With Comic Relief just around the corner next month the charity sector is picking itself up after the busy Christmas period. However, although the Comic Relief website has been increasing its market share of visits to the charity sector in the last few weeks, the fastest climber last week was ChildLine.

Between the week ending 5 February 2011 and 12 February 2011, visits to the ChildLine website have increased by an incredible 900%.

The peak of visits to the website is the highest ChildLine has experienced in the last two years, and the source of this extraordinary growth is Facebook.

In the last week, Facebook accounted for 73% of all visits to the ChildLine website. This volume of traffic pushed ChildLine to the top of the charity sector, accounting for 13% of all visits to all charity websites for the week ending 12 February 2011.
In the same week, ‘facebook’ was the fastest moving search term driving traffic to the charity sector, and ‘fb’ was the sixth fastest moving term.

Whilst I was looking at the list above I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the eighth fastest moving search term driving traffic to the category, which was ‘wedding dresses’. When I looked at the downstream traffic of websites receiving clicks from the term ‘wedding dresses’ I was surprised to see the Oxfam Shop right up there at number 14, quite an amazing feat given the competitiveness of the search term, especially in the run up to the Royal Wedding.
I’ve blogged previously about how social media can have a huge impact on the success of charity campaigns but the effect of Facebook on ChildLine’s traffic is another outstanding example which demonstrates how embracing social media can really benefit a brand.
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