With You Or Without You
This new study — the Social Change Impact Report — from Walden University and Harris Interactive might point to the latest dinosaur … your nonprofit!
Here’s the official descriptive blurb:
The Social Change Impact Report “provides a detailed picture of the state of social change engagement in America: Americans’ beliefs about social change, the issues they care about, the motivations behind their engagement, the actions they are taking to further social change and the tools they use.”
Heaps of interesting stuff here if you’re in the social change or advocacy side of the nonprofit sector.
But here’s what grabbed me: “Americans say they are most likely to get involved in social change in the future as individuals acting on their own or in informal groups (52%)”
And: “Nine out of 10 Americans (88%) agree that digital technology can turn interest in a cause into a movement more quickly than anything else.”
Couple these two proclivities together and you see the potential large-scale abandonment of major social change and advocacy organizations.
Who needs them (i.e., your nonprofit), when you can do it all yourself, or with a few social net friends, digitally?
Faced with this ‘do-it-yourself’ mentality, what is your organization doing to maintain its relevance? If your core business as a nonprofit is supplying timely, specialized information on what to do to save some small bit of the world (isn’t that what most advocacy groups do, in essence?), are you relevant anymore to — or needed by — net-savvy would-be activists?
A possible ‘macro’ reason for the fall-off in donor retention?
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
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