Charities and snapchat (research)

For charities, as the social media landscape has become more competitive, traditional channels such as Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only lines of communication, as newer apps such as Snapchat are becoming a great tool for reaching a younger demographic.

Brands are keen to explore new ways to engage quickly and Snapchat has emerged as a great tool for this. Grabbing the attention of audiences is becoming increasingly difficult, especially as the charity social media space is becoming ever more crowded. That’s why Snapchat works so well – the immediacy of the platform gives users a real sense of being with us ‘in the moment’, which is something that younger demographics particularly engage with.

As companies become more savvy about how to increase awareness while still creating content that is fun and shareable, Snapchat’s creative elements such as the doodle option, text option and stickers means brands can be more creative and think outside the box on how to engage with followers.

Macmillan has increasingly been integrating Snapchat into our communications activities over the last six months, testing to see how our audiences react and using it to reach an audience who we have not proactively engaged with before.

During the London Marathon we ran a Snapchat story featuring our runners and volunteers on the day, which helped capture the emotion and the excitement and give a sense of everyone coming together after a gruelling few months of training.

For this year’s World’s Biggest Coffee Morning we launched five branded geofilters in 25 city centre locations across the UK and saw strong uptake, particularly from millennials attending work-based coffee mornings.

For our corporate partnership side, we created a Snapchat story to speak to our younger audience about the PizzaExpress partnership launch (5p from every Padana pizza sold now comes to Macmillan); and received a great level of engagement. Snapchat worked well in this instance because it lends itself to light-hearted, fun content, allowing us to overlay imagery with comments and emojis and to create a sense of excitement. It’s informal, real-time format also added a valuable sense of authenticity to the campaign which contributed to encouraging supporters to visit their local restaurant.

But what about paid for? There is also big potential for advertising in an interactive way with features such as geofilters and paid for lenses. On the down side, Snapchat currently offer limited analytics which makes it hard to tell how content is being consumed and who exactly is engaging. For example the client support we get as an advertiser with a smaller budget has been less than we get from other social networks.

Going forward, it looks as though Snapchat will continue to be utilised by charities in ever more innovative and creative ways, as the millennials who use the app are a key demographic that non-for profits are keen to tap into. Ironically, as social media becomes ever more about capturing points in time, it looks as though Snap chat could last far longer than those moments shared…