Getting Bloggers to help tell your fundraising and campaigning stories

Howard Lake | 6 July 2010 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Digital
• Facebook
• social media
• Volunteering

Following the tweets from the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention this week has reminded me just how fast the world of digital communications is moving.  There are still lots of sessions on using social media to support fundraising and campaigning as well as interest in specific areas like crowdfunding and using blogs and bloggers.

This reminded me of an article in Third Sector I’d seen in February which shared the story of how some charities are engaging bloggers as part of their media campaigns.  The author, Helen Barrett, illustrated the different approaches being tried by larger charities such as Cancer Research UK and Action Aid (use a third party agency to help engage bloggers on a charity’s behalf) and Amnesty International UK (who prefer to keep communications with supporters in-house and try to embed the social media approach internally).

I found the examples interesting but the learnings are even more powerful if added to the outputs from the Convention above:

• Social media isn’t a standalone activity – it should be integrated with other campaigning, brand or fundraising activities
• Getting bloggers on board is about building a relationship with them first rather than treating them like a journalist working to a print deadline (check out CharityComms for more detail on this).  And ultimately accepting that it may be a two-way relationship in the future
• That said, when the right messages do go viral – through social media generally or specifically through bloggers – they can be hugely powerful (see recent post on Sussex Road Safety Video).  Marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog generated over 600,000 ‘engagement points’ in 2009.  That’s real people engaging with his content, not just page views.  Any topic he discussed would therefore have been seen and copied, linked to, recommended, tweeted, liked on Facebook etc. a huge number of times beyond this.

……………For the rest of the article head over to the new Penguin Blog

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.