Digital marketing offers charities a vast array of
opportunities in outreaching to a wide audience. While the opportunities are
vast, the competition charities face on digital platforms is significant. Despite
the level of competition, digital marketing has changed the face of charities
and how they approach their fundraising and marketing campaigns. Through the
prominence of digital marketing the charity sector has witnessed a significant
development and increase in engagement in recent years.
While digital marketing has increased engagement with
charities and has changed the way charities engage with the public, is it the
only option for charities? The aim of this piece is to provide an opinion and
explore the options available for marketing/fundraising campaigns.
What does digital marketing offer charities?
Digital marketing as mentioned, has become a vital element
and a core communication method for charities and non-profit organisations.
With the development of an optimised website and online presence, charities can
capitalise the current digital trends and therefore allow engagement with the
proportion of their specific target audience or public in general.
Digital marketing is no ‘one-trick pony’ and can take shape
in several formats. The versatility digital marketing offers charities is vast
and allows charities to portray and communicate their message in several ways.
For a charity to achieve its potential in today’s world, digital marketing must
be a significant component of their fundraising efforts.
With the charity sector becoming so saturated in recent
years (180,00 + registered charities in the UK), digital marketing allows
charities with smaller budgets to compete with charities who have national and
global reach.
Digital marketing strategies such as search engine
optimisation (SEO), allow supporters/ the public to come across your charity
when people search for relevant keywords. The more effective an SEO campaign
is, the higher the ranking a charity can achieve in Google. This is one of the
most effective ways to level the ‘playing field’ of the influence that budgets
can have on the success of a campaign.
The importance of social media?
Social media has become an integral part of our lives, with
it now becoming the number 1 communication method across the globe. Most
importantly, social media and the number of available platforms allows
charities to reach a national and international audience with relative ease,
and for free.
Using social media platforms to post content (photos/videos/
calls to action) naturally encourages people to share posts, which subsequently
grows the outreach of a campaign and engage with a wider audience. Such success
of using social media can be seen with UNICEF’s ‘Likes Don’t Save Lives’
campaign, Cancer Research #nomakeupselfie and Movember, which gained 1.2
million social media mentions in their first year of running the campaign
(2013).
Why social media needs to be an element of your digital
marketing campaign.
The latest Global Digital Report
produced by We Are Social, reported that globally there has been an increase of
91% in new users of the internet since January 2018. The UK witnessed an
increase of 0.6%, which now brings the internet penetration to 95% of the UK
population.
The report produced by We Are Social indicates an extensive
penetration of social media into the UK population. As of March 2019, it was
reported:
- Active Social Media Users: 45 million = 67%
- Mobile Social Media Users: 39 Million = 58%
- Average Day time use: 1hour 50 minutes
(https://wearesocial.com/uk/digital-in-the-uk)
Most Successful digital marketing charity campaigns:
- WaterAid: Everyday WaterAid
WaterAid took advantage of readily available 360 video
technology to create ground-breaking content, immersing the person watching the
video into the day-day work of staff around the world. Deliberating leaving out
statistics, the videos created allowed the charity to directly show where and
how donations are used.
- Amnesty International: The
Undeniable Wonder of Family life
To spread awareness of the is ‘Family Together’ campaign,
they invited families to spend time in a large Perspex box on London’s South
Bank. The whole motive behind the campaign was to create an idea which would
draw people to have a look at what was going on, and then broadcasted on
Facebook Live.
- Worldwide Breast Cancer:
#knowyourlemons
This was one of the most simple but effective uses of social
media. The innovative marketing campaign published in 23 different languages,
was so effective as it managed to show a different way breast cancer can
manifest itself and bypassing the stringent rules on social media. The simple
use of lemons as demonstrations made it easy for Women to know when to contact
a professional, if they notice something out of the ordinary.
Conclusion
With the increased
influence and penetration of the internet in the daily lives of the average
person, the importance of effective digital marketing will increase. However,
it is importance to recognise that a marketing campaign cannot be defined by a
single method. An effective marketing campaign will encompass a mixture of
techniques and marketing strategies. In short, the answer is digital marketing
is not the only option for charities. Although this piece has focused solely on
digital marketing strategies, more traditional marketing campaigns should not
be forgotten.
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