Could the bad times be good for digital?

There’s no escaping the economic reality that pervades all aspects of life at the moment, not least for charities and NGOs. Every day when I talk to old colleagues and acquaintances within the sector, I hear words like ‘rationalisation’, ‘consolidation’, ‘collaboration’ and, increasingly, merger. The messages coming from central government are consistent and to a large extent deeply inconsiderate of the impacts that funding constraints are having on the sector.

In amongst this, the adoption and development of digital and social media has a more vital role to play than ever before. Communication teams can often find themselves with half the physical resource they had last year; print and direct marketing budgets are being slashed and in some instances disappearing altogether. Consequently digital and new media teams find themselves more in demand from a variety of stakeholders, many of whom may have historically not taken an active interest in online.

This presents something of a paradox: on one hand, its great that adoption of digital is now more widespread throughout the sector. However, on the other there is a danger that it can be seen as an interim holding solution until the economy rights itself and investment comes back into more traditional areas of marketing and communications.

Above and beyond this, digital now has a critical part to play in the wave of business change that is sweeping across the sector. One of the things I loved about running digital teams was that, regardless of which directorate we sat in, we represented interests and strategies from right across the organisation. This expertise is now coming into its own as websites and digital assets become the frontline of contextualizing organizational change to a whole range of audiences. In effect, digital now rightly has a place at the strategic heart of charities and, if it doesn’t, then there is something fundamentally broken internally.

So for a lot of Because members this is, despite the prevailing economic uncertainties, a time of considerable opportunity for growth and innovation. The critical thing is that you grow from a solid and evidence-based platform, rather than just crow-barring stuff in because the web represents a short-term cost-saving.