CharityComms 2020 - ideas, inspiration and innovation for the next 10 years in charity communications.

1. CharityComms 2020 ideas, inspiration and innovation for the next 10 years in charity communications a joint initiative from Bright and

2. foreword We’re only six months in to a new decade, but already we are seeing the charity landscape and the way we communicate changing dramatically. Social media tools are being adopted across all shapes and sizes of organisations, with charities often leading innovation in these areas ahead of the private sector. Meanwhile, changes in the political, economic and environmental climates, combined with increasing pressures on funding and resources, mean that you need to be thinking years ahead to make sure that your charity is equipped to deal with whatever is coming down the road. We’ve asked key figures in the charity communications field to write down the five trends they see as the most significant in the coming decade. These points are accompanied by an image that reflects their vision, giving you a snapshot of what each contributor thinks lies ahead. We hope that these ideas, inspiration and insights help your organisation communicate effectively over the next 10 years. Both Bright One and CharityComms will be with you along the way. Enjoy! Vicky Browning Director, CharityComms Ben Matthews Founder, Bright One

4. CHaRiTY Collaboration: Charities increasingly working together to pool ideas and resources. Honesty: Celebrating the wins and discussing, not hiding, the failures. Recklesness: Removing fear of new and untested ideas. Fail fast and fail often. Transparency: Allowing supporters to share in and suggest how their money is being spent. Yackety-Yak: More. Much more. Much, much more talk with, around and about supporters. Stuart Witts Social Media Evangelist Marie Curie Cancer Care www.mariecurie.org.uk @stuartwitts

5. Major national charities as we know them will not exist in the same form – the democratisation of brand, the crowdsourcing of effort, and devolution to the micro-local, will negate the need for 20 th century models of ‘charity’. The internet will be radically different – we will have amorphous and ubiquitous media that will make today’s “social media” look like Pong. Charities will harness microvolunteering, as it is now, seamlessly – and the Big Society (but not as the Coalition quite envisage it) will be interwoven into the fabric of our lives. A wave of scalps. There will be real tests - and fallout - for reputation managers and communicators, as charities and NGOs’ expenses and administration costs are wrung through the media - akin to MPs in the UK. There will be savage accountability and Government will step into the Charities Commission’s territory to enforce stricter transparency and communication. Co-production will finally be widely understood and adopted. Where we have seen pockets of user-led participation in the third sector, it will be viewed as primitive in the future to not have service-users involved in every stage of conception, planning, comms, and delivery. This will affect communications and marketing that relies on expressing ‘pity’ and paternalism today. As a product of both heightened transparency and co-production, charities will use the cloud increasingly and service provision will be delivered with even less requirement for bricks and mortar buildings. Fundraising will be largely crowdsourced, with less ‘ownership’ from grant-providers and major donors. Rob Dyson PR and Social Media Manager Whizz-Kidz @robmdyson www.whizz-kidz.org.uk

10. [ shared experiences ]

14. [ contribute and comment ]

18. [ quality of content ]

22. [ people to people ]

26. [ closer connections ]

30. Join the conversation! What trends in charity communication do you see taking place over the next 10 years? How will some of the ideas described here affect your charity? Email your 5 trends and an accompanying image to ben@brightone.org.uk Or tweet your thoughts using the Twitter hashtag: #cc2020