Our Thoughts

If You Were a Charity What Would You Do?

June 9, 2010 by Duncan Shand

There’s an often quoted phrase that is spoken when someone spends too much or wants to do a good deal to get the business “We’re not a charity you know!”. I know you’ve heard this before.

Now I’d suggest that the real questions should be “If we were a charity what would we do?”. Obviously charities are there to help people, to make their lives better, to find our new ways of doing things, to promote and educate, to make things more comfortable etc. In short they’re there to help.

Often we have questions from our clients in terms of what should I say to their clients, what content should they produce, what should we post about? We believe you should be posting information that’s helpful to your customers. Unfortunately however companies, in the pressure to meet their next sales target, rush to talk about their product or shout about a great deal.

In this age of social media and communities we’ve discovered there’s something we can learn from how charities and not for profit organisations work. At the heart of it they’re there first and foremost to help the people they serve. Commercial businesses really are no different but we often get things in the way.So take a step back and think about how you can serve your customers, what can you do to make their lives easier? What can you do to help them? What is the underlying purpose of your business? Make sure this is framed in the context of helping customers.

As an example a car company might position itself on safety, so it could talk about how you can drive safely. In that conversation it’s car is a secondary element – the first priority is to educate the customer on how to use (or drive) the product. Another example from client we’ve been working with is Bananas. All Good Bananas don’t really talk about how good their bananas taste (they do taste good) they talk about FairTrade and making a difference to their growers lives, the secondary message is that obviously you can make a difference too by purchasing their product too (check out the give a bunch campaign we did for them on Facebook).

So when you’re thinking about your content strategy think about your purpose, how you can really help your customers. Pretend you are a charity, you might even find it fun!

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Tags: charity, facebook, Marketing, social media

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