Are blogs worth the effort?

In the late noughties and early 2010s, most charities had a blog. Blogging had evolved from a ‘personal website’ in 1997 to a content marketing power niche with the launch of Medium in 2012.

 

Yes, social media was the new hype channel, but it was also a place for charities to reach more people with information, views, and opinions from their blogs. 

 

Back then, including a blog on your charity’s site was a no-brainer. But what about now? Charity content strategist Lauren Pope looked at 50 charities to analyse the state of the charity blog in 2023.

 

Pope’s findings make really interesting reading:

• Six out of ten charities have a blog
• Charities working in social welfare or health and charities reliant on voluntary income are most likely to have a blog
• Charities that don’t have a blog sometimes have a ‘news’ or ‘stories’ section instead

So what’s going on? Pope says the finding that surprised her most was the lack of correlation between the overall income of a charity and the likelihood of having a blog. 

 

“My hypothesis with that was, ‘Well, if they’re a big organisation, they’ve probably got a big content team and a fairly mature approach to content. They might well have left blogging behind.”

 

 

The evolution of blogs on the internet

 

The launch of the internet sparked the democratisation of information. Anyone (with internet access) could put up a website for other people to read. Publishing was no longer the preserve of powerful newsgroups.

 

As we entered the second iteration of the web, web 2.0, the blog was booming. The comments sections of blogs, and later forums and social media platforms, morphed into online communities.

 

“Having people be able to either publish their own content or publish the content of their users, coupled with the fact that people used to be able to comment, was really powerful,” says Digital Strategist and UX Design Consultant, Ezinda Franklin-Houtzager.

 

Blogging became a source of revenue for early creators and the lines between news (the facts) and blogging (opinion and experience) began to blur on sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

 

Fast forward to 2023 and we’re shifting awkwardly into Web3. The social media influencer/creator is queen and organisations like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed are hollowed out and possibly on the way out.

 

But social media is also in jeopardy. X (Twitter) seems on the trajectory of collapse. Meta has faced scandal after scandal, and fear of state influence over TikTok is real. In a decentralised web where and how do charities create value or even revenue through comms? Can they become publishing organisations with a following?

 

Digital strategy and UX designer Ezinda Franklin-Houtzager says, “I think more people are asking themselves the question: do we have the resource for that and is there any value in it?”

 

 

Do people still read blogs?

 

According to a Hubspot study at least 60% of people read a blog at least once a week, but as Pope says, “it takes a lot of effort to maintain a blog. And I think there are so many competing priorities and things that probably feel more pressing and more important.”

 

However, there are circumstances where blogs can be valuable, such as “areas like policy or research where you sort of have a drip of information that people need to know,” according to Franklin-Houtzager.

 

Equally, if you work in the humanitarian sector, a blog can help your audience follow your work through fast-moving, emergency situations when they slip from the headlines. 

 

Expert opinions are also vital to a healthy infosphere and help to dispel misinformation online. However, as Pope points out, “it’s a really, really tricky thing for charities at the moment because obviously there’s pressure from commentators on the sector to stay out of news and current affairs”.

 

Charities are often able to amplify marginalised voices. A blog focussed solely on creating space for people affected by the issue you work on to tell their stories with support, feels like a valuable use of time, but does it need to be a blog?

 

Franklin-Houtzager says, “I think storytelling is crucial and it’s always going to be crucial and I think everybody needs to make a place for that [on their website].” Pope’s study found that eight charities out of 50 had a ‘stories’ or ‘voices’ section.

 

The future of the blog is uncertain. To help make decisions about what to do with yours, ask yourself - is your blog full of “stuff that people wanna sell, but nobody is buying” says Pope. If it is genuinely meeting the needs of your community with expert opinion, stories from marginalised voices or news from emergencies, for example, perhaps your blog is here to stay.