The sustainable nonprofit: A social issue support journey

I have been thinking a lot lately about how our clients are connecting with the public to build community for the social issues and movements they represent. It all started with variations we began to notice in our social issue campaign data in the last six months.

We started to see that the number of people being exposed to and engaging with an organization’s content on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok was extremely high—so high, in fact, that this activity was driving some of the highest levels of engagement since Cause & Social Influence began tracking this data. At the same time, however, the rates of acquisition of email addresses and/or text numbers were low—drastically low in some cases, as compared to previous campaigns.

After many meetings and conversations about our observations, we came to several conclusions: We are in an era of high consumption; platforms want to keep people within their ecosystems; and while email addresses and text numbers are valuable commodities worth working for, they won’t come easily, especially from younger audiences, regardless of the social issues they support. Moreover, perhaps we should not be overly focused on email and text conversions....

Read the full column article by Derrick Feldmann, lead researcher at Cause and Social Influence.

(Photo credit: Uriel Mont via pexels)