The Social Aspect
Charities could be more social. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all about helping out people in need. But if you take social as in, connecting with people, there is a lot to gain.
Most charities are well connected with their donators. But what about the others? what about the friends of the donators and what about the other charities in the same fields? It’s not that charities wouldn’t love to reach out to them, but how do you do so, in a social matter?
Charities could use Buckets of Promotion, but that will get them only so far. It’s risky, because if they shout too loud, they might loose their humble image. It’s not so effective, because this one-to-many communication is interrupting people who probably don’t want to hear their story.
“More and more people don’t like the mass mailings they get from charities.”
Jordan van Bergen in 9 Questions.
It didn’t take me long to find a quote, because this is a big problem. So if you can’t shout, then it seems there is nothing more to do then just have a good ‘product’ and hope the word will spread. Well why just hope? It might sound strange, but social behaviour is designable.
In recent times we’ve seen that websites designed with social behaviour in mind have great succes. If we look at Friendster (24 million members), mySpace, Hi5 or the Dutch Hyves, they all have little content of their own. It’s the users that provide content for other users. These sites only set the rules, a structure that encourages social behaviour.
So this changes the game from one-to-many into one-to-one-to-one-to-one-etc. This word-to-mouth, or click-to-click as we might call it, is superfast and works as a pull media and almost never as a push media. This means that people who want to get information go get it themselves. It isn’t pushed towards them, hoping they might want it.
This is only one piece of the social aspect. Charities are about people, not about money. So that’s where the focus must be on. There are lots of other possibilites of making charities more social, for example:
- What if being involved with charities was more fun?
- What if you can see what the boy/girl you secretly admire supports?
- What if you could start your own charity within a couple of minutes?
- If you knew the people you trust are trusting a charity, would that make you more likely to donate?
If charities want to reach beyond their donators, they need a network designed for this purpose.