July 26, 2010
As an in-house communicator, you will find that there’s a wealth of benefits to working with agencies. They bring in specialist skills, economies of scale, a wealth of experience from working on other projects and – perhaps most valuable of all – a fresh pair of eyes and the ability to shed new light on a project.
It’s also worth remembering that using agencies doesn’t have to be expensive, as they can deliver just one phase of a project, with the rest of the work being completed in-house.
But the client / agency relationship is often a difficult one to manage, and there can be a lot of pressure on the charity to ensure that the agency delivers value for money.
Rachel Beer, Founding Partner at beautiful world, gives her own view on the client / agency relationship: “The one thing I have learned over the years is just how important the spirit of partnership is in this equation. You’ll get far more out of your agency if you treat the relationship as more of a partnership and less like a client-supplier arrangement. Both parties need to be prepared to give and take, and work at it – just like any relationship – otherwise it’s likely it will experience degrees of dysfunction.”
Zoe Amar, Marketing and Business Development Manager at Lasa, also has plenty of experience in dealing with agencies: “Take time to firm up the project plan/ business case/ objectives for it at your side (i.e. the charity’s) before briefing the agency. This will create buy-in and credibility for why you want to bring in an agency, and ultimately will make their job and level of engagement with their work much easier. Make sure you’ve got the right chemistry with the agency and have compatible working styles. For example, I work best with agencies/ suppliers who also like a structured process with clear outcomes.”
If you do find yourself hiring the services of an agency, for supporting your communications efforts or otherwise, there are many important points to bear in mind that will make the relationship more of a success. Here are Rachel and Zoe’s top tips for managing the client / agency relationship:
- Take time to firm up the objectives. Doing this before briefing the agency will create buy-in for bringing in an agency, and can ultimately increase the agency’s level of engagement with their work.
- Take the time to find the right agency. You will need to see quite a few before you understand which one is the right fit. For a big project be prepared to devote as much time to recruitment as to the work itself – it will be worth it.
- Build a partnership. If you work in the spirit of partnership, everything else will fall into place. This is a joint venture, and you are jointly responsible for its success. Celebrate the successes, learn from the failures, and don’t ever resort to blame tactics.
- Establish trust. The charity needs to be able to trust that the agency is working in the best interests of its mission. Equally, agencies put a huge amount of care, energy and passion into the causes they work with, and it helps if they feel that the client’s behaviour reciprocates. The more open and trusting both parties are, the more healthy and productive the relationship will be.
- Emphasise clear communication. If you have trust, you will have this, and if you have this, you will have trust. Start out as you mean to go on, putting in some ground rules at the beginning. Good, open, honest communication is key to keeping the relationship healthy.
- Don’t be afraid to challenge. Clients use agencies because they want to benefit from their skills and experience, but no one is always right. Give each other permission to challenge each other positively, and keep doing it.
- Make it mutually beneficial. Like it or not, the agency needs to make money in return for its services. If it didn’t do this, there wouldn’t be an agency able to share its knowledge and experience. Remember, your agencies are stakeholders in your success too, so it’s smart to treat them like that.
- Step back when you need to. Although it is good to work closely with your agency, sometimes they need some space. Make sure the agency has the support it needs, but also let them get on with the job.
Do you have experience in working with agencies? What worked well and what didn’t work? If you’re on the agency side, what tips would you give to charities thinking about hiring an agency?
Ben Matthews is Founder of Bright One. Follow them on Twitter here: twitter.com/brightonecomms
July 16, 2010
Brand can get a lot of stick in the third sector – especially when a substantial pile of money is spent on rebranding an organisation. It can appear wasteful to channel funding into what is, on the surface at least, a change of logo and a new strapline.
However, brand is more equivalent to reputation than appearance – it’s all the images and ideas that people associate with your organisation. Although verbal identity (name, tone of voice, strapline) and visual identity (logo, typography, colours) are perhaps the most obvious elements of this, they are only reflections of what should be the foundation of your brand: your vision, mission and values.
Seeing brand in this way, it becomes obvious that your staff and supporters should be involved in its creation; they, after all, make up the body of your organisation.
Speaking at yesterday’s CharityComms seminar about the recent Parkinson’s UK rebrand was Dan Dufour fromThe Team – the agency behind the rebrand – and Caroline Ledger, Communications Director at Parkinson’s UK. Here are a few salient points from their inspiring session:
1. Ask questions, and learn from the answers. You cannot undertake a rebrand without knowing what problems you have, and what needs to change. Carry out research with all your audiences – service-users, staff, volunteers – and find out how they feel about your organisation’s vision and future. Parkinson’s UK found that even internally people could not articulate what the charity was about, and that their name, Parkinson’s Disease Society, was unpopular – something that had not been appreciated. The information you collect from research will help you recognise your priorities.
2. Test your ideas on your audiences. During the development of the organisation’s updated vision, mission and values, and their new name and strapline, ideas were tested on reference groups made up of all their audiences. Later, options for the visual identity were also tested with these reference groups. Their feedback directed the route chosen, and the ideas that ended up before the board. By doing this, you can ensure your brand is created by your organisation, not imposed on it.
3. Keep in touch. Explain your intentions and decisions clearly at every stage of the process, using multiple channels of communication. For example, the Chief Executive of Parkinson’s UK wrote to local branches at key stages of the rebranding process, to ensure that all parts of the organisation were included in the changes and kept in the loop. It seems this continuous communication was effective in helping them identify with the new brand: 74% branches had adopted it after the first month.
Whilst you can’t guarantee that everyone will be happy with the changes you make when rebranding, you can work to give your staff and supporters a sense of ownership over the new brand.
Ellie Brown works at CharityComms.
July 9, 2010
If, like me, you are lucky enough to have known and remember your grandparents, you may feel a twinge when you see one of their contemporaries enjoying the sun on a park bench, when you read about Second World War veterans in the news, or when you’re reminded of their favourite TV programmes.
However, as colleagues working in comms targeting older people know, there’s a lot more to the over 50s market than the stereotypes of little old ladies leaving their money under the mattress to the cat.
Communications with older people can be improved by following some key principles:
- AGE = identity. Anyone inhabiting their own skin for six decades plus is likely to have worked themselves out and have a strong sense of self. Older people are a sophisticated – sometimes cynical – audience. And they quickly spot tokenistic or patronising campaigns.
From marketing or communications materials they will probably be seeking:
information, rather than image
benefits, rather than brands
logic, rather than logos
- AGE = diversity. Be careful about targeting older people on the basis of their age – unless you’re offering a specialist product or service that is designed for this age group. Look beyond age – this is an incredibly diverse sector of society that runs from newly minted 50 year olds to both active and vulnerable 90 year olds, and everyone in between.
Lifestage, health, income, values … all underpin mindsets and behaviour.
- AGE = renewal. Older people are looking for new, refreshing, more representative forms of communication in materials aimed specifically at them, or at mainstream audiences that include them.
If we are to engAGE, rather than enrAGE, we need to begin our creative approach with some baselines:
- recognise older people’s life knowledge, lifeskills and sense of self.
- reflect their strengths (individuality, acquired wisdom, flexibility) and their unique life
experience.
- respect their concerns, problems and needs (including the need for tailored design of products, services and materials).
- reject stereotypes – re-think your ideas about older people.
These tips are taken from a new good practice guide: Engaging Communications: communicating with and about older generations, produced by AGEncy. This new arm of the communications agency Forster aims to help reframe how society sees old age and to re-establish the value of being older.
We’re also running a free series of monthly seminars on communicating with older people, beginning next Tuesday 13 July. For more information email donna@forster.co.uk or call 020 7403 2230.
Donna Tipping (donna@forsteragency.co.uk) is a Project Director for AGEncy – the service dedicated to communications for older people at integrated communications agency, Forster. Follow us on Twitter @ForsterAGEncy
July 2, 2010
As we all know, we are currently living under the governance of a hung parliament. How will this affect your e-campaigning tactics and strategy going forward?
Uncertainty
Will the coalition crumble at the first sign of opposition or will it be here for the full five years? At the moment, no one really knows (though it will be fun to watch!). The length and success of the coalition government will drive your organisation’s strategy considerably. Will you be building relationships with MPs for years to come or will you be getting back to election campaigning if we all go to the polls again in a few months time? You will need to be very reactive to the situation.
A new class
About a third of the current crop of MPs are new to parliament – 232 in all. They are from different backgrounds and are as young as 26 in some constituencies (Airdrie and Shotts MP, Pamela Nash). This means that campaigning organisations are talking to a group of politicians who may never have been contacted by their constituents on charity issues before. This really is the time to get in front of them and get your voice heard. Soon.
Policies
The coalition has committed to tacking the national debt, meaning that funding for your organisation’s causes may be cut to finance the repayments. It’s more vital now than ever to make sure your issues are really in front of MPs and the government. If you know that certain MPs are supportive (maybe they pledged to help you during the election), make sure you use their support in any way you can. For example, get them to support bills, sign Early Day Motions or join relevant All Party Parliamentary Groups.
The role of each MP has been amplified – take action!
In the past, even if ‘back-benchers’ voted the other way, bills generally were passed, due to the fact that Labour had such a big majority. Similar ‘revolts’ could now cause major issues. Your organisation needs to use this fractured decision making process to your benefit. If you know certain MPs are involved in committees or groups, or are interested in certain issues, get your supporters to send messages to them with relevant questions, comments or asks. Pull in party specific issues and local statistics too. Get your supporters to be personal with their MPs. This will help get the message across and could really impact on your campaign’s success, or lack of it.
Be direct
Running alongside supporter based actions, you should also consider sending emails directly to MPs asking them to support your cause, come to an event or just download some materials. Segmenting email communication based on personal information and past activity can help your open rate and participation rate email stats, just as with your supporters.
On the subject of supporter emails… how many of you know the constituencies that your supporters live in? If you don’t, you should – and then use this information to send out targeted emails at vital times. For example, if a bill is being passed and you know that certain MPs are wavering, and you also know that you have a sizable number of supporters in those constituencies, you can send an email just to these people, asking them to take action and convince the MP(s) to back your campaign. Segmenting like this can have a great lobbying impact but it can also help to engage your supporters as they will really feel like they are making a difference.
Jonathan Purchase is Head of Market Development in the UK for Advocacy Online, a leading provider of integrated e-campaigning and fundraising software. Contact him here: jonathan@advocacyonline.net
June 25, 2010
As the World Cup enters the knock-out stages and the remaining newspaper and magazine pages fill up with the faces of the final Big Brother intake, there’s little escape from the world of ‘celebrity’ at the moment.
We all know the value that a famous face can add in terms of grabbing attention, but we also know the potential pitfalls. Corporates are perhaps more accustomed, in some ways, to working with the ups and downs of celebrity culture than charities. But there has been a major shift in recent years, with many of the big charity brands employing dedicated ‘celebrity managers’ to help them identify, recruit and manage the right people.
There’s no doubting that celebrity management, done properly, is a demanding and time consuming job. There is always a risk in aligning your carefully nurtured brand with someone in the limelight (many will remember Naomi Campbell striding down a catwalk draped in fur just weeks after acting as a spokesperson for US charity ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’, and Geri Halliwell’s limited grasp of the issues she was meant to be highlighting as UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassador), so you have to commit time and energy to finding the right individual, briefing them thoroughly, and monitoring their exposure carefully. And, unfortunately, in many cases they will expect some form of payment – often in the form of substantial fees – which could be argued to be a rather unsuitable way to spend funds.
That said, in many cases the potential value can outweigh these risks and make celebrity engagement a valuable part of the communications mix. But the value really comes from having informed and personally engaged people representing you, who have real credibility and can speak from their own experience – not just be fed a series of messages to regurgitate while you watch with baited breath and crossed fingers. When Hugh Grant supported Marie Curie Cancer Care’s Daffodil Appeal in a string of national media interviews, it could have been cringeworthy. In fact, it was incredibly powerful, because he was speaking from the heart, explaining the impact that the charity’s nurses had on his mother’s last weeks of life. No media questioned the celebrity angle. There wasn’t a hint of cynicism, because it was a real, personal experience that moved beyond the fame-factor.
In its modern form, ‘celebrity’ is a word that carries with it a set of incredibly strong connotations. It is no longer the same as describing someone as well-known or high-profile. Thanks to the world of tabloids, weekly magazines and internet hype, ‘celebrity’ now refers to a particular form of fame – often at its most loud, extreme, superficial and self-publicising. There are, without a doubt, some brilliant individuals who fall under the celeb banner, but as communications professionals rather than entertainment-seekers, we should ask ourselves whether these are the people we should be focusing on.
Perhaps, rather than ‘celebrity managers’ we should be thinking more about building ‘ambassador manager’ roles within communications teams. These professionals would take on responsibility for seeking out and involving high-profile individuals of all kinds, such as key media commentators, major donors, sector influencers and so on – not only those who would fall within the celeb category. In many organisations this role would work across departments, creating a strong connection between fundraising, marketing, PR and public affairs, for example. And perhaps it would help focus the mind and avoid a reliance only on one type of famous face?
Kirsty Kitchen is Account Director at Amazon, a communications agency specialising in work for the voluntary and public sectors.
June 18, 2010
Earlier in the month, Peter Gilheany suggested that charities embracing the new Coalition buzz-term Big Society do so with care. I can only agree, and hope early-adopters and champions of the concept take great heed. While its intention is to sound cosy and inclusive, Big Society doesn’t in my view really change much of what charities are doing right now, or how they navigate access to funds, resources and volunteers. Big Society is aimed squarely at local people and groups, encouraging them to pick up the threads where the State’s woolly pullover has frayed and snapped off. And nothing wrong with that – it’s been happening, and will happen, forever. But with my cynical hat on (which I admit I wear on more than one day a week) it could also mean a greater reliance on the public conscience and purse, twinned with less statutory funding or social business investment (many in the sector lament the very recent loss of Futurebuilders, for example, and this morning’s Today Programme featured some guests hazy on investment being diverted from existing resources and handed to local people to build their own ‘independent schools’). Once it gets too ‘Do it Yourself’, the hand tugging on the sleeve of local people’s goodwill, imploring them to donate their time and money, becomes the brave new concept Big Society – and thousands of the UK’s charities in business-as-usual mode.
Andy Westwood, Chair of the OECD’s LEED Forum on Social Innovation, argues that in order to have a Big Society, you need a plentiful supply of ’social capital’ (roughly: the collective will of people in a community to get stuck in and change things for the better. If ‘cultural capital’ makes you cool and socially accepted, ‘social capital’ is the will that makes our communities less dysfunctional). So our sector, the third sector – or “civil society” as it’s now being referred to (confusingly, a term previously used to describe non-military society) – must work very hard to harness social capital in our communities wherever we see it.
Westwood suggests help to build social capital comes from unlikely places. For instance, he argues that large Tesco regeneration stores and locally franchised fast food outlets like McDonalds anchor wealth and build communities in the same way that the pits and factories once did. So too are workplace darts and football teams – and even glee clubs (!) – now places where a sense of community is being fostered.
So where does this take our sector? As I suggested two paragraphs ago, I think we’re in business-as-usual mode – with an arguably bigger battle to win the support of individual-givers and the corporate sector’s CSR programmes. And we perhaps also face heightened competition to deliver local public services over profit-making bodies – although why not take a leaf out of Whizz-Kidz’ book here and join forces with local authorities to deliver more services together, better?
If you hadn’t guessed, I’m not big into Big Society if it means being flattered and wooed to deliver more with less. But, if we take off the rose-tinted spectacles, and leave the slogans and official briefings at the door, we have some tough yet exciting opportunities ahead. As Joe Saxton talks about, some of these decisions may result in mergers and more cross-charity partnership working. This could reduce duplication of effort, and I’m all for communication as opposed to territoriality. We also need to tap into the social glue or capital in all communities and not just chase after the same depleting golden pots of money. Our sector faces the same challenges that Government and the Labour opposition has in terms of uniting communities, and we can do it; but for now I think the real slogan in our minds needs to be Big Challenge, and not get too bogged down in Big Society.
Rob Dyson is PR Manager at young people’s mobility charity Whizz-Kidz, and a board member at CharityComms. He founded the Third Sector PR and Communications Network on Facebook, and also tweets from @thirdsectorPR / @robmdyson
June 11, 2010
“Strip away fat!” “100 simplest weight-loss cheats ever.” “Boost your brain power by watching the World Cup.”
Charity sector communicators can learn a lot from these headlines.
They’re taken from the July issue of Men’s Health magazine.
Like any effective publication, pick up a copy of Men’s Health, read by a quarter of a million people every month, and you’ll know instantly what it’s all about.
You’ll get an idea of who the reader is, their hopes and desires and why they buy the magazine.
Now, I’m no Men’s Health reader myself, and this blog isn’t about critiquing its content. I take the magazine down from the newsagents’ shelves now and then and recall my old journalism tutor’s lesson about why their cover works so well: it sells the magazine’s content to its target audience so they buy it.
Here are five things to learn from a magazine cover, like Men’s Health, to help you improve your charity’s communications.
1. Know what your audience does in their free time.
Ask a Men’s Health journalist what their reader might do on the weekend and they’ll, sigh, and whittle off an answer: “Go for a half-hour jog they thought would be an hour’s run, plan their next week’s meals, watch the match at their mates BBQ, shop for the latest gadgets and have a few beers at the pub, but then feel guilty about them the next day.” Or something similar.
As a charity communicator, you need to be able to do the same thing for your target audiences. Know your audience well and you’ll be more easily able to persuade them to donate, or change their behaviour.
2. Use SMART to get your reader’s attention.
Men’s Health readers like SMART targets – as in, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely. For example, “24-hour muscle: seven ways to pack on 5kg.” They know that their reader really wants to get fit but is so busy they want results fast. Your charity’s target audience, donors for example, are probably also looking for immediate results. So, to grab their attention, tell them how many lives their cash will save and in what timeframe – shopping lists are essential items for your communications so invest resources in getting them done properly.
3. Re-package what you do.
Every month, Men’s Health will have articles about losing weight, gaining weight, the right food to eat, how to improve intelligence without much effort etc. It’s just re-angled each time. You should apply the same creativity to your charity communications. It might be the third annual report you’ve written but you can approach it in a completely different way – use an unusual format, get your service users involved, or go for an online version. Some of the readers of the charity communication you are working on might not have heard your story before, so if it’s tired in your telling, they’ll notice and switch off.
4. Know how you want your audience to feel.
Men’s Health stories are generally about motivating readers to look after themselves, emotionally, physically and mentally. They are made to feel excited, enthusiastic and good about themselves. When you produce your communication, you need to think about how you want your audience to feel when they read it. It might be empathy for a case study, or shock at a hard-hitting campaign.
5. Hone and translate your key messages.
Like any good charity communication, a Men’s Health article is filled with key messages. “Keep fit, look good and you’ll achieve more,” is one. “Busy successful men like you can stay healthy with minimum effort,” is another. These key messages help shape the magazine’s content every month. If you tailor your key messages to your target audiences, your charity communications will be a whole lot easier to produce, not to mention more inspiring and effective.
Trina Wallace is a writer at ngo.media, www.ngomedia.org.uk, a leading editorial, copywriting, publications and training agency working only with charities, socially driven organisations and ethical businesses.
June 4, 2010
It’s been just shy of a month since the general election and it is fair to say that things are yet to settle down completely. Nowhere is this clearer than in the language of the new administration and, by extension, the language of those organisations looking to gain favour with that administration.
Language is impressively flexible and creative, able to adapt and change shape as external events and trends require. It might have only been a month but we already have some new coinage to deal with, not least the double edge sword of the “con-dem” coalition.
For the voluntary sector, the phrase that has loomed largest is “big society”. Like many examples of good rhetoric, nobody is quite sure what it means but most agree that they like it very much. You only have to look at the responses from the sector to see a remarkable number of organisations who welcome it, and claim at least part of it as their own.
At the moment, it seems to be working in tandem with “civil society” as a kind of linguistic pincer movement to corral the voluntary sector into the required shape. Of course, as new phrases and words gain favour, they push out others that suddenly have the association of failure and the past. There must be a big bin somewhere in Whitehall stuffed full of Office of the Third Sector business cards, rubbing shoulders with a wodge of DCSF compliment slips.
Suddenly, these new words and phrases are everywhere, being used with great authority by chancers and leaders alike.
The challenge for the voluntary sector now is two-fold: creating real meaning and substance behind these phrases, and communicating their value and relevance to supporters and the wider public. The cold, hard truth is that neither have had any real resonance with the general public yet. It is instructive that when “big society” was birthed to the nation as one of the key planks of the Tory election campaign, it was met with indifference and quickly relegated to the outer reaches of the campaign.
One of the lovely things about the general public is they have a tendency to ask the questions you least want to answer and can smell a lack of conviction or truth from a mile away.
Any charity that wants to claim aspects of these phrases as their own with a wider audience is going to have to tread very carefully indeed. Get it right and you can find yourself at the centre of a zeitgeist, riding a wave of relevance and striking just the right cord. Get it wrong, however, and you might be cleaning the egg off your brand and reputation for a long time to come. Words and phrases of this type have a nasty habit of going stale just as organisations have invested time and effort into communicating them.
A year from now, the picture may look very different. We might have seen concept of Big Society take root, and the voluntary organisations who championed it reaping the benefits in terms of raised profile, more public sector contracts and increased fundraising income.
Then again, we might be looking back at the collective madness that gripped the sector in its enthusiasm for these now dim and distant concepts. Who knows which way it will go – the only thing we can be sure of is that the word “stakeholder” is truly dead and buried.
Peter Gilheany is Director at Forster, the UK’s leading social change communications agency. Follow them on Twitter @Forster4Change.
June 2, 2010
So, we are now governed by a coalition and what new stresses and strains this brings. Individuals, parties, policies and politicians are all challenged by the new arrangements. It’s much easier to disagree and be seen as ideologically pure, than to compromise and govern. Ed Miliband likened putting the anti-nuclear Chris Huhne in charge of the pro-nuclear energy department to putting a vegan in charge of McDonalds. What fun being in opposition is going to be.
But the coalition has achieved something in a week of negotiation that many charities have failed to do in years of discussion: they have put together a working partnership. They have to maintain their separate identities but be united when it matters. They have to be transparent and coherent and united – while being separate entities with different opinions, and having campaigned against each other just weeks previously.
So what charity examples of this kind of close working are there? I am struggling to think here. Multi-party coalitions, like Make Poverty History, are much more common, where everybody is clear that this is single issue collaboration, and the separate parties are much greater in number making the confusion far less. I know that RNIB and Action for Blind People are now joined together very closely – sharing resources and combing regional services – and still seem to have two (legal) identities; but I am hazy on the specifics. Then there is Childline and NSPCC – but they do have one legal identity now.
This illustrates one of the challenges for charities who are not merging but are doing more than just working closely together. Communicating close collaboration is one of the biggest challenges. In our brain we have a pigeonhole for merger, but no pigeonhole for collaboration. So any charity that wants to work closely with others needs to work out clear and simple ways of explaining what is going on. And the rules are probably to return to the basics: work out your key messages, make sure they are simple, clear and memorable and then say them until you are sick of them.
Joe Saxton is driver of ideas at nfpSynergy, and founder and chair of CharityComms.
May 21, 2010
New research released this week showed that the average British web user spends 22 hours and 15 minutes on the web each month. That’s 65% more time than 3 years ago – great news for those of us who work in digital.
And what was the most popular activity online? Yes, you guessed it: social networking. Almost a quarter (22.7%) of time online was spent on a social network. Compare that to 2007 when it was less than 9%, and the growth in that area is clear.
But what was the casualty of this explosion in social networking? If we’re on Facebook or Twitter more, we must be spending less time doing something else. Any guesses? Email, perhaps?
Contrary to what many would assume, email hasn’t been the casualty. In fact, time spent on email has increased slightly from 6.5 % to 7.2%. Good news for email marketers.
But if people spend three times as much time on social networks than email, should we start emailing supporters less and put more effort into trying to engage them on Facebook or Twitter?
I think it’s a good question to ask, and the only answer is that it depends on what results you’re getting through each channel. If your email open rate is so low that the number of click-throughs is comparable to the number of interactions on your Facebook page (you are monitoring both those numbers, right?) then your time might be better spent on Facebook.
But whilst Facebook adoption is still growing (23 million users in the UK and counting), it’s not as big as email – almost everyone has an email address. So if you want to reach bigger volumes, it’s still a hugely important channel. In a recent presentation with Dogs Trust, we talked how they’d experienced great success with new forms of social media fundraising, but email was still the most important channel for driving event registration and fundraising.
And on that note, a 2009 survey by Nielsen showed that heavy social media consumers actually spend more time on email. This sounds counter-intuitive, but think about how you are alerted to new activities on social media, be it a Facebook friend request, a direct message on Twitter or a new blog comment. They can all come through via email (depending on your settings, of course).
So whilst this data gives us more reason to try and engage with people on social networks (insert “fish where the fish are” cliché here) this boom hasn’t resulted in a mass desertion of email. As with most marketing, picking a range of channels to reach people makes sense, ensuring the message is consistent makes more sense and integrating your message across channels makes, well, even more sense.
The people behind the study, UKOM (The UK Online Measurement Company) have also created a nifty graphic to compare time spent on different activities, which is useful for seeing all our online activities in context.
If all April 2010 UK Internet Time was condensed into one hour, how many minutes would be spent on most heavily used sectors
Jonathan Waddingham is the Digital Strategist at the UK’s leading online fundraising platform JustGiving, and you can say hello to him on Twitter at @jon_bedford.
