Nonprofit Digital Marketing: A Tool for Rebuilding Civil Society
Media Cause COO, Cody Damon, speaks with a delegation of NGO leaders as part of a citizen diplomacy program run by the US Department of State
Through a partnership with WorldBoston, Media Cause had an opportunity to share our approach to nonprofit digital marketing with a delegation of NGO leaders. This citizen diplomacy event focused on building civil society in the Arab-speaking world.
We had the opportunity to share some of our methods for building and engaging communities with delegates from the Gulf Region and Northern Africa. It was a wonderful exchange of ideas and conversations that highlighted how digital tools really have made the world a smaller place. It was an interesting discussion considering the role social media played during the Arab Spring uprising. So many of the initial assumptions were to give credit to social media for causing the the uprising — giving social media a false role in the democratization process. When in fact, as the research supports, social media served as a communication tool for outbound communications, spreading news and information to external audiences around the world.
Access is the underlying reason why social media wasn’t the great democratizing force that so many social media gurus would lead us to believe. The Pew Research Center
reports that nearly two-thirds of the Egypt’s total population does not use the Internet. It would be hard to mobilize a revolution through digital communication tools when the majority of your population isn’t online.
The notion of access was a major topic of discussion for the delegation we spoke with in Boston. Many of our methods and approaches are geared toward audiences that have access to mobile devices and the Internet. While we often look at digital methods as a more cost effective and scalable marketing solution, it is dependent on your audience being online. It was encouraging to know that projects like
Internet.org and
One Laptop Per Child are fighting to end the divide. As an impact-focused organization we support these initiatives – because so much of the good work our clients do around the world relies on reaching vulnerable audiences.
Media Cause will continue to champion organizations that bridge the digital divide and use digital tools to create measurable impact in their local communities or across the globe. We also look forward to sharing our brand of nonprofit digital marketing with as many organizations as possible.
If you are one of those organizations that is looking for a thought partner on digital issues or if you are an organization that is just getting off the ground and want to take a digital-centric approach to your communications strategy, then we want to
connect.
