There is no doubt that the recession has impacted many charities – people without spare cash don’t give as readily. This means that many charities have taken a serious look a social media.
Many charities are now using Facebook, YouTube and podcasts as a way to disseminate the word about campaigns. The hope is that advocates will spread the word through their social networks. I for one have certainly seen a fair number of these come through my face book account.
Nonprofits are also very active on twitter. Some use it as an active online presence to keep donors up to date with an unfolding catastrophe. For instance @Redcross uses Twitter to warn and interact with people about situations where their help may be required. Others just use Twitter to educate and maintain an ongoing engagement with their donors.
A recent research report by Cone show that 79% of those online are behind nonprofits using email, webstites and social media to promote campaigns. Of these 60% were already engaged with one or more cause in this way (e.g. by forwarding an email or purchasing a cause branded product). In other words the punters agree this is the right way to go.
However there is a disconnect. Despite this demonstrable level of interest and awareness of causes on line it does not often translate into giving. Only 18% of users have donated via online media or taking their awareness to develop active engagement. This has a huge amount to do with trust. Nearly four out of ten (39%) supporters said they didn’t feel their support would actually help the cause.
“Americans are actively engaged with causes on new media, but they`re lacking a degree of trust that takes them to the next level of engagement,” explains Alison DaSilva, Cone`s executive vice president of Cause Branding. “Organizations can overcome this barrier by showing tangible and compelling results, offering multiple consumer touch points and making the bridge to offline activities wherever possible.”
An interesting development which deals with the issue of trust is the idea of charity aggregator site such as causecast.org. The point of such a site is the charities are “curated” in other words they have been checked out to ensure that they are legitimate. The idea being that by building up the “causecast” brand smaller charities can piggyback onto their reputation. Interestingly the Huffington Post (the highest ranking blog on technorati) has recently teamed up with Causecast to promote their charities via a new section in their blog. It will be fascinating to see if this aggregate “branding” works in the longer term.
And yet the obvious truth is that if you can win the trust and align it with a compelling story then people are more than willing to donate online. For instance Obama’s election campaign showed exactly this. The truth is that just as in the corporate world it takes time to build up a brand and create engagement. However with a good strategy engagement will happen, word of mouth will follow and online donations will grow.
Here at SociaLNK we are very interested in helping charities build up trust and engagement amongst their donor community. Contact us.
