One year since lockdown: how the charity sector has changed

Digitising fundraising

Digital fundraising largely took over from the tin bucket in 2020. Lockdowns and social distancing restrictions made street fundraising and physical campaigns near impossible. Charities had to take quick steps to minimise the loss in revenue. The result has been interesting, with the arrival of lots of quirky and innovative digital fundraising campaigns.

The main benefits of digital fundraising are savings to time and money. Digital campaigns are often simple to organise, especially in relation to their physical counterparts. They are often cost-efficient, too, saving the charity money trying to bring people together in-person.

Digital auctions, for example, only require a moderate amount of labour compared to physical auctions. Prize draws are cheap and relatively straightforward to arrange. Crowdfunding only requires small administrative costs, if any. Adding a donation button to your website takes little effort and often costs no money at all. Using text-to-donate again costs a small amount. The same is true with social media, where charities are generating significant sums.

We expect many charities will continue to take forward digital fundraising ideas into the future. It is likely that charities will combine a mixture of physical fundraising and digital fundraising, perhaps saving money on smaller and easy-to-manage campaigns and focussing their attention on arranging very big-ticket campaigns in the physical world.

For more information, check out our article: The essential fundraising trends for 2021.

Making physical events virtual

Lockdowns and social distancing restrictions rendered physical events impossible for large parts of 2020. Many charities again adapted quickly, working out how to use videoconferencing and digital networking platforms to put on succesful virtual events.

Our experience at Charity Digital serves as a good example. In March 2020, just before the first lockdown was announced, we put on a physical conference that was well-received. As the year slowly ticked away, it became increasingly obvious that the 2021 conference would need to be digital. We researched, we organised, and we adapted. And in March 2021, we launched the Charity Digital Virtual Conference 2021, which we felt was a massive success – and, looking at the number of attendees and the feedback, the audience did, too

Other charities had equally succesful experiences with virtual events. The benefits of virtual rather than physical events relate to the benefits of digitisation generally. Virtual events can be easier to organise, cost-efficient, and they circumvent many of the geographical limitations implicit in the physical.

It is likely that many charities will take the successes of virtual events into the future, ensuring at least an element of digital. But, again, it’s likely that a hybrid approach will seem appealing.

Hybrid events were already popular prior to the pandemic. Hybrid events combine in-person events with an online audience, balancing the best aspects of physical and virtual events. We will likely see physical events return with a virtual element. We will also likely see charities offering a mixture of entirely virtual events and physical events, with all of those occasions demanding a large degree of digital.

For some predictions of the future of events, check out: Three predictions for the future of virtual charity events.