Digital challenges faced by small charities: Insights from Digital Candle
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. This year has seen the switch to digital rise up the agenda of most charities. The pandemic has driven rapid change as services, information and contact shifted from in-person to online.
Charities that previously didn’t have working from home setups had to get one because they had no other choice. Offline forms of marketing and fundraising closed overnight and charities had to reach their target audiences online.
For many small charities without the resources, knowledge and finances to pay for new equipment, the big switch was tough.
How Digital Candle helped
That’s where Digital Candle came in.
Set up in 2019, the aim was to connect charities with digital questions, to experts who could help answer them. We wanted to be able to provide short nuggets of practical and bespoke advice to help build digital understanding amongst small charities. We wanted to help them move on from digital challenges which were holding them back. We wanted them to be able to connect and learn through people, not blog posts.
It was a way of giving charities who didn’t have big digital teams or budgets for consultants, a way to access tailored information on their specific digital challenges.
So far, it’s helped over 750 people from mostly small charities. They’ve all had a one hour call with a digital expert from another charity or business who has volunteered their time to offer advice, signposting and support.
What charities ask about
Charities ask about every digital challenge under the sun, from very technical ones such as whether they can change their data region in a Google for Nonprofits Workspace account, to broader questions about getting the most out of their Google Ad Grants accounts.
The most common issues centre around three areas of digital.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Most organisations need to communicate with all sorts of people - from volunteers, fundraisers, campaigners, to staff and partners organisations. Charities often ask for help choosing a system that will help them keep track of all these interactions and help them find new efficiencies.
Often it’s a specific question, like what database can manage the volunteer application process. Other organisations ask for help implementing an all singing all dancing platform like Salesforce, which is no mean feat!
IT
Here, ‘IT’ covers a wide mix of issues and problems. Pretty much every organisation works with computers and most need help with the basics that come along with that.
We get questions about sourcing laptops, migrating to Office365 and whether a charity should renew its local IT support contract when the costs are doubling.
It is clear that if funders and infrastructure organisations want to help small charities, supporting them with the basics of equipment and set-up is really important. Big data science and user experience are much further down the list for small charities.
Social media
Social media is probably the most common problem Digital Candle enquirers have. They need to reach new audiences just like better resourced charities but a lack of time and resources can hold them back. We signpost to low / no cost platforms which can improve efficiency.
We get asked how to use Facebook Events to attract more people to real life events, whether Twitter DMs are a good place to offer advice and how best to measure social media success.
Ask your question
Here are the two biggest things we’ve learned about small charities through all these questions.
- Firstly, your question is not silly. Plenty of other charities have asked it already, so you are definitely not alone.
- Secondly, if you have a problem, there’s an expert out there who’s willing to give you lots of help to solve it.
Digital Candle is free. Just go to the website and ask your question. We’ll match you with one of our expert volunteers who will listen and help you to plan a solution to your digital dilemma.
(Digital Candle is an initiative by Platypus Digital, supported by Catalyst)
