This week I was one of a few charity and digital industry types at a roundtable discussion on the future of giving technology hosted by the Guardian. It’ll be written up by the Guardian as an article in mid-May but while my memory is still fresh I wanted to capture a few of my personal take-outs.
- Technology adoption by charities:
- Charities are behind the curve in contrast to commercial, partly due to expense of adopting the new while its less consumerised and partly because the technology expertise is missing in many charities.
- There’s also the technology industry view that the charity sector doesn’t have a strong business case for investment (see previous post by me on Spring-giving).
- Innovation in charity sector:
- Some interesting models exist but often innovation comes from the ground up, but only where those ground staff are empowered to express their ideas.
- In smaller charities the silos that stifle innovation don’t exist (mostly).
- Giving trends:
- There’s a question over whether digital channels are fund-catching Vs fundraising.
- No charity wants to swap a channel which has a higher average gift for one with a lower average gift so sometimes a more convenient channel is a less effective one for the charity.
- We need to separate the process from the reason, people don’t give because you have an SMS number they give because of the cause and key messages.
- Some insights from experiences shared:
- SMS giving has meant a lower average gift for certain charities, choosing ‘slumps’ as focus point for using SMS calls to action is a good mitigation.
- Unexpected ‘social media’ response as seen with the tragic case of Claire Squires mostly demonstrate that giving is easier than it was before. They pose speed of response and decision-making challenges.
laila takeh thoughts on my everyday 