Despite the hype, social media is yet to take off as a mainstream fundraising tool for many organisations. Tom Latchford explains how, if used properly, it can help your charity soar
When I was four years old, in my school yearbook under the heading ‘What I want to be’, most of my classmates wrote, ‘superhero’ (apart from one, who wanted to be a fish). We wanted to have special powers to do good for the world.
Charities can rekindle that passion by empowering individuals to use social media for good. It is now possible to find the superheroes in your database, and help them to fly through fundraising. They can make an impact now that was impossible a few years ago.
NFP Synergy published the Social Media League Table earlier this year, which sought to find the top 50 most successful charities on social media. Unsurprisingly this ranked everyone by the number of ‘likes’ on Facebook and ‘followers’ on Twitter. If I ‘liked’ your charity on Facebook what would change? Too many charities throw resource into rounding up followers, without ever stopping to question why.
Real returns
All too often social media experts cower from the return on investment (ROI) question. We need to focus on three components; the investment it takes to help a nobody become a somebody, the cost per acquisition (CPA) and the future long-term value (FLV) we can gain from supporters.
When we understand this, social media stops being a game and starts being a game-changer. Instead of the intern blasting benign updates into cyberspace, social media can be used as a serious, scalable supporter engagement tool. For that to happen you must understand the ROI in pounds and pence and scrap spurious assumptions that it is a free tool, warranting no investment.
Social media stands to radically reduce the CPA in comparison to traditional methods. The FLV of a supporter is no longer the sum of their individual donations, it is the sum of their network. Charities should take highly networked individuals as seriously as their high-net-worth connections.
Traditionally, many charities have depended on securing large amounts of money from a small number of people. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky argues that “it’s not that organisations wouldn’t like to take advantage of the casual participant, it is because they can’t. Transaction costs make it too expensive”. Traditionally, the expense of interacting with donors means charities have always targeted the rich. This year’s Sunday Times Rich List showed a 33 per cent decrease in giving by the top 100 philanthropists. As grant funding dries up, the greatest opportunity for charities today is to secure more people to give more money more often. This is now possible, as social media has crushed communication costs.
A future, not a fling
FLV is about building a relationship rather than instant gratification. Street collections do not fulfil this framework, which is why attrition rates are disappointingly high, with around a third of donors dropping off after five months according to the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association’s DARS survey.
Social media on the other hand is geared up for reducing attrition and improving advocacy. Fundraisers should ask the right person, at the right time, for the right call to action, using the right communication channel. By harvesting data from digital interactions, and understanding people’s preferences and propensity for giving, and using this to provide highly targeted requests and responses, a charity can increase the chance of developing enduring relationships with supporters. It is exactly the kind of behavioural data analysis that happens behind the scenes at online dating websites.
The supporter journey
Communicating with a large volume of people needs to be systematic. The supporter journey is the best method of increasing the future long-term value of your supporter base in a mass-managed way.
Lots of charities stop at the first hurdle. They get people to like them, follow them, and then struggle to convert them into doing something that will actually make a difference. Engage people emotionally and they are more likely to take physical action. The advocacy step is when a supporter starts a chain reaction, infecting their network with their commitment to the cause.
Instant attraction
Social media is about engagement, not spurting spam onto deaf ears. There are people talking about topics related to your charity all over the web, all of the time. These are warm prospective supporters, already actively engaged in the topics your charity cares about.
Topics on Twitter are found using the hashtag (#), so your charity should be finding the hashtags that are relevant to its cause and engaging with the people contributing to these conversations. You need to tap into these debates and cultivate their interest in your cause. The true power of Twitter is tapping into already-formed communities in this way. For example, the last few hires at Raising IT have come through Twitter, by using relevant hashtags to reach out to the right job seekers. You can also track the effectiveness of your engagement and calls to action by using bit.ly links for your URLs.
Once you know the FLV for every ‘like’ on Facebook or follower on Twitter, you can assess how much it is worth investing in building these connections. This could make online marketing worthwhile, such as Adwords (make sure you get a Google grant), Facebook advertisements or affiliate marketing.
Meaningful action
Social media is great for initial interactions, but it is not a transaction tool. This is where your website should take over. The gap between social media and your website can be bridged using social sign-in, for example, where someone can sign into your website using their Facebook ID.
I am not talking about the typical charity website either; a glorified brochure with a naively hopeful donate button. According to Mission Fish’s recent report, Passion, Persistence, and Partnership: the secrets of earning more online, charities still only raise 3.6 per cent of total donations online. This is in the shadow of retail which brought in £1 online for every £10 spent according to the Office for National Statistics. The secret to success is not a big ‘buy now’ button but using technology to understand buyer behaviour and prompt people to be loyal. Charities should be doing the same through the supporter journey.
Websites should be interactive and enable you to track interactions for all the ways that people provide you with value. Your website should be a transactional hub, managing your relationships with people as they contribute in multi-faceted ways. Whether it is through appeals, an online shop, raffle tickets, volunteering or attending events, your site is a vehicle for accelerating towards or accomplishing your charity’s vision, with your community of committed contributors acting as a driving force.
Leveraging advocates
Advocates create a virtuous circle by spreading goodwill towards the cause virally through their connections. We can now manage, moderate and motivate people within their own space, through safe social and web technologies. This allows charities to increase the responsibilities of supporters and outsource more of the problems and pressures. Supporters find the solution.
However, the most effective method is to get your top advocates to leverage their connections. For example, at the launch meeting for a campaign website, we asked the charity’s top ten most influential followers to kick-start the campaigning. As we left the boardroom two hours later, we had over two thousand new followers.
Fundraising staff are the leaders, looking to leverage the latent potential of the supporter base. The key is to understand that most people have more impact through their influence than a direct donation alone. These social media approaches challenge the institutionalised fundraising models. My theory is that we should seek out the right people, trust them and aim to move those supporters to a level where they are as effective as a paid member of staff.
When you do this, you get results. A cancer charity supporter who raised over a million pounds comes to mind, or the seven-year-old cyclist who exceeded his £500 target by £250,000 after taking off on Twitter. People with a purpose are powerful if you provide them with the tools and direction to deliver their potential.
Making multi-channel work
The ability to capture and process data is critical to a seamless supporter journey spanning offline, online, social media and even mobile. If you have fractured systems or departmental divides and fail to harness the data necessary to track how individuals interact with your charity, this latent potential will be lost.
In principle, it is clear how social media can reduce the cost of communicating with supporters. It can be used to co-ordinate communities, so the supporters can support each other, spreading infectious inspiration. The impact people have now is through their networks. Current systems of donations data capture are archaic. We should be capturing downstream donations: the ripple effect created by a supporter, who was just a drop in your database, but has created a tidal wave of support.
The 3 stages of the supporter journey
- attracting people so they sign-up and become somebodies;
- prompting them to take meaningful action and become supporters; and
- getting people to become advocates or superheroes.
Tom Latchford is CEO of Raising IT
This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 10, November 2011
