Like many charities, we value the positive role social media can have for people, communities and charities. But we also understand and recognise people’s growing concerns about the divisive nature of social media platforms like X and Meta, and how this presents challenges for charities when defining the best way to engage their audiences. We also join the sector in the concerns raised about AI, including on social media platforms, being used for nefarious reasons.
Every charity needs to consider its own position for their social media strategy and how any changes may impact its audiences, staff and volunteers. As a sector body, our responsibility is to support our wide membership base. We feel, as an infrastructure organisation, it’s important that we are present for charities and members where they are, so they can access our support.
After careful review, we have decided to scale back our activity on some channels, so we can monitor the role they have for the sector and our members, while putting our energy into a wider social media strategy that reaches our members in new and exciting ways.
Our social media approach
After performing our social media platform checklist review, we will be splitting our social media approach into core stages:
- Keep our members informed on the topic and of our plans as they develop
- Perform platform and audience engagement research to devise a new social media strategy
- Build up our infrastructure and test content and community engagement ideas
You will find CharityComms on LinkedIn as our primary channel and we will be increasing our activity on this platform. We will also be taking a test and learn approach to our new Bluesky channel for the first six months while we see how to engage our community on the platform.
We will scale back our posts on X and Facebook to once a week to keep members who have decided to stay there informed of our support. We will also remove our X premium access, so, while we might not have the blue tick, you can rest assured it is still our account.
We will also continue to develop social campaigns that highlight the work of our comms network.
We will listen, learn and reflect with our members about issues related to social media, as well as what they need from us. We will also continue to contribute to key sector learning and discussions.
As the membership organisation for charity communicators, we remain steadfast in our commitment to supporting charity communicators with resources, events and services that allow them to navigate issues and make decisions that best serve their organisation, people, audiences, and purpose.
We are all on a journey with our social media channels, as platforms change over time. As a sector, we must continue to help each other in our work with insights, messages, information and actions that allow us to use social media in the most effective ways, and counter online hate, misinformation and deepfakes.
You can find a lot more on our website, like our social media resource hub page or our events page, to support your thinking and approaches.
Please ensure to follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/charitycomms/
Find us on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/charitycomms.bsky.social
Visit our knowledge hub to access our archive of insights: https://www.charitycomms.org.uk/knowledge
Sign up for our newsletter to receive a round-up of activity from CharityComms and beyond: https://www.charitycomms.org.uk/membership/enews
The statement was originally posted on 5 September 2024 and was updated on 10 February 2025.
Image Credit: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
