News: SiftGroups Charity Sector Community Benchmarking Survey 2011

A conversation with the British Heart Foundation’s multimedia team led SiftGroups to the conclusion that in the third sector there’s a massive amount of activity around community and social media, yet scant resources to help answer the question, “how are we doing?”  It inspired SiftGroups to produce the first of a series of annual surveys looking at the ‘who’, ‘what’, why’ and ‘how’ of online engagement and the use of online communities within the charity sector.

The findings make fascinating reading; for example, 9 out of 10 charities surveyed have no means of measuring the financial contribution of their online community to the rest of the organisation.  SiftGroups studied 100 similar UK charities involved in the health sector; naturally pioneers in online community as a key facet of their service delivery portfolio.

The report was released at a Community Huddle in London on Thurs 17th November 2011 attended by over 25 of the participating charities, and was also featured in the Guardian.

To download the 2011 Community Report benchmarking online community for the charity sector.