Haiti Relief Shows Digital Giving’s Potential
| Other articles on: | fundraising • information technology • Social Entrepreneurship |
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| Posted: | January 25, 2010 10:46 AM |
| Author: | Todd Cohen |
The massive charitable response to the devastation in Haiti should be a wake-up call for the charitable marketplace.
Using text-messaging and other digital applications, givers quickly have donated millions of dollars to relief efforts.
Givers also showed social media can be powerful tools for charitable giving.
Just as online giving came of age in the days after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunamis in Asia, the Twitter generation has shown through its Haiti relief that texting is a strategy all nonprofits need to understand and put to use.
The challenge for nonprofits is figuring out how to do that.
The recession has hit the charitable marketplace hard, stressing nonprofits with rising demand for services and greater competition for shrinking donor dollars.
And in the face of the recession and a tradition of struggling to do too much with too little, too few nonprofits truly have taken full advantage of the Web and email, which these days already seem like “old” media.
Nonprofits tend to be slow on the uptake in adopting new media and fully integrating new digital tools into the way they do business.
Seeing the outpouring of Haitian relief using social media, nonprofits that truly care about connecting with givers using the means of communication their givers prefer should invest the time and effort to truly understand how to build digital tools into their overall operations.
Beyond just being cool and easy to use, social media actually can make a big difference in the way nonprofits raise money, recruit volunteers, deliver services, and communicate with constituents and supporters.
The huge question for nonprofits is whether they actually will do what it takes to plug into new media and put it to productive use.
Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.
Comment
Todd,
How do you feel nonprofits can capitalize on the potential for giving through texting and social media when the world is not hyper-aware of the need to give to a cause? In a recent course on Volunteer Management, a classmate who is a Volunteer Coordinator for the Red Cross informed us that the Red Cross recently implemented the texting technology, but that it hadn’t been put to wide-scale use. Now that it has been proven effective, I wonder how similar initiatives can be made successful for “smaller” or more localized causes?
»» Posted by: Chelsea Hick on January 25, 2010 02:09 PM