Many of us in these days of times has a Facebook account amongst our other social media platforms. Whether we use Facebook to talk to our friends from High School, to play Candy Crush (which, I’m STILL stuck on level 30), or for other reasons, Facebook allows us to connect to people in  which we wouldn’t have been able to before. There are a multitude of ‘pages’ on the site for us to ‘like’, including many charity pages such as UNICEF, and many like its kind.

Now, these charities are smart to utilize social media as a part of marketing, as it reaches a much broader audience compared to television programming nowadays. However, a research done by Sauder PhD Student Kirk Kristofferson shows that “Charities incorrectly assume that connecting with people through social media always leads to more meaningful support”.

The study shows that as Facebook allows people to easily ‘help’ a charity just with a click of a button, it is turning people into ‘slacktivist’, where people believe they are helping, but in reality, they are not. People are less inclined to donate to charities as they believe their simple like has sufficed.

Referenced through this article.