Recently, the evolving social media landscape has left many charities feeling conflicted about how best to use their accounts to continue connecting with both others in the sector and the general public.
Charities once simply used social media as a tool to spread awareness of their cause and engage directly with beneficiaries, funders and each other.
However, changes to how these platforms combat hate, vitriol and misinformation – as well as their increasingly controversial owners – have caused some charities to rethink how best to support their often vulnerable communities.
Since the summer, a growing number of charities have left the likes of X, formerly known as Twitter, either in favour of alternative platforms like Bluesky or LinkedIn, or by reducing their social media presence altogether.
Misinformation leaving charities in the dark
Worryingly, some charities have become targets of misinformation on social media.
An especially notable recent example was the Welsh Refugee Council, which was forced to shut down its X account and contact police after it received a “hostile backlash” to a video reposted by Elon Musk, which was wrongly attributed to the charity.
Meanwhile, BBC Media Action was made to emphasise its independence from the national broadcaster after Musk reposted a claim that the United States government funds the BBC through its international development agency USAID.
Jay Kennedy, director of policy and research at the Directory of Social Change, wrote in a recent blog post that “more needs to be done by the government and the Charity Commission to protect charities from the surge in online witch hunts” .
One change that has been made recently is that Ofcom, best known as the broadcasting watchdog, additionally became the online safety regulator in 2023, with the aim of making online services safer for users.
Meanwhile, a commission spokesperson tells Civil Society that while it will help trustees within its remit, charities should report any threatening behaviour to the police.
A mass X-odus?
Charities of all sizes have left X since the US elections in November 2024, when Musk, platform owner and the world’s richest man, played a prominent role in Donald Trump’s re-election as president.
Some of the more well-known sector organisations to leave include Mind, Woodland Trust, Race Equality Foundation, Refugee Action, Care International UK and umbrella body ACEVO.
For Mind, which had over 506,000 X followers, leaving in January this year was about prioritising the safety of its online community and the staff monitoring its account, as well as maximising its outreach and engagement on other, less algorithm-focused platforms.
Gabrielle Taylor, interim associate director of communications at Mind, tells Civil Society: “The decision to leave a channel we had spent many years building was incredibly difficult.
“However, it was based on ongoing analysis of the reach, engagement and impact of our social media channels.
“The data and real time evidence showed that X is no longer the right place for us to achieve the things we know we need to achieve.
“That’s why we made the strategic decision to focus our energy and resources on channels that maximise impact and engagement with new and existing audiences.
“Alongside the data we also have an obligation to keep all our beneficiaries and supporters who follow us, and our own staff who are moderating social media channels, safe.”
Smaller charities, too, are making the leap.
The east London branch of national brain injury support charity, Headway, which previously had more than 4,000 followers on X, announced that it would be leaving the platform last month; instead, it has migrated over to Bluesky.
A spokesperson tells Civil Society: “We are watching closely as platforms change their policies, not often in favour of our core values of respect, diversity and inclusion.
“We want to engage meaningfully with our audience, in spaces where people feel welcomed and valued.
“As always, we’re committed to raising awareness of brain injury and celebrating the richness and diversity of our community.”
Taking a different approach
Rather than leaving X altogether, some organisations are opting to scale back on their activity on the platform and use others more instead.
Among them is Charity Comms, the membership organisation for charity communications professionals.
The organisation has said that it now plans to share a round-up thread once a week on X to update members who are still on the platform, with a pinned post on our profile sharing where to find more regular updates from them.
Natalie Corlett, the organisation’s communications and engagement manager, tells Civil Society: “In the background, we are downloading the data we need, to enable us to remove premium access on X, and running monitoring exercises to check where members are and how they engage with us.
“We will continue to review and adapt our approach as required to best support our members.”
Bluesky flatlining?
For charities that have made the decision to leave X, finding an alternative platform is difficult, seeing as its rivals Instagram and Facebook, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, have also changed how they combat misinformation.
Enter: Bluesky. Prior to 2024, it was something of an outsider in the social media landscape, having started life as a research initiative of Twitter, back in 2019.
Since then, however, Bluesky, which severed ties with its parent platform when Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, opened to the general public in February and has grown to more than 25 million users.
Yet, despite making waves towards the end of last year, the buzz surrounding Bluesky seems to have plateaued.
Only around 300 charities have active Bluesky accounts, according to charity communications expert Madeleine Sugden, while over 100 charities have dormant accounts.
As Sugden noted in a blog post on the subject: “Many of the accounts which have been set up, are dual publishing to X and Bluesky. They’re not necessarily mirror-publishing. Most are still focusing on X, occasionally posting the same content to Bluesky.”
Sugden goes on to note that none of the top 10 most popular charities in the UK, according to YouGov in 2024, have left X, and only a handful have active Bluesky accounts.
Speaking to Civil Society, Sugden says that the number of charities on Bluesky “feels like it’s flatlined”.
“We had this big growth in the autumn. I had expected it to go even bigger around the inauguration, but it hasn’t.”
Sugden says she thought that Mind’s move from X to Bluesky would “lead to the domino effect” of more charities switching, but that similarly failed to materialise.
“As a sector, we need to embrace it to make it good, or it’s not going to be as good as it could be,” she adds.
LinkedIn renaissance?
Some charities are opting instead to increase engagement on LinkedIn instead.
The professional networking platform had 1.8 billion users by the end of 2024, an increase of over 100 million on the previous year.
Its nature as a platform dedicated solely to professionals has appealed to many charities seeking to avoid the stream of misinformation that often proliferates on other, mixed purpose social media platforms.
Corlett from Charity Comms says: “LinkedIn made the most sense to us as our new primary channel and we are seeing increasing engagement and followers as charity professionals spend more time there for important sector discussions.”
However, Corlett also adds that they are “equally excited” about channels like Bluesky and “what they might hold for the charity comms community as they build momentum as an X alternative”.
Looking forwards
As charities look to the future – and to a social media landscape that is likely to become only more unpredictable – more organisations may leave particular social media platforms in favour of others, scale back on their usage, or decide to stay put.
But, as we have seen, these platform – and their owners – are ever-evolving. Might there even be a future where charities start reducing social media activity altogether in favour of alternatives, like more in-person connection?
Sugden says she would like to see this, yet she acknowledges that it’s much more difficult to do this in practice.
“We’ve created these spaces that we’re very dependent on and we’ve become vulnerable,” she says. “We can’t really exist without having that real time comms place.
“We’re not all in the same place, talking about the same stuff. We need more cohesion. If bad stuff happened in the future, we need somewhere to communicate that.”
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