Digital innovation in the third sector: an Aquent forum
by Julian Blake
Storytellers. Digital coaches. Bloggers. Community champions. Chief conversation
officers. Online organisers. These are the new roles that today’s charities will need,
as the world of digital communications is revolutionised by social media.
That’s the view of Steve Bridger, creator of nfp 2.0, an online resource for not-for-
profits using social media. Bridger describes himself as a ‘buzz director’, a champion
of the use of social media to promote charity causes. It’s another new role that
Bridger reckons charities are going to need.
“The boundaries of traditional charities are under assault by new patterns of
communication and association,” Bridger told an Aquent open forum for digital media
experts from large charities in London on 6 May. “Networks are replacing institutions.
We are becoming more focused on ourselves as individuals, yet yearn to be
members of communities. We also want to know about experiences.”
“The problem is that most big charities are not structured for participation. They are
built for transactions or for broadcasting, rather than for conversations. There is too
much organisational dependency on hierarchy.”
He said that charity supporters increasingly want to mix giving their time, money,
activism and influence – and that charities need to recognise that the world has
changed, and restructure.
Bridger points to Leap, an online agency launching in summer 2009, as an example
of the new breed of lean, savvy, networking charity. Leap will offer its supporters the
chance to ‘have a good time being good’ online. It will have little by way of hierarchy
and will lean heavily on communication by Twitter for talking to the world. Take the
company’s recruitment drive (also via Twitter): it’s bringing on 100 interns and 90
‘part-time anywhere’ staff.
Similarly, See The Difference is allowing people to raise and to give money online,
engaging them with projects from across the world through video-based digital
storytelling. It is helping shift the culture away from a situation where people don’t get
to see what has happened to their donations.
“Personal identity is central to the new rules of engagement,” explained Bridger.
“This is a huge opportunity to reach people who don’t give money to good causes,
Charities need to focus on one-to-one, highly personal messages. It’s all about
charities engaging.”
And the best engagement is, he says, when people do things for a cause when you
didn’t even ask them. A great example of this was in January 2009, when Twestival
happened almost completely spontaneously. More than 200 cities from around the

world held ‘Twestivals’, bringing together the Twitter community to raise money and
awareness for charity:water. This not-for-profit, which seeks to bring safe drinking
water to people in developing nations, suddenly benefited from Twestival donations
totalling US$250,000. This is, according to charity: water, enough to pay for 55 water
projects for 17,000 people in Ethiopia, Uganda and India.
“The thing is that charity:water did not even ask for the money,” said Bridger. “They
were selected.” Like Leap, charity:water has a bare-bones structure. All its staff are
on twitter. And it lets its employees do the talking, letting employees develop the
charity’s, and their own, identity.
“The point of this is, if you can’t trust your own staff, maybe you should be
questioning your hiring policy. Everyone should be able to be a press officer.
Centralised corporate communications are the problem,” said Bridger. Annual
reports should be slimmed down to the bare statutory minimum; they could be
replaced, as MSF Canada has done very effectively with field blogs and podcasts.
So how should digital teams, many already under pressure, sell this new message in
to their organisations? “You need to become a personal digital coach to senior
managers to help them build to their epiphany moment, to help them see the
potential of all this,” Bridger said. “This needs a reprioritising of resources. I know
one large charity that puts loads of resources into producing web pages that hardly
anyone reads. That could be shifted to pay an online community manager. You have
to question everything.”
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the new social media, digital teams need new
metrics. “A very important measure is the cost of ignoring this stuff,” said Bridger.
“You’ll see how your relevance wanes over time.”
The Aquent forum brought together digital managers from the top 50 UK charities,
including NSPCC, Macmillan Cancer Support, WaterAid, WWF, VSO and Comic
Relief.
Earlier, Nick Torday, head of new media at Breast Cancer Care, shared his
experience of the planning, build and launch of his charity’s new website, launched
in January 2009. BCC has moved from a ‘monarchy’ of centralised communication to
a social model, via user-centred design and build. The shift required a “huge cultural
change, trying to be brave and a bit less controlling, putting users at the centre and
making a business case”.
Torday explained how health information replaced fundraising asks on the BCC
home page, forums grew and the whole site became much more useful for people
affected by breast cancer. More detailed profiling has helped the charity to find out
much more about its users, so BCC can improve. “Traffic has rocketed - and visitors
are having a much more efficient time online,” he said.

Gill Arnold, manager of digital creative and business management at Aquent,
explained the thinking behind the forum. “There is lots of networking in digital, but
very little specifically for digital in the third sector. We hope the forum has allowed
people to share experiences and discuss digital innovation in the sector.”
The Aquent forum was sponsored by Whitewater, which specialises in direct
marketing for not-for-profits.
Contacts
Gill Arnold: email garnold@aquent.com
Steve Bridger: email mexicanwave@gmail.com; Twitter: @stevebridger
www.nfp2.co.uk
Nick Torday: email nick-torday@breastcancercare.org.uk, twitter: @nicktorday
Web www.breastcancercare.org.uk