Reading some of the posts on the charity blogger and charity sleuths websites, it struck me that there’s a big change coming in the way donors relate to charities. And I don’t think charities are really prepared for it.
Two currents are discernible.
The first I’m going to call the ‘consumerisation’ of donors. There’s a growing number of people who are becoming far more active in how and why they choose their charity. These people won’t simply respond to a charity appeal on an emotional level. Instead they’ll do their research, comparing the effectiveness and perhaps the efficiency of different charites. Deciding whether or not the charity deserves their custom. These may not make up a large pool of people just now, but they tend to be younger than typical charity donors, their numbers are likely to grow and I suspect they may be a rather influential groups of people.
The second current stems from that great leveller of information – the internet. It is now possible to quickly and easily reseach large numbers of charities online. Prospective donors can find out what charities say about themselves and what others say about them. And donors can set up a blog and talk about their good and bad experiences with charities. The ones they like and the ones they distrust. How long is it before someone takes a leaf from ratemyteacher and we get ratemycharity.com or the non-profit equivalent of tripadvisor with donors marking charities’ performance out of ten? There are already resources in the UK like Guidestar, a database of charities. All it needs is a forum or blog attached and you could see donor opinion unleashed.
And how are charities responding to this revolution? Well I think it’s going to be a rocky process, and charities that fail to embrace both the spirit and the potential of this interconnected world will suffer. Take a look at this post to see how the response of some charities to questions about their CEO’s salary. That kind of stonewalling simply won’t cut it with the new generation of slightly cynical, slightly suspicious donors.
[tags]charity, internet, accountability, blogging, donors[/tags]
{ 2 trackbacks }