The reason they do it is, of course, highly laudible: they want to help other charities and show them what’s possible. Many people are being inspired, and many are discovering that they’re not isolated any more: there’s a community of people out there with similar jobs, issues and interests.

I’m fed up, I realise, because I feel woefully inadequate. I feel I’m crap at my job because I haven’t managed to use digital media to the great effect that others have, even though I may have been doing it for longer. And my job currently has lots of threads, none of which I feel are delivering very much.

But of course, we don’t all have the teams, support and access to funding that we’d like: so maybe I’m not alone.

The organisation I work for comprises around 30 staff and runs a number of projects. Many of these run nationally. They involve thousands of young people and teachers, and hundreds of volunteers. One project alone involves over 800 magistrates; another involves lawyers from about a third of the UK’s top 100 law firms.

It goes without saying that each project must be reflected in our central communications output. But we have no communications team now, just me. There is no press person, no PR person. I have no team; I have a small budget, which pays for the maintenance of our corporate website and not much else.

I spend my time supporting the teams, managing the website, writing content, trying to keep networks afloat, trying to find information, planning communications strategies, looking for journalists and trying to keep track of what we’re doing.

Put in black and white like this, it seems silly that I might beat myself up for not managing to pull off an exciting social media campaign, or for not solving our funding issues by giving our fundraiser the necessary online tools and training.

Yet only in the last couple of days have I realised that we can’t all be poster-children. Quick wins, led by a flexible but clear response to strategy, are all that some of us can aspire to.

So my message is: don’t be disheartened by other people’s successes. Some charities may well be running innovative and exciting social media campaigns, but we don’t all have the capacity, support or public appeal to follow their lead.

For example, what works for one charitable cause won’t necessarily work for another.

We should let our use of digital stuff be led by our goals and strategy, not by someone else’s.

If we know what we need to achieve and why we need to achieve it, digital tools can allow us do so. And they can allow us to be flexible and spontaneous in doing it.

We should play, if we can. We can’t choose the best solutions based on our goals if we don’t know what’s available, and in my experience the best way to understand what’s available is by trying it out. The barrier to use is generally so low and fast that if we have the freedom to try stuff, we should use it.

We can’t all lead the way in charity marketing, but we can do our best with what we’ve got.

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The research was undertaken last week by online pollsters YouGov, on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation. Almost 4,000 young people between 14 and 25 took part in the survey.

In answer to the question ‘How much, if at all, do you trust the following to tell the truth?’, journalists fared poorly. The scores for ‘little to no trust’ make worrying reading:

Or do they? Is it in fact reassuring that The Sun isn’t trusted by its vast readership, or that newspapers don’t necessarily hold as much sway over the public as maybe we believe?

Further information

• Survey results summary (pdf)
• Full survey results (pdf)

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A recent YouGov poll for the Citizenship Foundation interviewed almost 4,000 14-25 year-olds about their attitudes to political participation, politicians and power in the United Kingdom.

• The majority of respondents said they would be likely to vote, with 59 per cent seeing voting as the most useful way of participating in local or national politics.
• 32 per cent said they were knowledgeable about “the way that local and national government works”; of those, 71 per cent said the internet was a source of their news.
• 85 per cent had never joined a campaigning group in their local community (fairly consistent across the age ranges), and 50 per cent thought doing so would make no difference to the issues the tackle (also fairly consistent).
• 51 per cent had never joined a campaigning group on a social networking site, but 42 per cent had; however 65 per cent thought doing so would make no difference.
• 54 per cent said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online.
• Email was seen as the most effective tool for making a political difference online. This doubles at the top end of the age bracket. Twitter scores very low and only increases fractionally with older respondents; although interestingly there is a significant spike among 16 year-olds (almost treble the score of younger age groups).

Further information

This post was originally published on the Citizenship Foundation Webmaster blog. The research was commissioned to mark the Citizenship Foundation’s 20th year.

• Press releases
• Download the survey results summary (pdf)
• Download the full survey results (pdf)

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