Charities do fantastic work all year round to raise awareness and money to support the
causes in which they campaign for. Towards the end of 2019, there was some suggestion that charities are not doing enough with the digital marketing tools they have to increase the awareness through various online channels.
In order to tackle this issue, Charity Excellence Framework, a free online toolkit which helps charities assess their work, has recently produced a report which is based on 1,500 questionnaires among charities about their organisation. Different aspects of the charities work is scored by a traffic light colour, in areas such as fundraising or strategy. The colour scheme ranges from ‘green’, where charities are performing well, to ‘amber’ which suggest there is much room for improvement. Of course, if they are scored ‘red’, then they are pretty much non-existent in that area.
In regards to communication, 75% of charities were given an ‘amber’ warning. These include the use of their website to become cost-effective and raise funds. Charities use of Google Analytics was also given an amber warning. Charities are failing to monitor the progress of online activity in a bid to improve. In order to reach a mass of their audience, tracking data is very important to identify the channels which are a success, and the others which are not.
“There are lots of opportunities for charities to achieve a great deal more, often fairly easily and at low/no cost,” said Charity Excellence Framework Founder Ian McLintock.
“The challenges around digital are well known and too many charities are still missing out on opportunities such as contactless, text donations and the Google Ads Grant, and even in using basic analytics.
Onto the positive, many charities were scored with ‘green’ when it came to the use of social media; using content to engage with their customers, as well as using video effectively. The results were based on 2019 questionnaire responses and are comparable to data collected in 2018. It suggests although some progress is being made, the areas in which require improvement are still the same.