Better social media strategies required to keep up with supporters says report
Melanie May | 28 April 2016 | News
A gap between the expectations of digital savvy consumers and the digital confidence of charities means too many charities are targeting the same shrinking pool of supporters, according to a new whitepaper from Equimedia.
The Social Media and Fundraising whitepaper says that while many charities are comfortable with using social media channels to reach and interact with their supporters, it is now time for charities to create more structured social media strategies.
The whitepaper points to the growth in smartphone penetration and social network use across all age groups, and states that with the introduction of payment and donation routes within these platforms, there is growing potential for social media to play a crucial role in supporter recruitment.
However, it also highlights the need for social media activity to reflect offline and online campaigns, across all channels, to maximise impact, as well as the need to consider the sort of support each channel is likely to generate. For example, Snapchat and Vine, it says, are more popular among a younger audience so might be best used for recruiting volunteers, event participants or raising awareness, rather than generating Direct Debit sign ups.
Therefore, the whitepaper says, charities need to understand which supporters will get involved with different campaigns, and which segments use each social network in order to identify the right influencers to approach.
It recommends using the huge amount of data generated by social media to gain insight on supporters, and employing attribution analysis, which studies the data generated by every single digital exposure to see which exposure was the most important and to help identify the value of each social channel used.
- Read Attribution analysis – a guest blog post by Louise Burgess, COO of Equimedia
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.