Yesterday we had the chance to attend CharityComm’s Engagement Conference. And it was incredible! We learnt so much and met many great people. The conference focused on the concept of charity engagement. It’s a tricky topic to tackle but the speakers did a marvellous job. No matter what your charity is currently doing, there’s always new tools and techniques to learn to help you best connect with your audiences. Here’s a little of what we learnt yesterday about engagement strategy:
Engagement is …
Firstly what is engagement in a charity context? Engagement is connecting to your audiences in a way that inspires their involvement in your charity. To accomplish effective engagement though you need to properly target your audience.
This was touched on by Michele from nfpSynergy. She relayed that to properly and sustainably target audiences you need to understand the current dominant engagement trends. Through addressing these trends, charities will have a better understanding of the audiences they are targeting and thus have more success in engaging those audiences.
Charity engagement
Other great advice about developing charity engagement came from Joe from The Eden Stanley Group. He spoke of the importance and value in segmentation. Through good insight on your data, you can narrow down your audiences to target advocates and multipliers.
Social media’s potential for charity engagement is growing. Ben from the National Trust shared their Instagram strategy and the impressive results it has yielded. His advice was to be unique on each social media platform, to use each platform for something different. By not replicating content you are able to engage with your audiences differently through multiple channels.
Video for charity
Video for charity engagement is an incredible tool to effectively involve audiences in your charity. Dave and Katie from War Child realised this with their Duty of Care video (see the video below). They told us of the incredible results of over 100,000 views within 24 hours of the video’s launch. This video took a non-stereotypical video for charity to engage, inspire, and motivate audiences to take action.
Engagement Strategy
The recurring theme of the conference was that there is no one solution for engagement that will work for everyone. Effective engagement strategy is all about knowing your audience, and how to best target them. And this CharityComms conference did a great job of delivering all of us with the knowledge we need to accomplish this.
