitable organisations. If co-ordinating a team of volunteers to run a network of charity shops, events and high street collections could occasionally be a headache, managing the anarchy of social media can easily seem a migraine. Co-ordinating platforms and stimulating and managing discussion and input is a big task. But it’s one that has to be mastered. Inactivity is death in the social media world.
Charity decision-making structures based on policy papers and internal debate will no longer be capable of handling the fluidity and speed of the medium. New approaches to defining and focusing campaigns will need to be found to embrace the energy of virtual supporters, but ensure that critical issues and campaigns are not diluted and lost. And, in an environment where anyone can add their name to a campaign at the click of a button, new ways have to be found to indicate the depth of passion in support of an issue, as politicians become victim of e-petition fatigue.
The possibilities are stunning, but it calls for a new culture and a new approach. Charities need to learn how to get comfortable with chaos to reap the rewards.
