You’re a charity communicator. Trend spotting makes you look cool.
Plus in the digital world everything changes fast so it’s important to know what’s what.
Take for example platforms like Google, Facebook and of course, thanks to everyone’s favourite rocket blasting right wing loose cannon Elon Musk, Twitter… Keeping up with the latest changes or trends can feel like a job in itself.
Your colleagues and CEO might even look to you as the Cool Department. The ones that spot the fun new toys over the horizon.
So, the next time a colleague asks you what’s big in the world of digital in 2023, here’s what you should tell them.
ChatGPT writing all your words for you
Charity communicators write a lot of words. The words communicate their charity’s story. It’s kind of their thing.
You might have heard of Chat GPT. It’s a jacked up chatbot that can write all your words for you.
You just go to the Open AI ChatGPT website, ask it to write anything that springs to mind, and voila! A surprisingly human sounding piece of copy.
This should be on your radar because it could give you a working first draft of any fundraising landing page, email or social media post that you need to write. But of course be sure to sense and fact check this afterwards as it is automated after all and you wouldn’t want a blooper slipping through the net.
If it really takes off and ups its capacity (you often can’t access the website as it’s over capacity, at least at the time of writing), you could massively increase the number of pieces you could write. You might even be able to increase the quality, depending how good a writer you were to begin with.
A lot of SEO folk are using it to create content around keywords they want to rank for. Since so many people are doing it, that content will soon stop standing out. So you still need to be a brilliant writer, even with ChatGPT around.
Find your legs in the Metaverse
You’ve probably heard the term. But what is the metaverse?
It’s basically Facebook’s virtual reality world. It’s kind of a big universe that has everything from avatar led games to study spaces for surgeons.
Metaverse avatars now have legs. Cue a stream of pretty hilarious reactions from the Twitterati.
If you feel like it, splash out on an Oculus Quest 2 and play around with it. You’ll think it’s cool. If you have a seriously big innovation budget, plan out a way to bring your services to life that donors can experience for themselves.
If you don’t have a big innovation budget, you could always focus on comms that gets your charity’s message out there in a way that people actually can consume it, at scale, right now. Text, images and video, say.
TikTok explodes
TikTok is now a massive video based social network. It continues to evolve and dominate the social media landscape.
It was predicted to have 1.8 billion monthly active users by the end of 2022, as reported by The Business of Apps. That’s a lot of people.
The algorithm Is famous for being one of the best in the social media universe. It just has a knack of serving up stuff that makes users come back again and again and stay for longer and longer each time.
So as a charity communicator, there is a massive opportunity to make thousands if not millions of people aware of the charities they work for through engaging short-form video content. Check out Caenhillcc rescue animals for some ace examples.
TikTok is hard if you don’t have the time, resources, or let’s face it, the will to create kooky forms of video content that rely on funny and engaging people front and centre.
If that’s you, I bet there’s someone on your team who loves TikTok. They can help you get out there.
Remember, you don’t have to recreate the latest viral funny video craze. You can be useful. Check out these sustainable laundry tips.
Social media guidance for trustees
The charity commission are currently consulting on new guidance for trustees who use social media.
They’ve clearly been hurt before. A few trustees must have said seriously controversial or appalling things that reflected really badly on the charities that they were working for.
Most regulators are pretty cautious and not usually very down with social media. How much you need to care depends on what they come up with. It will affect small charities with no social media team most of all.
You might find your social media team getting asked a few more questions around your social media policy for individuals. If that’s the case, show them examples of what this says, how it is already working and isn’t actually a problem.
Just remember the classic “views do not represent those of my employer” disclaimer on Twitter bios is unlikely to cut it if a quick Google search will show what charity that person is a trustee or an employee of.
NFTs to continue to be niche at best
NFTs have been predicted to be massive since 2021. And yet here we are in 2023, with broadly the same charity sector promoting the same old lifesaving work to the same old audience.
True there are a couple of examples of digital artwork selling for millions of dollars. That’s a pretty far cry from any charity being able to do the same, transforming their fortunes at the drop of a digital hat.
What’s more NFT transactions rely on a cryptocurrency called Eth. That’s supported by the blockchain Ethereum, which relies on an energy-intensive, vast computer network to sustain it. Not great in the climate crisis.
So here’s to another unpredictable, exciting year for charity communicators. Let’s rise to the challenges ahead.
Discover more about the latest trends in the digital world and beyond at our upcoming Strategic Marketing Conference 2023.
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Banner Image: Pramod Tiwari on Unsplash
