How Charities are Making a Difference through Social Media

Social media these days is no more about distractions and wasting away your spare time. In fact, social media is playing a huge role in the way time, money, resources and awareness is being spread in the world today to help those in need.

With many non-profit organizations now using social media to make the world a better place, it’s not just about putting your charitable information, goals and success out there to others -- it’s also about understanding how to take advantage of everything social media has to offer.

For charities of all types of sizes, social media is often the best resource available.

Social media eliminates the need for intermediaries and takes to message directly to the audience compared to advertising or press meets. This gives charities more control over their message and helps them to build relationships with their audience in real-time.

Though social media may have its challenges, charities know that this is one platform where they can tell their stories, engage supporters, increase brand awareness and promote fundraising initiatives.

Recent surveys have shown that Facebook and Twitter are the most active and popular social media platforms used by some 900 odds non-profit organizations. And you can see plenty of active charitable foundations known for using social media in their outreach and efforts here.

With all of that being said, there are several charities that are taking advantage of social media through their work and following certain practices that have gone down well with the audience. Some of the most effective ways to use social media for such organizations include:

1. Thanking the audience. People like being thanked.

2. Telling the story of the charity

3. Staying informed

4. Engaging in a healthy dialogue with the audience

5. Using influence to promote action

6. Raising awareness and hope

Proactive actions on social media like using peer-to-peer fundraising encourages the online audience to share the charity's campaign with their networks. This helps in reaching out to a large audience. Also, charities create and share donation requests through images, captivating videos, timely statistics, and asking donors to engage with the posts with liking, retweeting, sharing and commenting, etc.

Today, many brands in different sectors use social media platforms as a part of their digital marketing strategy, and we will be highlighting three examples of such, through the remaining content below.

Many well-known charities have used social media platforms for their marketing campaigns and have been successful there. Some inspiring examples are shown below.

WE Charity

WE Charity is an international charity that focuses on children's rights and education, while also spreading awareness about those in need. The organization is quite active in Canada, the US, UK, Africa, India, and China -- while also making sure their charitable efforts span throughout the world.

The funds, resources and outreach for various projects are raised through many different social media programs, volunteer work and donations, while also coming from continued community awareness through their social reach.

With media coverage and live telecasts of their WE Day events the organization continues to reach new audiences, and spread awareness to help those in need. Many of the world’s top celebrities and social media influencers have attended such events, which only helps spread awareness for the cause even further.

The We Day event has more than 5 million viewers via televised broadcasts and more than 2.3 million Facebook fans, making it one of the most successful charitable causes.

After taking some time to view the social media accounts for WE Charity, you will see that they have been able to amass nearly 3 million followers on Facebook, over 300,000 on Twitter and another 300,000-plus on Instagram.

Make-A-Wish Foundation

The Make-A-Wish charity has been granting wishes to numerous children since 1980. The foundation is reported to have fulfilled a child's desire every 40 minutes in the US.

The foundation shares all the video wishes on its YouTube channel. Videos of children receiving their wishes are shared on the foundation’s website as well as its social media accounts of Facebook and Twitter, in addition to the YouTube Channel.

By sharing these videos, the foundation's interaction with its audience increased. These efforts were being reflected in the following statistics:

• 876K likes on Facebook

• 220K followers on Twitter

• 81,385 subscribers on YouTube

• 35000 followers on LinkedIn.

• 188299+ followers on Google

• The average price for granting a wish was up by 30% to $10,130.

• Raised $400 million in2020, up by 30% from $300 raised in 2015.

Save the Children

The Save the Children charity's main aim is to improve the lives of children globally, and the charity's main focus is on children living in war zones.

The organization created a video showing a situation where they showed a western child living in a warzone. This video helped donors empathize with the children and understand them better. The result was many shares of the video and donations.

In India alone, Save the Children alone changed the lives of 14 million children since 2008. Using social media to highlight child trafficking, hashtags “save the children" drew massive awareness when 1.1 million people talked about it on Twitter and 585 thousand on Facebook. The digital outreach has led to the charity having 3,50,000 active donors in the US alone. In social media, it has 3 million followers.

Statistics of Charitable Donations

In order to understand what it takes to launch a successful charitable organization that can out their efforts and donations to good use, we should also cover some of the latest charitable stats and information, as provided by DoubleTheDonation.com. Their latest report highlighted the following areas of charitable donations and how their time, finances and efforts are being put to good use.

• Overall giving has increased by 4.1 % in the past years, with online giving increased by 12.1 %.

• On average, charities were found to post to Facebook and Twitter once a day and Instagram twice a day.

• Charities have been sending out emails and print newsletters apart from posting short and long blogs and articles.

• For charities, Instagram was the fastest-growing social media platform with a 44% increase in followers.

• 29% of online donors say that social media is the communication tool that most inspires them to give.

• 87% of donors first donate from a social referral source.

• 71% of charities agree that social media is effective for online fundraising

• 34% of charities have paid for social media advertisements.

• Social Media drives 57% of their traffic to fundraising campaign pages.

As you can imagine, these numbers are always drastically changing as social media and the internet continue to change the ways charitable organizations perform outreach and operations online.

How Charities are Taking Advantage of What Social Media has to Offer

As you can see, through each of the examples above, when it comes to social media and charitable efforts, it’s a win-win situation for all.

While most charitable foundations focus solely on financial donations, the ones that incorporate social media and awareness in their campaigns often find much more success.

Through the use of social media engagement to increase comments, likes and shares, charities can reach more individuals and bring in more resources and funds to help their cause.

Of the many different ways these organizations can take advantage of what social media has to offer, the ability to instantly reach millions of people around the world has to be one of the most precious.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinoins of the edtiors or the management of EconoTimes