Charities on Twitter/X

Charities use Twitter/X a lot, we see a lot of CEO’s, trustees, consultants, donors etc who use the platform a lot to speak about recent happenings in the sector.

There are groups for charities and there is even a charity hour each week, but with the current state of the platform we’ve seen a lot of you asking how they feel about it and what they should do next.

First and foremost, download your data. If Twitter/X closes tomorrow, ensure you’ve downloaded your profile, the media and posts that you have shared over the years, because if it does close down, we might not be able to recover any of it.

How to download your Twitter/X data:

Go to your Account settings by clicking on the more (⋮) icon in the navigation bar, and selecting Your account from the menu.
Click on Download an archive of your data.
You should be emailed when your download is ready.

The firing of the entire workforce who work on the Accessibility of the platform was a real eye opener for me when that happened.

It shows that making the platform more accessible to all is now no longer a priority (Twitter was the first social platform to add ‘Alt’ functionality to imagery for example), the ‘Translate Tweet’ functionality is currently missing too.

How the workforce has been treated is also concerning a lot of us from a moral standpoint.

With the influx of now ‘unofficial-official’ accounts, spam accounts and the potential for hacks (because there are no support staff) we’re at a real crossroads for Twitter.

So, what are the alternatives?

Well, if you’re looking for a new platform as an alternative for your charities social media comms; Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon or Hive could be the next best thing. Let's start with Threads.

Threads

Threads is Instagram's new alternative to Twitter. Threads launched in July 2023 and had 10 million sign ups in over 7 hours according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Threads has a real trick up its sleeve as far as onboarding goes due to its connection to Instagram; it allows you to follow and populate your threads and accounts with people you were already connected with on Instagram (in a very quick and seamless way we might add).

The state of Twitter/X and alternative platforms to look out for