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In the past seven days, I have written two stories reporting that charity websites have been criticised as inaccessible and frustrating to use.
The first was on a report by the agency Bluefrog claimed more than half of the UK’s 100 largest charities used hard-to-read design styles on the legacy giving sections of their sites.
Should charities tackle malicious groups created by Facebook users? How do online mentors keep professional boundaries in place? And are elaborate email templates worth the effort?
Such digital media quandaries are tackled in a series of articles on Because It’s Good, a newish community blog that functions as an online salon for charity digital media geeks. The idea is to allow experts to share clever thinking on emerging trends, and it’s free to join and contribute to. Surely there must be a catch?
Well, perhaps not. True – the site is hosted by digital agency Enable Interactive – it’s upfront about that – but account director Nick Torday is keen to bat off suggestions that the site is a cynical commercial exercise. It is, he says, a spirited attempt to allow charities to simply share their critical insight.
It’s an idea that certainly chimes with current thinking on how “free” can be a business model for charity suppliers and just about any other commercial enterprise. Academic and blogger Jeff Jarvis argues in his influential book What Would Google Do? that the businesses best placed to survive the digital revolution will be those that offer free online tools to clients and potential clients. They won’t necessarily expect anything in return, or even to secure any business.
Charities should make the most of Because It’s Good. There are some intelligent and absorbing bits of bite-sized wisdom and some interesting debate here. Would-be members can sign up, create a profile, then either just stick to reading articles or, if they like, write the odd piece. The site promises to publish at least two new articles a week.
Gravity is a new social networking site that could prove extremely useful for charity campaigning and fundraising. A number of charities and sector organisations, such as Whizz-Kidz and UK Fundraising, are already there.
A contributor to an online running forum I frequent recently told the tale of someone who’d secured a place in the London Marathon through a gold bond owned by a well-known charity, then pulled out because of injury. But she was being chased by the charity for the full amount she’d agreed to raise.
The thread eventually ran to nearly 300 posts, and threw up a range of issues we’ve all seen before, including pay rates for charity chief executives and the amount charities spend on administration. If we didn’t know it already, these are topics that stir up public passions – and not always in a positive way for the sector.
According to the contributor, the charity later relented and deferred the injured runner’s place: a sensible move that might well have kept the supporter onside.
As with any message board, some extreme opinions were voiced. One poster attacked the fundraising ‘feeding frenzy’ of the London Marathon, claiming charities had taken over an event founded only to improve the quality of British distance running (not entirely true: one founding principle was to raise money for sporting and recreational facilities in London; another emphasised the ‘fun’ element of the event).
It was even suggested that by becoming so charity-focused, the London Marathon was actually driving down standards of British marathon running – a debatable point at best, but sadly not the point of this blog post (unless anyone out there has an opinion).
It was predictable and hardly surprising that a large number of contributors said they would shun the charity involved in future and tell others to do the same, even after it had apparently changed its mind. More disturbing were those who said such indefensible actions as this were why they never ran for charity and rolled out their own stories of perfidious fundraisers attempting to extract money from them in all sorts of ways short of actual mugging. In some quarters it’s clear that the public image of the sector is extremely low.
Of course, some people spend their whole lives being outraged, and naturally I’m in danger of over-emphasising the importance of one tiny corner of the internet, a medium in which the most extreme voices – or, perhaps more correctly, the most negative voices – tend to shout loudest.
News online doesn’t just travel fast – it’s live. Twitter and other social media mean stories are published and read as they happen, which presents charities with a problem if they want to react quickly to events.
When news of the earthquake in Haiti broke on January 12, the American Red Cross didn’t hang around; it launched an email fundraising campaign three hours after the first story was published online, according to Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of digital media agency Blue State Digital, the company credited with the success of Barack Obama’s online election campaign.
I met him and his colleague, Matthew McGregor, the agency’s London director, last week and they explained why such organisational nimbleness is, for charities, in their words, “absolutely crucial to fundraising success”. Charities, they say, need plans in place to cut through hierarchies of sign-offs and approvals.
So what would a digital media-ready organisational structure look like?
McGregor describes digital media as “a thread that should run through the whole organsiation.” Gensemer suggests a senior member of staff coordinate digital media across all departments, including fundraising, press and so on. That way, he says, it’s taken seriously.
“It’s likely to be where we’ll be in a couple of years time,” he says.
Will senior charity executives take digital media seriously enough to take the tip now?
We had half-an-hour to go before the panel I was chairing at the Media 140 event on social media in the third sector event last week was due to face the audience. Fear was setting in.
Huddled in the corner, the panellists and I were chatting about the kinds of questions I would be putting to them before opening up the session to the audience in the room and on the web. And while we had all worked with social media, the sense that we might be out of our depth was creeping in.
“What does that question mean?” asked one panellist, pointing to the question ‘Where is our community?’ which had been suggested as a discussion topic.
“Er, not too sure to be honest,” I replied. After a bit of thought I figured we had better skip that one, much to the panel’s relief. No one could be quite sure if it was an important question or just gibberish (although I’m almost certain it was the latter).
Trying to identify what works and what doesn’t in social media is like trying to herd cats. Sometimes social media initiatives fail for no discernible reason. Sometimes they succeed, but we’re at a loss to know why.
Ten years ago most people were only just online, and we still had time to make a cup of coffee while our dial-up connections loaded up websites. So it’s laughable to think that anyone should already have some magic formula for something as emergent and bottom-up as social media.
We really shouldn’t get intimidated or worried by it, especially since there’s so little financial risk involved.
Social media is a chance to experiment and play. Your social media experiments might not result in what you planned, but the unexpected isn’t always the unwelcome.
According to Dominic Vallely, one of the founders of the soon-to-launch charity video sharing website See the Difference, it is like being at the beginning of Google. At least that’s what he told me when I visited his offices last week.
Vallely restated his bold claim in terms more relevant to the sector. “Children in Need and Comic Relief pioneered the idea of donating through a telethon,” he said. “We’re pioneering the next big thing: the video revolution for charities.”
It’s difficult to believe that fundraising is about to be radically shaken up – after all, a lot of charities already have videos on their websites and share these on Facebook and Twitter.
But Vallely, who was previously a senior producer at the BBC, has some big backers, including Microsoft and Virgin Money Giving. He’s ambitious: he has set the website a fundraising target of nearly £500m in its first five years.
And there’s more to it than just a library of charities’ videos, which would rely on donors bothering to go to the website and watch them. The point is to make the charities’ work a talking point, so people email videos to their friends and post them on their blogs and social networking pages, just like they do with YouTube already.
But before charities start getting over-excited, there are a few things to bear in mind. You can’t just send the videos you’ve already made: they have to fit the See the Difference model of telling a story that highlights a specific project, and pledging to tell supporters exactly how their money was spent.
This means making sometimes complicated accounting arrangements so you can ensure that £10 donated to a specific school in, say, Tanzania, is actually given to that school.
The site intends to cater for a young, headstrong generation who demand to know exactly how charities spend their money and who are sceptical that a monthly direct debit would be absorbed into general running costs.
If See the Difference gets these people giving, it will have succeeded where many charities have failed. But the website could have a different effect: of reducing unrestricted income as people give directly to specific projects.
And in the long term, it creates a cultural shift. Charities are telling their supporters, in effect, that they have a right to decide where their money goes. Surely a charity’s staff, who have knowledge and experience in their field, should decide on the most sensible allocation of funding? Will it become tough to raise general funds if a “donor choice” attitude becomes widespread?
But there could be £500m at stake here – about a one per cent increase in the total level of giving in 2008/09. For that amount, giving more of a say to demanding donors could be a risk worth taking.
Popular opinion has it that charities are reluctant to share expertise and resources with one another. Which is why Child’s i Foundation‘s promise to make available for free its digital tools to other charities stands out as an act of goodwill.
Digital expertise is something Child’s i has in spades. The British charity, which was set up in 2008 to build a home for abandoned babies in Uganda, makes a point of using only free or low-cost resources. Up until a few months ago, for example, its website was created solely out of a free WordPress blog, though it has recently switched to a more sophisticated site.
Its developers have also created a bespoke code for its Buy a Brick fundraising campaign online, which has so far raised more than £10,000. And soon, the charity promises, the codes to both the website and the Buy a Brick tool will be available free to any charity that wants to use them.
In a move that flies in the face of received wisdom on the best way to grab the attention of today’s young activists, Christian Aid’s youth campaigning arm, Ctrl+Alt+Shift., launches a biannual print consumer magazine this week.
Although the charity is not saying how much the magazine cost to produce and distribute, the amount is likely to have been considerable because, as charities know, producing and distributing paper magazines is very expensive.
And for any publisher, launching a new consumer title in a recession is a risk, and this one has a cover price of £3.95.
To add to the challenge, the magazine is aimed at young adults who, we are told, are all broke and spend their time online reading content for free.
But Katrin Owusu, Christian Aid’s head of youth marketing and innovations, is confident the risk will pay off.
“It’s just another platform to build our community,” she says. “The idea that print is dead is not true; if it’s niche, of high-quality and interesting enough to collect then people are happy to part with money.”
Owusu isn’t just acting on a hunch. She points out that last year the organisation published a limited-edition graphic novel, Ctrl+Alt+Shift Unmasks Corruption, with a cover price of £5, that sold 7,000 copies.
And the new magazine is not strictly new: it existed up until last year, albeit in a much smaller format, as a free fanzine distributed in bars and galleries. The bigger, bolder consumer title, she says, has been called for by Ctrl+Alt+Shift. supporters across the world.
It’s is certainly a beautiful and thoughtfully produced product: stylish, weighty and full of wry comment on consumer culture – an affecting six-page fashion spread, for example, highlights interrogation methods at Guantanamo (headline: “Detention to Detail”).
It’s been five years since the Indian Ocean tsunami. Not long, but an age in terms of online developments.
A revolution has occurred between then and now in how NGOs get information to those affected by disasters, and how they report events to the rest of the world.
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