UK fundraisers are not identifying new markets such as social media viral campaigns and are becoming ‘digital dinosaurs’ as a result, Richard Taylor, executive director of fundraising and marketing at Cancer Research UK, said yesterday.

Taylor said charities must make more use of available platforms such as crowdfunding, social media and mobile apps to grow the giving market through innovative campaigns.

"As a sector, we need to embrace the new mechanisms available for fundraising," he said. "We need to be more innovative and have some imagination in our campaigning."

"We can't keep jumping on the viral bandwagon like we have been doing,” he said. “We need to identify these new markets ourselves and go to meet them. At the moment, when it comes to technology, we are digital dinosaurs!"

Taylor made the comments at Revolutionise's Annual Lectures held at The Royal Institution yesterday.

He went on to say that the crowdfunding market in the US was already worth around $8bn (£5.1bn) and growing fast. However he said UK fundraisers have failed to take full advantage of the mechanism and are "way behind the curve on this already".

Taylor said Cancer Research has launched several initiatives to in an effort to implement new technology across various platforms.

He told the auditorium that the charity had partnered with a US video blogger who has more than three million followers on YouTube to help raise awareness among younger users.

"We have also established a 'hackathon' where employees submit innovative tech ideas and are then locked in a room for 48 hours to work with software engineers to develop a prototype," he said.

The Genes in Space mobile app arcade-style game, where users can shoot mutant gene variations, was the result of one of these sessions, he added.

"We have to excite our staff about the future of technology," Taylor said. "We have to future proof our ideas and radicalise our products to capture this new market. And we have to do it now."