Digital Innovation for Charities
This is the first in a series of monthly Medium posts about innovating with digital tools and services for specific sectors and industries. These posts are the output from a process we’re refining at Fieldwork throughout 2019, which I’ll write about later in the year.
Since a lot of our work is with charities, it makes sense for us to start there, so here’s a collection of ideas and areas of focus for charities that are thinking about ways to innovate using digital tools.
Supporting Volunteers
Charities often rely on volunteer networks for delivering services and/or fundraising, and there’s a lot of potential for innovative digital tools in this area. A couple of key areas to think about:
On-boarding
- What are your new volunteers looking for when they start working with you? What information do they need? What will make them feel confident about getting started?
- If you have local groups of volunteers, what tools can you provide for key champions to help them recruit and on-board new people?
- What are the specific things about your organisation that attract volunteers, and how can you support those features through the on-boarding process?
- Where do potential volunteers get stuck? Can you research the most difficult steps to becoming a volunteer and find new ways to help people through them?
Communication and Co-ordination
- Can you help volunteers to co-ordinate and communicate with their networks to make more things happen more efficiently? Research the pain points that your key co-ordinators are experiencing and work on ways to help fix them.
- For some organisations it could make sense to work on ways for people to form ad-hoc groups and movements around specific issues and/or locations, without any commitment to continued volunteering. Think about how you might enable groups to have an absolute focus on one very specific thing at a time.
Impact Reporting & Your Home Page
Whether someone is volunteering or donating, the keys to sustained action are an understanding of the impact their contributions have and a continued belief in, and alignment with, your organisation’s vision of a better world.
A big issue we often see with charities of any size is that they have so much going on, and have built so much messaging up over the years, that their website’s home page is attempting to do too many things at once. This works ok for many use cases — users can usually find what they’re looking for — but there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Impact reporting is often not relevant for the specific scenarios in which most users visit your website. It’s very rare for users to visit a charity website as they would a news site, they tend to visit for a specific reason, like looking up a project, learning about how they can contribute, or to access specific services. General impact reporting content probably just gets in the way in these situations, yet the majority of charity website home pages look like news portals.
charity: water are a great example of a charity getting their digital presence spot on. Their home page looks much more like a product page than a news portal, and makes it very clear what they do and what they want from people visiting the page.
It’s interesting to think about how your home page might change if you were to:
- Focus on specific user contexts, like accessing a service, becoming a volunteer, making a donation, managing membership, learning about an issue, etc.
- Ruthlessly prioritise user contexts. What if you had to pick one thing to occupy the whole screen when someone first arrives at your website?
And how your impact reporting might change if you think about it in these terms:
- It is consumed mainly via external platforms and websites.
- Your team will use it to share via social media, create press releases, and communicate directly with supporters.
- People will only ever land on this part of your website because they’ve found it via social media or a news article, or have received an email from you, etc. — nobody is going to stop by under their own steam to see how you’re doing.
- Close the gap between contributions and impact by demonstrating how specific contributions have specific effects.
Rethinking Donations
Donations are an important source of funding for most charities. Some potential areas for digital innovation might be:
- Exploring new or updated donation models. What if you could donate monthly but based on a monthly impact report, for example, by clicking on a button in the impact report to increase your donation amount?
- In-person donations via contactless/phone payment. Tap For Change make a contactless donation box for charities. Does this open up any new opportunities for your organisation?
- Cryptocurrency is an interesting space to watch for charities. Huge reductions in transaction fees for small amounts, and near instant transaction times could make micropayments (pennies or even fractions of pennies) feasible, and the user experiences built around these new types of digital money could reduce the friction for users making digital payments. The technology and ecosystems around it still have a long way to go, but advancements like these in payment technology will open up lots of new ways to think about donations.
Sharing Information & Open Sourcing
A lot of charities generate useful data either as a core activity, through research and/or data gathering, or as a by-product of their core activities but most — particularly longer established organisations — tend to be a bit inward looking with this stuff, seeing it as a commodity to be protected and released strategically as officially published reports. What if your organisation reversed that outlook and opened up to collaboration and open source data initiatives?
- Can you open-source datasets, research, or tools you’ve developed? What benefits might you be able to find in opening up raw data and research to community groups, technologists or journalists?
- Do you already have, or could you build, digital tools that you can share with other charities?
