Charities should embrace charity ‘slacktivists’ because social is a great ramp for new donors, delegates at the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands heard at yesterday’s opening plenary.
At the session, called 'Inspire, connect, transform', which is the theme of this year’s IFC, Beth Kanter, the American author of The Networked Nonprofit and a social media consultant, said people who do something for a charity online that requires minimal personal effort, such as signing a petition or liking something on Facebook, are sometimes dismissed as ‘charity slacktivists’.
The assumption is that their low-cost efforts are a lesser substitute for more substantive actions such as making a donation.
Slacktivists become donors
But Kanter shared findings from a study, published last year, which looked at whether more social media activities equal more donations. It was from a sample of people in the UK, Canada and the US of 30,000.
It found that social media activity is “more of a ramp-on to donations”, she said.
“The challenge of retention and engagement is to keep them there and keep them engaged. Not only do they donate, they tap into their networks,” Kanter said.
The study showed that the more someone uses Facebook the more likely they are to have made a social-inspired donation, especially those who frequently update their status or like lots of pages, but less so those who have a large number of friends.
Kanter highlighted this summer’s social fundraising craze, the ice bucket challenge, which she said was started by the charity slacker Peter Frates, who has ALS, and went on to raise more than $115m in the US and was taken around the world, raising more than £11m in the UK for MND Association and Macmillan Cancer Support.
“Don’t be a fundraising slacker, embrace and love those slacktivists, they are important to your organisation,” she said.
Change.org
Ben Rattray, the founder and chief executive of Change.org, said online activism was often dismissed as “kids clicking things online” that could not possibly have any impact. But he said his site’s average user was 40 years old and the most effective way of mobilising change off-line was by starting online.
He spoke about several examples of the site’s power to galvanise support and change real-world policy, including Jennifer Tyrrell’s petition to end the Boy Scouts of America’s discrimination against openly gay young people and leaders.
Rattray said Change.org has more than 75 million users with 20,000 new petitions created every month.
National Geographic
Keith Jenkins, the executive editor for digital at National Geographic, which is a non-profit, spoke about the power of visual images and storytelling.
Traditionally the magazine has been a creator of content, delivered to readers’ doorsteps, he said. “We live in a world now that does things faster and we have to be faster, we can communicate in real time, we have to inspire people every day and we wanted to build a community.”
National Geographic created Your Shot – where people who love the magazine and photography can share their work and 200,000 images are uploaded every month, he said.
Since its launch last year, a picture editor has selected 3.5 million images to publish on the site.
“Embrace the power of visual storytelling to do your work,” Jenkins said.
