Charity Digital 2020
What an insane rollercoaster of a year…
This year has been exhaustingly intense. Uncertainty and change have made this year very difficult for us all. Yet, determined to still highlight all the brilliant work across digital in the charity sector (as per tradition) I’m back for my fifth year to look at some of my favourite things that deserve some recognition. As always, it’s by no means exhaustive but just a handful of some digital things that have really stood out to me.
Without further ado, here we go…
CALM: Finding The Words
Thanks to Luke for flagging this great video from CALM that reminds me a lot of another video I’d shared back in 2017 from Movember. Utilising how people view and interact with videos, rather than the narrative that is necessarily obvious at first.
That’s not all from the CALM team though: take a look at their Chrome extension which helps to remove some of the stress of COVID-19 noise from across the internet as you browse.
Facebook Fundraising through virtual events
It’s been hard to miss the unsurprisingly huge rise in popularity of virtual events and challenges this year. If your news feed is anything like mine then it’s full of various adverts for different takes on what indoor or outdoor activity can you do X number of in Y month. Many being run together with Adrian and the team at Get Your Stories Straight.
We’ve run three of such challenges at Breast Cancer Now, with the most recent two during October raising a combined £915,000.
What made these events even more special, was what was going on behind the scenes to make them work. We had implemented the Facebook Fundraiser API (possibly the first UK-based charity to do so) to automatically set up custom Facebook Fundraiser pages for participants. David Hunt, our Associate Director, Digital and Strategic Insight, shared some insight on the impact it has had so far on Twitter including how the pages created through this method raised 60% more on average than those set up in the traditional method for the same event.
Actively anti-racist
From the National Trust addressing the connections to slavery with their properties and items within, to Barnardo’s working to educate parents on having conversations with children about white privilege, this year has seen some important conversations start to happen across social media. While some charities are taking a stand and showing the importance of being actively anti-racist, there’s still a long way to go. This is especially evident if you were to see the horrendous responses to tweets like the one below.
Live video
Earlier this year I wrote a blog about how charities had been producing some brilliant live video content; from quizzes to Q&As, from galas to gigs, there have been so many great examples from charities across the sector. Even at a few months old now it’s still worth reading for a broad overview of some great examples. Needless to say that quality has continued, with organisations like Marie Curie continuing with their excellent celebrity quizzes, and Action for Children hosting an influencer-fronted Christmas quiz on IGTV with more than 476,000 views.
Like many others, we’ve hugely increased our live content production this year and have broadcast with our nurses or researchers 33 times in 2020 (more than double the number from 2019) to meet the increased demand for live content. As a result of this we’ve had 815,000 views of conversations and Q&As on topics ranging from sleep to post-surgery lingerie. You can view a playlist of all the videos from Facebook and Instagram on the Breast Cancer Now YouTube channel.
Virtual poppy appeal
Thanks to lockdown restrictions, selling poppies wasn’t going to be quite as straightforward as it has been in previous years. I love this approach by the Royal British Legion to create a augmented reality (AR) lens on Facebook to allow people at home to show their respects with a virtual poppy.
I’m interested to see whether we’ll see increased use of AR filters like this as restrictions continue into next year. Maybe we’ll even see a way of creating purchaseable filters like this — enabling users to donate in exchange for their virtual poppy or similar.
The Great Indoors
Way back when I was in Cubs/Beavers/Scouts I could never have imagined the impact a year like this would have had. It’s been incredible to see The Scouts move so quickly to enable children and young adults to continue learning new skills and having new experiences. In July, Lara Burns, Chief Digital Officer at The Scouts, shared that in just over a month of partnering with Zoom they’d already held 43,000 scout meetings virtually on the platform, with a third of a million combined attendees. 95% of local Scout groups have now signed up, through the central body, to use Zoom for their meetings. Thanks to their connection to the meeting platform, they’ve also been able to access increased capacity with one meeting having as many as 14,000 members.
As well as their close partnership with Zoom, The Scouts have also been busy with their ‘The Great Indoors’ badges series. Designed to encourage both scouts and (for the first time) non-scouts to have fun and learn new skills, using repurposed content and activities. It’s been such a huge year for product teams around the sector as organisations, like The Scouts, work to take their service delivery online to great effect in order to keep supporting and serving those they are there for.
Magic Marcus
No roundup of this year would be complete without some sort of nod to the incredible campaigning and fundraising done by Marcus Rashford under the umbrella of End Child Food Poverty. Whether you like Marcus, Man Utd, or even football in general, you can’t help but applaud the amazing efforts spearheaded by him to ensure children aren’t left hungry as a result of this pandemic.
Working together with the likes of FareShare and The Trussell Trust among others, he has driven more than 1.1m signatures on his petition to call the Government to act on child hunger, forcing them to u-turn twice. His Twitter feed has been turned into a constant thread of help being offered or sought all around the country, leading to crowd-created maps from All Of Us Together, and Joe Freeman with Ben Bowdler-Thomas and Beth Murray on the support available during October half-term.
Thanks for taking the time to reflect with me and read about just a few snippets of digital greatness from 2020. Here’s to 2021, keeping safe, and continuing to achieve brilliant things together.
PS. We’re currently looking for a Digital Marketing Officer to join our ace team at Breast Cancer Now and work across paid marketing and email. Find out more and apply on our website or if you know someone who might be a good fit, do pass this on. Thanks!
