CharityComms

It was only a matter of time before charities followed the trend.

In the last couple of years social networking site MySpace has revolutionised the music scene engaging with users to take acts like the Arctic Monkeys from cyberspace obscurity to the top of the charts. And in 2007 Facebook’s audience has grown by an incredible 523%, showing the potential it has to change the way people communicate, even mobilising users worldwide to campaign on issues like the Burma crisis.

Now charities are making their presence felt on social networking sites as charity communicators begin to use them as communication and campaigning tools.

NSPCC Facebook application

The NSPCC has set up a whole new team to deal with emerging online channels such as social networking. The NSPCC’s e-fundraising team have developed a fundraising application to run in Facebook, the first UK charity to do so. The application can be downloaded onto users’ Facebook profiles showing their “friends” that they support the charity. It displays all NSPCC events in a calendar and links up with JustGiving to show users’ sponsorship totals.

Such an innovative tool costs money, of course – donors’ money. The charity worked with digital agency Panlogic to develop the technology but Polly Gilchrist, head of the e-fundraising team, says it did not cost a “great deal.”

Mobilising existing online communities

“We absolutely don’t want to jump on any old bandwagon,” says Gilchrist. “We looked into Second Life [a virtual web community] and have discounted that for a while but we spotted Facebook as a huge opportunity for us to get involved in mobilising the online community.

“Our supporters had already set up their own pages in Facebook and developing this tool was a way to bring everything together under one banner.”

Gilchrist says the initial aim is to get people involved in NSPCC events and raise awareness of the charity and the work it does. Then, in a few months time, the application will be extended to get users involved in NSPCC campaigns.

A cost effective campaigning tool

It’s a similar approach to that of Amnesty International UK’s communications team who’ve just launched their “Unsubscribe” campaign across social networking sites Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Pages urge visitors to sign up to the charity’s campaign combatting human rights abuses related to the “war on terror”.

“We’re doing it in stages,” says Neil Durkin from the Amnesty media unit. “The first phase is primarily about getting people involved and directing them to the “Unsubscibe” website to sign up to the campaign. We’ll then bring out appeal information about prisoners around the world and hit members with our campaign asks, to lobby governments etc.”

Durkin believes social networking is a good use of donors’ money because involvement of people is what makes campaigns work. “It’s a very cost effective use of money because you can reach lots of people so quickly on the internet; you don’t have to travel around the country on trains,” he says.

Evaluating real world impact

At the time of writing, nearly 40,000 had signed up to the Unsubscribe campaign, launched at the beginning of October. That’s a fantastic number but Durkin says the charity have not yet developed a way of finding out how many people have signed up through social networking sites.

At the British Legion too, PR Officer Lizzie Bloom, says it would be tricky to find out how many people had signed up to be a poppy collector through their Facebook campaign “Poppy People.”

“We set up the Facebook page because we wanted to reach a younger audience than the traditional profile of the poppy collector,” says Bloom. “It’s gone reasonably well. But people like to join groups within Facebook and then it’s a case of motivating them to carry things out in the real world. But we’ve got about 350 members in the group and people have started to have discussions about the poppy appeal and the importance of it.”

The charities’ friend?

Bloom says the Facebook experiment was a bit of a “shot in the dark” because it was hard to predict the response. But she says one of the appeals of exploring social networking as communications tools is that they’re free to use and less expensive to invest resources in than an advertising campaign. “Facebook’s the charities’ friend,” she adds.

Indeed, some charities, like ActionAid, have even set up their own social networking sites. However, managing director of software company Fisk Brett and Third Sector columnist Robin Fisk thinks charities are better off investing effort and resources linking already established social networking sites into their own systems.

Worth a try

Fisk says social networking is still an emerging technology and whether charities can raise serious money online has yet to be proven, but charity communicators can’t avoid it.

“Social networking has mushroomed because there’s been a demand for it,” he says. “People are always going to want to communicate in peer online networks. So, if you have your own in-house skills and its not going to divert funds from other areas, it’s worth a try. I think they’re more about awareness-raising; converting a presence into cash will take a lot more investment.”