You know it. We know it. Twitter is mainstream communication, so Openface have added Twitter to our charity benchmark criteria to ensure a meaningful, up to date and relevant report. We want to help Charities understand how to use Twitter, help those that don’t use it (yet), and help others use it better.

This research was conducted at the end of last year (Nov 2009). Despite our best intentions errors and omissions can/may occur.

The Findings

1. 76 of the 120 charity websites included in the 2007 Charity Benchmark study are on Twitter with an official twitter profile. This is 63% penetration of our sample group.

Average, minimums and maximums values for 4 parameters indicating the presence of charities on Twitter. Calculated for 76 charities.

	# followers	# following	# of updates	days since updates
Average	1402	764	430	6
Minimum	0	0	0	0
Max	9228	7475	6083	69

2. Dogs Trust has the highest ‘# followers’ and ‘# of updates’.
   
   
3. Oxfam has highest ‘# following’.
   

The Twitter accounts of most charities represent their unique personalities. Some charities need to catch up:


4. 15 Charities are yet to customise their background.
5. 7 Charities have yet to upload their logo or personalise their picture.
6. 20 Charities had a link, announcement or follow me message on their home page to their twitter account.
7. Charities that tweet use a wide variety of tools to do it. The tools used, in alphabetical order, are; act.ly, api, bit.ly, cotweet, echofon, facebook, hootsuite, mrtweet, ping.fm, seesmic, snaptu, tweetdeck, tweetie, twhirl, twitpic, twitterBerry, twitterfeed, twitttertools, txt, ubertwitter, and web.

The ‘take-aways’:

1. If you are going to tweet, participate in the conversation – regular, meaningful tweets.
2. Provide clear responsibility and communication guidelines for the tweetor/ers.
3. Brand your Twitter account.
4. Ease finding your Twitter profile. The search to reveal if a twitter account exists usually ended clicks away from the Charities home page in a subsection of contact us/social networks or ‘get involved’, instead of an instantly recognisable twitter logo on the home page.
5. Update your sites. Sites that did tweet linked often had a high profile link to their Facebook page but not Twitter.

To find out how you fared or commission an updated personalised charity report, please don’t hesitate to contact mcarmichael@openface.com.

P.S. Apologies for the delay in sharing the results.