With charitable giving down year on year, it is clear that individuals are struggling to make the same contributions to charities that they did before the recession. Yet charities are asking the very same donors to dig deep into their pockets even more, as they are suffering from the lack of these much needed funds.
It looks like a vicious circle. But there is another way for charities to raise much needed extra income, without asking their supporters to change their online shopping habits or to shell out the extra money that they don’t have – affiliate marketing.
Previously, affiliate marketing was a sector that often went under the radar, quietly growing revenues from a wide range of online media and bloggers with little understanding from consumers of the industry and how this works when they shop online. The industry is now worth £4.6s billion annually.
Affiliate marketing is now being used as a force for good with Give as you Live, an App that allows users to purchase products through their favourite online retailers, with a proportion of every commission received going to their favourite causes.
With the Give as you Live shopping app, supporters can send, on average, 2.5% of every pound they spend online to their favourite cause. Which means you can turn every gift, every holiday and every new pair of boots into funds for their favourite cause, in a cost free way.
But for many charities, affiliate marketing is still carries a feeling of ‘dirtiness’ and some are sceptical about asking their supporters to shop through affiliate channels or buy certain products in order to raise these extra donations.
This attitude quickly changes when they receive a cheque in the post from Give as you Live from out of the blue and without any effort on their part. These donations come from their supporters, who are shopping with Give as you Live on behalf of their favourite cause. and with shoppers in the UK spending £4.9bn online during every month, charities will only see this new source of income increase.
Charities are now wising up to the power of affiliate marketing and starting to actively promote the method as a valued area of support from their existing supporters. Spreading the word about this way to raise extra funds is often done through social media, with charities promoting ways that supporters can help through channels like Facebook and Twitter.
Much is written about social media and its impact on marketing, and charities have often been ahead of the curve than their private sector counter parts in taking advantage of these new social tools. But with the advent of ‘social shopping’, where consumers share their purchasing habits and decisions through their social networks, shoppers are moving their offline shopping experiences online.
This is more than just “followers,” “likes,” or star ratings, which lack the actionable analysis and value marketers need to drive business decisions. This is shoppers sharing great offers they’ve found, their opinion on the latest collections and that season’s trends, a fashion icon caught wearing the latest design trend – all wrapped up in the ability to buy items directly from Facebook through fan pages, otherwise known as ‘F-Commerce’. Social shopping combined with initiatives such as Give as you Live has the ability to change the way charities are supported.
Social shopping is an already established trend in the US, but it’s not long before it takes off in the UK. With charities starting to realise the potential to drive additional revenues from affiliate marketing through services like Give as you Live, it won’t be long before they catch on to the social shopping trend and capitalise on the combined power of using affiliate marketing and their supporters to create much needed funds for their work.
