What this means for charities
STEVE BRIDGER, Buzz Director
One of the greatest benefits of digital technology has been the empowerment of individuals, and how these voices can be amplified. New online tools now make it easier for people to mobilise their social networks around peer-to-peer lending and personal fundraising campaigns – sometimes without charities even knowing about it. Significantly, in late 2007, social networking websites overtook webmail services in terms of UK internet traffic (according to Hitwise). Twelve months later, this shift was reflected in the number of referrals to fundraising pages on Justgiving (which provides online tools to support the collection of donations), which itself reached another milestone in February 2009: since 2001 the total number of pages created has passed one million.
There are particular challenges for those charities heavily dependent on donations for the majority of their income, as digital technologies are less a channel for their outward communications, but are changing the power relationships between charities and donors. This is driven by ‘a perfect storm’ of behavioural changes by (although by no means exclusively) young people, and the accelerating turbulence generated by open and disruptive technologies.
Crucially, these new websites provide an architecture for participation, not just a new channel for more of the same. Neither is social media something that only happens online. It’s a mesh of physical meet ups and online activities, such as The Big Knit where knitting communities across Britain together sent in over 400,000 ‘hats’ for Innocent smoothies, raising more than £200,000 for Age Concern . Charities should allow people the space to be creative and take the action they want on websites, blogs and social networks that they already visit every day to get the things they need from each other, and to get stuff done. This is a permanent shift, regardless of how the individual technology pieces change.
An initiative like Twestival demonstrated the enormous accelerating potential of self-organising social networks, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few weeks, without the prior endorsement of the recipient charity (in this case charity: water). This is real engagement: when people do things for the cause you didn’t ask them to do (although you cannot always ‘vet’ who wants to become your friend).
But social media is not a spectator sport (which is why I prefer to call it ‘participatory media’). In order to stay relevant, charities must now develop strategies for participation, invest in relationships, and if necessary re-allocate resources away from top-heavy content creation (where much goes unread) to growing people into new roles, to pull together the voices of others and to create value by aggregating the thousands of small actions of distributed supporters and small groups. Greenpeace’s Green My Apple campaign is a good example.
We need a new way of looking at charity and giving viewing it as an enriching personal experience and not simply a one-off or series of transactions. Charities should not take donors for granted, as many did in an analogue world, but embrace them as partners, allow them to have conversations about their appeals and how their money gets spent. Tools like Twitter now make this sort of intimacy more scalable making it possible for charities to treat every online donor like a major donor. A charity’s brand will increasingly be the dialogue they have with their supporters in this way one person, one connection, one conversation at a time.
Charities now have an opportunity to embed themselves in people’s lives and social situations (on social networks). Talk with individuals about what drives them and how these individual goals can be realised through the work of the charity. Engage donors by motivation and giving ‘experiences‘ – engage then fundraise. The connections will be sustained through storytelling (using blogs and other social tools) and through dialogue. Donor loyalty is about you being loyal to your donors, not the other way around. Consider how some charities have found just the right tone, e.g. The Dogs Trust on Twitter (and elsewhere). The tail now wags the dog.
Donors of the future will demand action and accountability (while allowing some wriggle room to experiment), not take it on good faith that a charity will eventually get there in incremental steps. It will be messy, but there are huge rewards for those charities that embrace this paradigm shift. People will become increasingly suspicious of those charities that do not participate, and will ask themselves whether they have something to hide – although those that innovate will earn new respect.
We urgently need a new vocabulary, as increasingly, so-called ‘beneficiaries’ will co-create the solution to their own problems. The exact nature of this new relationship with ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘service users’ is something charities are still getting comfortable with, and will cause many some discomfort.
Most successful charities will take a step back and focus on relationships, not processes and the overbearing structure of the charity brand, and create a truly donor-centred infrastructure. This may mean a return to small, dynamic project teams, which will embrace free agent fundraisers as partners, and not simply tolerate them.
There will continue to see an erosion in the ‘general fund’ most charities hold sacred, and in its place, different methods for earmarked funds. The significant upside to this trend will see greater use of blogs to demonstrate and communicate impact, so that donors can see how their contribution makes a difference. Médecins Sans Frontières Canada as demonstrated the power of blogs. Meanwhile digital cameras and cheap point-and-shoot video have the potential to show beneficiaries as real people. In January 2009, Kiva Fellow (volunteer) posted a viral video which followed the ‘journey’ of a loan from London to Cambodia.
Charities are being stressed to the limit by the economic downturn, but also by some more profound changes that I believe will have some far reaching consequences for a business model not seriously questioned for one hundred and fifty years. The fact is, even a decade ago, charities used to be an automatic choice for people wishing to make a difference, but they have now become just another player, albeit with still considerable visibility. Blend the old with the new social media is offline, too. For example, Apple create social retail experiences when their tribe gather in their larger stores. Imagine a similar scenario as tired charity shops get re-born as dynamic hubs for community activism.
In January 2009, the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID) published its annual report online. It weaves together compelling stories of its impact through a vivid mix of video, blogs and tags to drill deeper into content. While this is a significant step for a large charity to take, but size no longer matters so much as being able to demonstrate impact. New global, web-enabled charities, like US-based charity: water answer to the call “don’t tell me, show me”, and stream video of new wells being drilled in real time on their homepage, turning its work into a never-ending story. I see growing evidence that many of the new charities being born are leaner, more agile and more distributed than many of their predecessors.
Those that will succeed in the future will be those that grasp the true impact of these words by Katya Andresen: “the message is not about the charity, but about why the messenger cares.”
