Let’s ruin the joke for everyone by analysing charities’ use of humour as a brand-building tool, yay. Charities, on the whole, are pretty bad at being funny on social media. There are reasons for this. We depend so heavily upon an earnest, sincere tone of voice that we can find…

‘My manager doesn’t see the point of Instagram.’ ‘My boss says we don’t need to change the website, because we already spent money on it three years ago.’ ‘We can’t use emojis in our emails because the CEO doesn’t like it.’ The details may change, but it’s a common form…

Rallying to the defence of the charity sector in every crisis risks stifling the difficult conversations amongst us. I’ve been experiencing a bit of déjà vu lately. Because as the Oxfam scandal hasunfolded over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed certain common reactions dominating many of the online discussions…

In times of emergency, social media managers don’t need official statements. We need flexibility. Let’s imagine you’re a social media manager, working at one of the UK’s charities, when without warning, a big negative story goes down. It’s scary, it’s unforeseen, and it has the potential to do enormous damage…

A couple of months ago, when I had far too much time on my hands, I trawled backwards through the 2017 newsfeeds of five major, national UK charities that I’d seen using Facebook Live regularly or semi-regularly this year. There were 25 Live videos in total. And 19 of them…

Divination, Superstition, & Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm ‘Just an offering to the gods of the algorithm.’ Jay Rosen, New York Times If you ever want to gain insight into the hidden laws of the universe but don’t know where to start, Wikipedia’s ‘Methods of divination’ list contains several dozen entries, and…