It can be a challenge to keep up with developments in media.  The speed of change is mind-boggling, with new platforms, functions and technologies announced almost every day.  Many are proclaimed to be ‘game-changing’ for charities and self-styled social media experts can be heard repeating the mantra to ‘adopt or get left behind’. With all the noise and hype, it can be hard to tell what’s important and what to ignore and, when you are already hard-pushed to deliver to existing objectives, it’s difficult to make the time to keep on top of it all.

It’s true, there have been flashes in the pan – not all social media platforms have survived (remember all the chatter about, if not on, Google Wave?).  It’s understandable, then, that fiddling around with some newfangled online something or other might seem like a risk not worth taking – particularly for the many charities whose resources are already strained.

But, surely none of this can excuse not taking long-established platforms seriously?

Take Facebook, which is really part of the furniture now.  It’s been around for over seven years and has 590,000,000 users internationally, 26,000,000 of which are in the UK.  It’s the most visited site both globally and in the UK; pipped to the post only by Google.  I think even the most hardened sceptic would be forced to agree that makes Facebook long past the point of being niche and that there’s no longer any question about it being important and worth investing time in.

So, if in doubt, and when resources are limited, my advice is to focus your resources where the most users are, and where that use is well established.

It’s not the right audience for us

‘Our supporters are older people who don’t use social media’

Really? Whenever I hear this the phrase, ‘You get what you ask for’, springs immediately to mind.  Is your current supporter age group really the only age group that will support you, or are they just the age group you’ve traditionally approached for support?  Most charities have been using traditional media to target older people – empty-nesters, with higher disposable incomes – with their fundraising asks for as long as they can remember, so it’s no coincidence that most charity donor databases are dominated by older people.

But does this mean that charities should only expect this profile of person to support them going forward?  When well over a third of the total population of the UK uses Facebook, can you really say that large numbers of your supporters aren’t already logging into it regularly or that Facebook users that don’t support you yet won’t be interested in your cause if you speak to them about it in the right way?

I firmly believe that the sector shouldn’t limit its ambitions and expectations to engaging donors in their golden years, and needs to reach out to other audiences in new ways.  For many charities, the need to diversify their support and future-proof their income is a pressing one.  When so many organisations are concerned, and rightly so, about their ‘ageing donor bases’, their reliance on Trusts and Foundations or, worse, statutory funding, surely the opportunity to engage with different audiences through such a low-cost medium is one too good not to be taken a little more seriously?

Besides, in truth, whilst it may be the case that the majority of your donors might be getting on a bit may well not be using Facebook, there’ll be other groups on your charity’s database – including events fundraisers, volunteers, campaigners – with different profiles, many of which are regularly using social media.  That’s not to mention the journalists, policy-makers and other influencers you are trying to reach (Twitter is a great route to these), and charities’ clients and other stakeholders that will be among the many millions using a variety of social media every day.

The value isn’t proven

‘We are unconvinced about the return on investment and – until we have seen proof of it – we can’t justify the resource or the budget’

How many times has your charity invested money in a doordrop or direct mail test campaign, only to receive a handful of responses, but learned from the experience and gone on to develop more and more effective fundraising approaches as a result?  For any charity with an established individual giving programme, the answer is probably, ‘many times’ because, without this kind of pragmatism, much of the good work that UK charities have funded over the years would not have been possible.

Then there are the PR and comms departments, happy to send out press releases to a largely disinterested media, in order to receive the odd piece of coverage, which is probably not as long as they’d hoped for and didn’t contain many of the key messages they’d carefully crafted.

What strikes me as odd is that charities are resigned to spending money on media, or time on press releasing, to get their messages out and have learned to accept that the return on their investment won’t always be what they hoped for, but that social media, and many other digital channels, for that matter, are often not considered in the same light.

Why is a small mention in a national paper – where you have no way of knowing how many people actually read it, or whether it resonated with or engaged them – commonly perceived to be worth more than the same messaging being discussed, debated and shared on blogs, Facebook and Twitter?

Yet, there are many that would be far happier with a small mention in The Sun (the most-read UK daily newspaper, circulation 2,817,857) than a meme on Twitter (with the potential to be seen by up to 3,100,000 users in the UK), mentions on Facebook seen in an equivalent number of newsfeeds or views on highly-read blogs or widely-used message boards.

Online buzz, status updates, tweets and page views are often still seen as more insignificant and disposable even though they exist – and can be searched and read – long after most newspapers have been recycled.

Surely daily newspapers are the original disposable media, but they are somehow perceived to carry a weight disproportionate to their readerships and the engagement they generate.  I wonder whether, to a large extent, this is simply because they’ve been around for such a long time and people feel comfortable with them, and whether social media just need to be around a while longer before they are accepted into the mainstream?

The problem with this is that technological developments are move so much faster now than they ever have, and show no sign of slowing, so we don’t have the luxury of waiting for them to embed anymore.  New media will be born, they will expand, some will contract, and others will die, but one thing you can guarantee there will be more and more of them and that they will replace the methods before them sooner or later.  To some extent, blindly clinging to the old at the expense of the new just isn’t an option regardless of the barriers.

It’s crucial to interrogate decisions about investment, be clear about meeting objectives, know that we’re engaging the right audiences effectively and that we are achieving the best returns for our organisations.  However, the basic fact remains that the sector still has to take a series of leaps of faith with new channels – including social media – just as it once did with the traditional ones once, for the simple reasons that they exist, that more and more people are using them and charities need to engage with those people.  Coming together and sharing our successes and the lessons we’ve learned, through conventions like this one and communities like NFPtweetup, are so important because they help us make sure those leaps of faith are as carefully calculated and informed as possible.  I’m really looking forward to sharing and learning more on 13 June.

This post was originally featured on the Third Sector Social Media blog.