Social media really has revolutionised the way people interact. We’ll happily share details of our private lives with the world, posting pictures we might not want our parents/employers/future in-laws to see in public online spaces, and allowing ourselves to be contacted any time, anywhere. There’s a new facebook feature which is literally a tracking device, updating your status as you move, which I find slightly terrifying.
But has social media changed the way people interact with charities? Every organisation seems to have someone dedicated to spreading their message online – and I say ‘spreading their message’ deliberately, because I think this is where online communications come into their own. For raising awareness of a cause or a charity, social media is invaluable. But converting that awareness to action (particularly of the financial kind) is another matter.
Of course there are some cases where online appeals for money have been very successful – notably the Disasters Emergency Commission’s announcement on twitter following the Haiti earthquake, which resulted in donations of £8 million. But these are still remarkable. There is a big difference between ‘liking’ a cause on facebook, and going a step further and clicking on a charity’s website to read about their work, or even making a donation or finding out how to ‘get involved’. I wonder how effective online fundraising appeals actually are – on a personal level, I currently have several invites to donate to various facebook friends running marathons or doing sponsored events for charity, and yet I haven’t responded to any of them – in fact I’ve never donated money to a friend who has just contacted me via facebook. Perhaps this makes me a bad person, but someone telling me face-to-face why they’ve chosen a cause will always move me far more than an impersonal generic facebook invite. Sites such as Bmycharity, justgiving or virginmoneygiving have undoubtedly made the practicalities of fundraising easier, but it would be interesting to know how many of the donations made on these sites are generated purely through online contact.
What social media is good at is creating awareness of a cause or event, or fuelling a debate. Many charities have launched incredibly successful online campaigns which have got people talking (or tweeting) about an issue. The World AIDS Day red ribbon campaign led to virtual red ribbons appearing across the web, and hopefully drew a fair few visitors to the charity’s site to find out more. Earlier this year USA Today’s #AmericaWants twitter hashtag competition generated 60,000 tweets reaching more than 67 million followers, with the most tweeted charity rewarded with a free full page ad in the paper, worth $189,000, and a whole host of free online coverage (won by a charity dedicated to helping people coping with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide, To write love on her arms).
For campaigning charities, social media is an excellent free platform for getting a message to the masses. But for charities in need of funds, it seems that the gap between online followers and dedicated donors is still a tricky one to overcome.
Social media and fundraising go together well, but you have to use the same engagement strategies ONLINE that you’d use OFFLINE.
And I’ve never heard of millions being raised by grassroots nonprofits on Facebook. Personally, I think nonprofits can get off of facebook with impunity, and go and do something fun on twitter or linkedin, and get a lot more out of the relationships being built there. And that’s the key thing, building relationships.
Each time you touch a person, you’re building that relationship. If someone just sends you a request to “like” their cause, it’s not very meaningful. If you got a follow, then a direct message, then a mention on twitter, would you be more likely to follow back, look for something to retweet, possibly even give money or volunteer? YOU BET!
It’s all about personal touches. And this requires personal effort. And a lot of nonprofits do not want to invest in the amount of people necessary to generate consistent follow through on fundraising tasks. And under-investing in social media is a convenient excuse to say, “Well, social media doesn’t work for fundraising” It really does. You just need to put in the time and the effort in the right channels.
Mazarine
http://wildwomanfundraising.com
If you’re interested in knowing how many donations have been prompted by online contact only on JustGiving, I can tell you the answer – and it’s “a lot”.
If you have a look at a presentation I gave at the IoF National Convention this year, we shared the fact that most people fundraising on JustGiving ask people to donate by email (86% of fundraisers) followed by face-to-face conversations and Facebook messages (74% of fundraisers).
Slides 38-41 at http://www.slideshare.net/jwaddingham/discover-the-secrets-of-online-fundraisers-iof-national-convention-2010 will show you how this compares to people donating – with 57% of people who give on JustGiving, giving because they were asked on email, versus 16% who were asked face-to-face and 12% who were asked to give on Facebook.
What’s more interesting from a digital marketing perspective is the differences in how people of different ages respond to different channels – see our infographic at http://www.flickr.com/photos/justgiving/4790015697/
Hope that answers your question!
I think it very much depends, as Jon says, on the demographic. For some of my relatives, I’ll send a personal email with my justgiving page, but for other fundraising, doing things essentially exclusively online, can yield great results:
http://www.justgiving.com/jailbreak4kidscan
http://www.justgiving.com/bearddebate
Granted, you may have lots of unanswered FB pleas for sponsorship (alas, so have I, but this is more through lack of funds than not wanting to support my friends), but they are a great way to spread the word.
With tools like http://www.justtweeting.org.uk it’s getting even easier to let people know what you’re up to.
On an organisation level, from the Meningitis Trust’s perspective (my employer I hasten to add), we’ve had people get in touch with us via Facebook as their first port of call, and have gone on to become active supporter of ours.
Whilst I agree that followers on social networks going on to become active supporters (beyond spreaders of a charity’s messages) may be quite a small percentage, social networks are quite a recent phenomenon, and it’ll be interesting to see if this trend continues or not.
Thanks for the comments – and thanks Jonathan for the answers to the Justgiving question – that’s a great infographic.
Maybe a better conclusion would be that social media can be a successful fundraising tool where relationships already exist (eg, emailing a friend or family member to ask for support for a cause) or where, as Mazarine says, you really take a lot of time to build relationships online, as you would in real life. The justgiving pages in Dave’s comment show that, just like offline fundraising, the success of online fundraising often depends on the effort and imagination put into it (as the beard debate shows!) or the scale and awareness of the disaster being fundraised for (eg, with the DEC Haiti appeal).
And yes, it will be very interesting to see how online engagement with charities develops, I do think social media will be increasingly influential. Perhaps the rise of social media has also seen an associated rise in ‘slacktivism’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism), but I don’t really see a problem with this as long as people keep giving to charity in ‘real terms’ too, eg, with their time or money, which as far as I know they very much still are!
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It’s great to do charity and be a part of a social cause! It takes a lot of efforts and patience to raise money for various social causes. Connect to Charity is supporting over 1.5M nonprofits by providing those online fundraising tools link Facebook Aps, Real Time Reporting etc. and promoting them online.