New Report Highlights How Charities Use Technology
A new report is casting light on how charities here, and around the world, are embracing technology. The Global NGO Technology Report from Nonprofit Tech for Good and Funraise.org is the only crowdsourced, multilingual survey and report for the NGO sector. Digital Charity Lab is the official Irish partner for the report in 2019, and has this free downloadable report on the Irish charity data.
Some of the most interesting findings were:
- Irish charities have embraced email marketing, with 78% sending email communications. However, many only contact their lists infrequently – opportunities exist to send more emails and deepen relationships.
- Irish charities are using Google Ads more than their peers in the rest of Europe and North America – but a significant proportion that have the Google Grant are not using it.
- Only 30% of Irish charities are using Facebook’s Fundraising tools, well below the North American figure of 45%.
- Social media is popular among Irish charities, with 96% of charities using it. However, only 48% have a social media strategy and only 28% measure ROI on social, which suggests that use of social channels is not always strategic.
About benchmarking
Reports such as this one and the M+R Benchmarks are really useful for looking for opportunities for organisations to get ahead of their competitors. Beware though of using benchmarking to accept mediocre results, or to draw the conclusion that because a majority of charities are using a particular channel, it must be effective. The point above about the majority not even measuring their return on investment on social media really underlines this!
The best benchmarking you can do is against yourself: try to improve your own results, because converting some of your existing subscribers and followers to campaigners, donors or volunteers will be much more cost effective than trying to acquire a completely new audience.
More analysis of the results on the Digital Charity Lab website.
Digital Charity Lab’s online courses in key digital skills and free downloads for digital non-profits.