Charities, listen: Don’t become static noise!

Where is marketing of charities organizations heading?

Organizations have a huge e-mailing list and a stack to send out to members and subscribers - but risk their e-mail ending up in the trash or being caught by spam filters.

How can we use online fundraising to get people to open their emails, create surprising marketing and have a strong online presence?

Charities try to work out strategies for smart Guerrilla marketing, and catching people off-guard, like how Amnesty International welcomed President Putin to Amsterdam. But it’s hard to know how to make a hard hitting campaign. Enter the internet and new online behaviour of donors:

Open your Email from a friend

The old paradigm of how to do fundraising was the organizations thinking “If we do something good people will donate”. We have to crank out press releases and slap them on our website. But this way of thinking is changing as the web is become user generated rather than organizations creating all the content. The organizations are becoming personal to the audience through user participation.

Organizations marketing is becoming more and more audience centered and user generated, meaning two way communication rather than one side packaging and sending off messages to the other.

Let your users become active

The BBC set up a user generated content team as a pilot already in April 2005 with 3 staff. The team was made permanent the same year and expanded, illustrating that citizen journalism is here to stay. User generated content was featured in Time magazine's 2006 Person of the Year, in which the person of the year was "you", implying all people contributing to user generated media such as YouTube and Facebook.

Create great marketing

Story-telling is also vital to generating traffic and engaging the audience, making posts personal. It’s human to tell stories, and human interest stories are what make us respond to posts immidiately. And this kind of content again sparks new media: like the annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, presented by YouTube. In 2011 the American Jewish World Service took home the prize for Best Large Organization Video by telling this story: A Public Service Announcement Not Approved by AJWS

We know that timing issues with the news agenda generates more donations. A profile that is creative, fun, personal and blog-style is more effective in reaching an online audience than a static profile. Organization however seem to have too large an audience to target the people who are interested and get lost in the static. Users can target their own networks, after all, they know the people they are trying to reach.

User generated content like personal fundraisers is a way to see what kind of stories your supporters are telling and sharing. Fundraisers who are reaching out to friends and family online on behalf of an organization also have a greater impact on potential donors as the request comes from a trusted source which the potential donors have an emotional tie to.

In effect: the fundraiser breaks through the static, so that you don’t have to. And later you can also see what they have done and implement this in your own marketing.