Social media guidance for charities

Use this page to read our key highlights of the Charity Commission's guidance for charities on using social media, which may help trustees and sector leaders to use social media effectively in their vital work.

Social media can be a hugely positive tool for charities. It can help to:

• increase profile
• drive fundraising opportunities
• provide a way to respond to key issues as they happen.

Building communities online helps create opportunities for conversation, sharing and learning, especially among hard-to-reach audiences.

Creating a social media policy is an important step for all organisations, regardless of their size or how they intend to use social media.

As the Commission’s guidance outlines, creating a policy is an important step to help meet your responsibilities. The guidance says charities should ‘have internal controls that are appropriate and proportionate for your charity’s needs and which are clear to everyone at the charity using social media.’

You should tailor the content of the policy to meet your charity’s needs. How detailed your policy is and how much resource you will need to develop it should match the level of risk presented by how your charity uses social media. It will also depend on the other activities your charity is carrying out.

• Alongside the guidance the Charity Commission has also released a checklist to help you develop a social media policy.
• You can find more templates and advice in our digital communications, campaigns and content guidance.

Using social media creates opportunities, but it also creates risks.

According to the guidance it’s important to consider ‘how you can manage those risks, including by acting reasonably and responsibly to protect your charity.’

Using social media in riskier contexts can attract significant public interest or criticism. The Commission has also said that criticism can be mitigated by trustees ensuring their charity conducts its activity with ‘respect and tolerance’.

Charities can be involved in issues that provoke strong emotions. Your charity can engage on emotive issues if this is a way of achieving your charitable purpose and is in the charity’s best interests.

However, the Commission suggests you should plan appropriately. For example, you should consider:

• the risks to the charity, including its reputation, and actions you can take to mitigate these. These include informing key stakeholders of your plans and thinking about how the charity’s conduct on social media may help manage potential criticism
• the impact on your resources and staff. For example, receiving a significant number of complaints or negative attention. Your plan should include how you will support staff in case they have to deal with complaints and online abuse.

If you’re using social media in riskier contexts, for example with vulnerable individuals or on emotive issues, use the Charity Commission’s decision-making guidance to help you make a proper consideration and assess the risks.

It’s important to remember that while you have control over what you share, you don’t necessarily have control over who sees it. It’s important to think about who might be seeing content, and if that content might be triggering to people online. Especially if you’re ‘provoking emotions’.

According to the Commission’s guidance, your social media policy should make it clear that your charity should not post or share content which is ‘harmful’.

The guidance explains that ‘what may be harmful to one person might not be considered an issue by someone else, however the UK Safer Internet Centre defines harmful content in simple terms as anything online which causes a person distress or harm.’

The Commission’s operating online safeguarding guidance has more information.