From online engagement to offline action

Engagement tips to drive offline action - a not-for-profit campaign example

At charity @vInspired, digital and social media is key to engaging with our young audience. Retweets, mentions and comments can be an early indicator of success, but they are only transitory metrics and not our end goal.

Source: All images: vInspired

If we're not getting young people to take a real-world action, to volunteer, then we are just measuring digital outcomes - what some call vanity metrics.

Our recent research, 'Online Engagement, Offline Action' explores digital behaviours that can be harnessed to help young people discover the value of volunteering. We identified four digital trends that can help us and other organisations use digital engagement to drive offline actions.

Four digital trends to help digital engagement drive offline actions

1. How can influencers and advocates online inspire action offline?

While a celebrity supporting our cause online can help us reach lots of new supporters, and is particularly useful in creating a big buzz and extending the initial reach of a campaign launch, the impact is often fleeting. The people that really influence action are trusted advocates – real people with shared interests, or who have expertise in their field.

Our Summer event, vInspired Live, aimed to demonstrate the power that young people have online. A few celebrity supporters helped us trend on Twitter, but it was the ordinary young people who had the greatest ongoing impact.

The attendees were selected for their online influence – they were no Justin Biebers but some had large networks of fellow One Direction fans, others were music or fashion bloggers. What mattered was that their followers trusted them and that they were willing to use their social profiles to promote vInspired.

2. Does curating beat creating?

There is a huge amount of content created online every minute. Why add to this river of content when you can cherry-pick a selection of the best information and organise it in context that is useful to your audience?

By filtering and presenting the best bits most likely to engage and drive action in your target audience, you can become a trusted source of information. Sharing the content of others, fits with the spirit of the web and increases this trust, as opposed to the hard sell of constantly pushing your own.

3. Are intrinsic or extrinsic incentives better?

Offering an iPad as a competition prize can win you lots of new fans, but the impact will be short term. When you offer a prize that has monetary value, you create a market context – the supporter expects a similar reward every time they do something for you.

A more sustainable strategy is to look for the supporter's intrinsic motivation: why do they really want to get involved? And reward that.

When the Humane Society International in the US wanted to increase regular giving they played to their supporters' intrinsic motivation to save animals from testing. They added an interactive slider to their fundraising page, un-caging more animals for every extra $10. The redesigned page delivered more than double the monthly sign-ups of their regular donation page.

4. Is the collaborative economy an opportunity or a threat?

The trend for individuals to share access to products and services rather than having individual ownership is seen by some established businesses as a threat. The recent reaction from hotels in New York against AirBnB - a community marketplace for renting out unused accommodation, highlights how serious some perceive this threat to be.

Charities too could perceive a threat from the recent popularity of crowdfunding sites. Donors might shift from giving to established charities, preferring to directly fund people running grassroots schemes in their local communities, and why wouldn’t they?

At vInspired we took this trend as an opportunity and created our own crowdfunding site. vInspired Igniter directly gives young people an opportunity to access funding, making an impact in their communities with their own unique projects. This crowdfunding model cuts out the need for the ‘middle man’ so donors can see instantly where their money is going.

Passing fads?

Are these trends just passing fads? Time will tell which will endure and evolve into established ways of engaging your audience, to elicit the actions that are the real goals of your organisation.

Thanks to Damien Austin-Walker for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Damien is Head of Digital at vInspired, a charity offering easy-to-access volunteering opportunities and support for young people to get involved with good causes in their communities. You can connect with him on Twitter @b33god or LinkedIn