Brands, including charities, have always competed against each other for a share of the market; a share of consumers’ attention and spending power. However, in a world where consumers are bombarded with more marketing messages every day, many charities are finding that tried and tested approaches aren’t working quite as well as they used to.
The huge range of media channels that exist today is, in large part, responsible for this. The more marketing messages people are subject to – through an increasingly diverse range of channels – the more they learn to filter them out, and the more selective they are about the ones they respond to.
There’s also just more choice and more information available now than there has ever been, so consumers can afford to be – and need to be – considerably more ‘picky’ than they once were.
The Internet plays an enormous role in this, providing consumers with choice, and empowering them to make the best choices to suit them. We now have access to price comparison websites like www.moneysupermarket.com enabling us to make informed decisions based on the relative benefits, quality and value across a wide range of consumer goods and services, and sites including www.intelligentgiving.com, offering ‘independent ratings and reviews of charities’, helping us to decide which are most worthy of our support.
And, if that doesn’t present enough of a challenge, there is suddenly a proliferation of social media channels online, where people are sharing opinion with each other about the brands that are worthy – or not – of their attention.
This has caused a massive shift in the relationships between people and brands, to the degree that leading research organisation, Forrester, has coined a name for it: ‘Groundswell’, which they describe as ‘a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.’ As a result, Forrester says, ‘to be successful, marketers should forsake one-way campaigns for two-way dialogues, yield control of the message in favor [sic] of the role of participant in the conversation, and abandon carefully crafted positioning statements for more personal language’.
So, having a website is just not enough anymore. Forward-looking brands understand that they need to be more flexible, that they need to engage people in a genuine dialogue, rather than broadcast marketing messages at them. To do this, they need to have a presence in the online, social communities that their customers (or, for charities, existing or potential supporters and stakeholders) enjoy using.
This is not the only thing that charities are going to have to do differently, because these social platforms have a different ethos – which can take some getting used to, and may present some challenges. These spaces have their own ‘unwritten rules’. They are very open and equitable, and require the softer skills of conversation and collaboration, the transparent sharing of information, honest discussion of views, values, goals, successes and failures, highs and lows – warts and all – rather than the polished diplomacy of PR, the hard sell of advertising or the push of marketing.
Understanding and responding to this in the right way is just as important for charities as it is for commercial brands – both in communicating with supporters and potential supporters, and reaching out to people who may need their services and support. However, it’s the commercial brands that tend to be faster to invest in testing new routes to market, and are generally more open to taking the risk that testing new channels inevitably presents. It’s understandable that charities are more reticent – they are often under-resourced, with existing strains on their manpower and budgets, and are duty bound to use supporters’ donations as wisely as they know how.
But, after years of being able to rely on tried and tested media – including mail, press and television – to achieve fundraising, marketing, communications and campaigning objectives, charities are seeing a downward trend in the level of success they used to see from these channels. This is probably set to continue as more and more people go online, spend more time there and find the communities and resources there more and more indispensible to their day-to-day lives.
I would say, then, that ignoring social media isn’t really an option. Most of these tools are available free of charge, anyway, so there’s every reason to at least start trying them out because, only then, can you really start to figure out how they might work for your charity.
So, what do you need to consider before you get started? Your corporate and departmental objectives are a good place to begin, as is having an understanding of where people might already be talking about you and engaging with your brand online (if you haven’t Googled your cause recently, you might be surprised what you will find).
Forrester has come up with the helpful acronym ‘POST’ to bring some focus to thinking strategically about the applications of social media for your organisation:
People: Assess your customers’ social activities
Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish
Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers will change
Tools: Decide which social technologies to use
Forrester also says, ‘Concentrate on the people and objectives, not the technologies’, which is very important. There is absolutely no sense in setting up a presence on any social channel that doesn’t help you to achieve your objectives, or help you engage with your priority audiences. In fact, if your resources are limited, you are likely to be best served by focusing on just one or two channels that best meet those key criteria.
In plain English, here’s my suggested check list:
- What do we need to achieve?
- Which audiences are important to achieve this?
- Where are those audiences online – which platforms are they using?
- Do those platforms/ tools fit with the kind of content we have or can create?
- Can we sustain what we start?
This final point is also important to consider carefully. There is no point in prioritising a presence on YouTube if you don’t have the time, money or expertise to create engaging video content, or setting up a Twitter profile or a blog if you don’t have time to post frequently (or if all of the audiences you really need to engage with to achieve your objectives use Bebo and MySpace!). Equally, if your organisation already creates a lot of video content, a YouTube channel could be perfect for you; representing a fairly low-maintenance way creating a social presence that can be linked to content on other platforms later, or to groups your supporters, or other interested audiences, may have set up on Facebook, for example.
Wherever you decide it makes sense to have a presence, you do need to be able to make a commitment to posting and sharing content fairly regularly. If you actively engage people anywhere through a social platform, you will have become an important part of their online world and your absence will be noticed and commented on if you suddenly disappear from the landscape. The rewards should far outweigh the responsibility though, so don’t let that stop you getting out there.
Rachel Beer is an independent Marketing and Communications Consultant. If you’d like to contact Rachel you can email her on: racheljbeer@googlemail.com.
Rachel recently spoke at a CharityComms seminar – to download her presentation or to hear her comments on our podcast: Click here