CharityComms, the sector membership body for non-profit communicators, and BrightOne - a volunteer-run PR agency for non-profits - are tapping into thinkers, communication leaders, and PR practitioners to produce the CharityComms 2020 project. The concept is to crowdsource an organic piece of multimedia that can be used to mark and predict key trends for the next 10 years of charity communications.
When compiling my own, I drew on some themes I'd already seen to some degree, and tried to project some exaggerations of those in the shadow of some really interesting collaborative and technological changes going on right now. I'm not suggesting my ideas are a given (or incredibly original) but if we're stirring the futurism pot, we may as well add some seasoning. I'll expand here.
It has become inescapable that we democratise our brands; accepting that those that use our organisations appropriate and own them. As personal affiliation and appropriation increases, so the minutiae of our messages and missions decrease. Most large charities have a macro brand (national) but work on a micro level (in real communities, on the ground). But because of this democratisation, and because the mechanism behind their sustainability - fundraising - is essentially a crowdsourced effort (i.e. individuals, groups, companies, trusts - all giving a little to a collective whole, and all investing a little emotionally while doing so); I think the days of the large, national monolith charity are numbered.
The devolution of service delivery to local people, local knowledge and local joint-partnerships, will mean the breaking up and crowdsourcing of effort. The paternal charity has been steadily decreasing - look at Scope changing from The Spastics Society in the early 90's, and then in the last six years or so recruiting more disabled people to the workforce, including senior management; while changing their support from residential institutions to community and co-located service delivery. This is a kind of co-production between users of a service and the owners / traditional deliverers of that service. Where we have seen pockets of user-led participation in the sector, I think it will be viewed as primitive in the future to not have service-users involved in every stage of conception, planning, communication, and delivery. Co-production will mean that operations are refined and stripped down; delivered through community groups directly involved in the end product - and not a central organisation divvying up core funds and paying overhead costs associated with large national offices and admin costs.
This (I think!) is the backbone of the coalition Government's "Big Society". If Britain is broken (it isn't), then it's going to take communities at grassroots to make it less dysfunctional. This isn't a brave new concept, it's actually erm good old fashioned collectivism - but let's go with this notion and own our communities and start taking an interest in what we can do to make them better. This idea is aided by what media and technology author Clay Shirky terms 'cognitive surplus'. The premise being where people once spent spare - or 'surplus' - potential thinking-and-doing time watching television, this is now being redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging— from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action.
I also think where we have seen pockets of criticism of the charity sector's salaries and administration costs, there will be a heightened transparency of charities, necessitated by (I predict) large media investigations and exposure of waste and misspending in the coming years. Akin to that we have seen MPs exposed to. This also will be a contributing factor towards the re-assessment of the need for bricks and mortar central offices and administration, and more use of the cloud, and devolved delivery.
As I say, none of these thoughts are particularly new, but I think by framing and confronting them, we can get over our hang-ups with "broadcasting" and controlling what we want potential supporters to say and think, and concentrate more on reaching out with a dialogue that will ultimately make our services better, leaner and more fit-for-purpose. Just get used to the idea of "localism" - supported by tools that make it easier to coordinate our efforts (like Facebook, Twitter, Meetup forums and messageboards) - and less about 'location'.
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