Charitable Engagement and Social Media: Considerations for Best Practices

Early in 2019, United Way of Johnson and Washington Counties (UWJWC) engaged ACT’s innovation and research unit, ACTNext, to review their stakeholder engagement efforts and to explore ways to reach a younger audience, less familiar with United Way and their important mission.

UWJWC already had a robust communication and engagement strategy in place; their donors and volunteers broadly identified with their mission and messaging, and they enjoyed excellent brand recognition. However, even the best strategies can benefit from revisiting assumptions and tactics, and having a third party perform that review can be especially beneficial.

The ACTNext team, with a strong research background in gamification, engagement, and computational psychometrics, was a natural fit to provide the consultation and develop innovative ways to meet UWJWC’s expanding needs.

Over the course of several meetings with UWJWC leadership, ACTNext team members Ada Woo, Alina von Davier, Andrew Cantine and Saad Khan developed a framework for reviewing their donor engagement efforts. The primary information supporting the review was collected through a series of focus groups held over the course of 6 months. Alongside the focus groups, ACTNext provided an analysis of UWJWC’s web presence and social media platform performance, which is the focus of this article.

A primary challenge UWJWC faced was identifying and leveraging the most effective of the changing means by which they might reach their audience(s). This is a perennial issue for organizations, but the explosion of social networking apps and the sense of immediacy infused in 21st century, mobile-first, communication has exacerbated the challenge considerably.

The broad gamut of media — email, sms, photo, video, audio, augmented and virtual reality, along with others yet to be developed, all compete for user attention. If inter-media competition weren’t enough, there is also the competition between apps and platforms for each type of media.

Even if an organization’s mission and supporting messaging are crystal clear, relying on assumptions about how media is consumed can lead to being on a back foot when it comes to engaging audience(s) where they congregate, in ways that resonate, as platforms and the media they support evolve dynamically.

Our analysis indicated that engaging your audience on multiple platforms, if not done well, can lead to sentiments like indolence about a brand. Cross-platform distribution of content, without tailoring it specifically to that outlet, can leave users asking, “What’s the point of posting this here, if I’m going to see the same content elsewhere?” or “Why is this tweet leading me to content on Facebook? Just tell me what I need to know.” Some people had strong reactions to seeing cross-posted content, primarily with privacy issues about Facebook driving the discussion.

This is a hard battle. While significant, the desire for platform specific content was far from a unanimous sentiment, and constraints on a communication team’s time and workload has to be balanced against the value of engaging or enraging individuals on a given platform.

Social media management software can help with scheduling and distribution, but platform-specific technical requirements like image and file format, handle and tagging paradigms, video length, and the pace and directionality of interactions all chip away at time that could be spent strategizing and creating content in favor of formatting and distributing content. The peril, of course, is getting caught in a cycle where tactical decisions supplant strategy.

The findings in the report also supported the notion that time is money, and the window to deliver value, or a call to action, is small (i.e. time your audience is active on a platform, the half-life of the information’s relevancy, shrinking attention spans, etc.).

The focus groups strongly expressed the importance of immediacy and described universal frustration with slow, mobile-unfriendly webpages and cumbersome donation processes, and they wanted the information about the impact of their donations (an impact calculator) to be at the very top of UWJWC’s homepage, right next to the “donate” button.

This is well-trodden ground — consider Google’s recently announced “scarlet-letter” URL badge for websites with slow load times. To Google, it doesn’t matter what the content on the page might be (in this case), only that it’s optimized for speed. Anything other than near-instantaneous delivery of your content is understood to be time spent wasting (Google’s) users’ time. If your page loads slowly, that badge will be the first thing your potential users see, and may drive them to better performing websites delivering similar content and/or making a similar “ask.”

Fortunately, the essentials of effective communication change little, despite the expanding ways and means by which we interact and communicate in the digital commons. Clarity and consistency, along with delivering a compelling and coherent narrative all remain central to success.

Ultimately, we found that content is still king. An organization’s mission and message have to be obviously valuable and clearly transmitted from the outset. But organizations also need to tell a story about how that value affects customers and stakeholders, and it needs to be done in a diversity of ways that resonate with key audiences. Stakeholders are not monolithic, and there are repercussions to communicating with them as if they were.

UWJWC’s mission and messaging were clear and they delivered compelling narratives that were relevant to their audience. Their users just wanted to be able to provide their time or money, and experience narratives about the impact of their time or money, in a more streamlined fashion.

The balance between being spread too thin and not reaching far enough into the digital ether is hard to strike, and there are difficult choices to make about which battles to pick. The central challenge for organizations, non-profit or otherwise, is the increasingly important roles that technical proficiency and workload (in service of multi-platform reach) play in successful communication strategies.

The time passed long ago when teams developing strategy, crafting, and delivering digital collateral could reliably bank on the effectiveness of an 80% cat-video content stream.

The 2020 industry benchmark is 65%.