Allowing supporters to choose

Sue Fidler, Sue Fidler Ltd

For many years those of us who work with, for or as fundraisers have mumbled on about donor choice, while Comms have added the ubiquitous "we would like to contact you" opt in tick box and forgotten about it.

Now with the diversity of new media and the newer sibling social media our supporters are finally pushing us into putting our stories where they are, rather than the historical expectation that they will come to us. With the MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/linked-in networks, flickr and YouTube, twitter as well as blogs, RSS, web, email and SMS we all need a presence in a wide diversity of online spaces.

It is no longer enough to have a website and expect supporters to come. We need to proactively pull our audiences to the site with content that has a value to them. We must also pitch our features and core values in the wider network as that is where our new supporters are now living.

The challenge of course is both to be in all the right places so supporters can join us and to create enough content to keep it fresh and interesting. For smaller charities with a non-existent web team and over-busy Marketing and Comms staff the challenge is increased.

The best option is to design a marketing strategy for each channel, as we have learnt to do for direct marketing, phone, billboards and other offline channels. As we learn about the audience of each network we will learn to tailor the stories for that channel by the normal socio-demographic profiles.

Until we have a history to learn from we can still make educated guesses about the age and type of users by looking at the content of the most popular areas of the various sites. Just by knowing Bebo has a very young play profile while Linked-in has a professional middle aged user group we can start to apply the lessons we have learnt offline to our online supporters.

Alternatively we can produce a small number of stories and put them in all of the online spaces, adding them to our sites or blogs, offering an RSS feed and sending out both bulk emails and Facebook style updates to everyone who has joined our groups.

The later allows a smaller charity with limited resources to repurpose each piece of content simply by creating a precis to use in the shorter mediums. The downside is that people who have signed up to multiple channels, such as an email newsletter and a Facebook group, may get the story twice. Some of them might even opt out of one or other channel.

But then isnt that the whole point of choice - allowing people to chose which medium they want to engage with.