Email is still the comms method of choice for charity communicators, despite the siren calls of social media.
A survey of delegates at the CharityComms conference on digital communications on Wednesday showed that 65% of the 91 respondents believed that email was a very important part of their organisation’s communications, compared to 20% who said that social media was very important. Websites topped the poll, with 77% of respondents citing them as very important. No respondents felt that SMS was very important, with 42% of respondents deeming text messaging “irrelevant”.
Speaking at the event, Matthew McGregor, senior strategist at Blue State Digital, the agency which provided the online technology for the Barack Obama US presidential campaign, agreed. “Given the choice between 500 emails and 500 Facebook fans, email would win everytime,” he said. “It may not be sexy, but data capture, mining and management are still vitally important aspects of effective communications.”
McGregor advised charity communicators to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter “to plant a tourist information flag to pull people back to your website and emails.”
“Just because you can do something online, it doesn’t mean you should,” he told delegates. “Work out what engagement you want to have with your supporters and then decide what tools you should use to achieve that.”
The delegates’ preference for emails over social media was further evidenced by the time organisations spent interacting with stakeholders using social media. 51% spent up to an hour a day on social media interactions with 16% spending no time at all and 26% spending more than an hour a day.
The survey was part of a digital benchmarking report being compiled by CharityComms using interactive voting technology supplied by conference sponsor LiveWire.