I have been thinking a lot lately about how our clients are connecting with the public to build community for the social issues and movements they represent. It all started with variations we began to notice in our social issue campaign data in the last six months.

We started to see that the number of people being exposed to and engaging with an organization’s content on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok was extremely high—so high, in fact, that this activity was driving some of the highest levels of engagement since Cause & Social Influence began tracking this data. At the same time, however, the rates of acquisition of email addresses and/or text numbers were low—drastically low in some cases, as compared to previous campaigns.

After many meetings and conversations about our observations, we came to several conclusions: We are in an era of high consumption; platforms want to keep people within their ecosystems; and while email addresses and text numbers are valuable commodities worth working for, they won’t come easily, especially from younger audiences, regardless of the social issues they support. Moreover, perhaps we should not be overly focused on email and text conversions.

Let’s break down each of these components as we embark on a new understanding of what a social issue support journey may look like today.

A slower journey to increase knowledge and change attitudes

Message frequency and intensity to a target audience have long been the secrets to changing attitudes and building knowledge around a social issue. Some of the most successful campaigns have used a 70 percent to 80 percent message saturation rate through advertisements in a targeted market. Is this level necessary? Yes, because our audiences now live in a world of constant and ever-changing content that entertains, informs, and speaks directly to their interests.

We must rethink how we try to move people to action or, better yet, to a deeper understanding—with consistent, subtle, and approachable knowledge content that goes beyond a momentary “wow” moment from a statistic or fact to create real learning. Marketers (and those who approve their budgets) must view ads on social media platforms as more than a website conversion tactic. Today, marketers must focus on creating a consistent series of educational and informative content that’s wrapped in a creative approach and educates audiences over a period of time.

This drip of informative content will start the process of shifting attitudes and building new knowledge among audiences while combating stigma and misunderstanding. With this approach, we can create a more lasting experience in a more acceptable way than with a hard-hitting attempt to convince and convert with just a one-time ad exposure.

Creating a journey in social media

Social media platforms are designed to have users remain active there rather than leave to visit a website. Today’s entertaining and interactive content sparks this consistent platform involvement and users’ ever-growing exposure to videos, posts, and images. We must realize that in this atmosphere, it takes a lot of work to move someone from a highly entertaining, rapid-consumption social media model to your website.

For that reason, we have to look at how social media platform content can enhance knowledge or prompt behavior change without the user ever visiting an organization’s website. Essentially, we must meet users where they are (on social media) with the experience we’re offering, not where we think they should go (our website).

With that in mind, we as leaders must create a moment of learning, hand-raising, and interaction that is different from what we’ve been doing to drive our audiences to our website to learn more. We should now present our calls to action (CTAs) right then and there, in the moment of social media use—asking the user to immediately perform a specific action or make people around them as knowledgeable as they are now. Our CTAs must leverage a social media platform’s interactive components to present an opportunity that has more of a network effect. This approach will be much more effective than using social media simply to move people to a website and capture their contact information.

Not everyone wants to share their email and text

We have seen this trend of staying on social media platforms even more lately; fewer young people (ages 13 to 25) provide email addresses and text numbers in response to campaigns. This trend seems isolated to Gen Z for now; we have seen more email and text sharing in our millennial campaigns than with our Gen Z efforts. We are calling attention to this behavior as something to watch and begin to fully understand.

Here’s a question I frequently hear, however: Are emails and texts necessary parts of a campaign? After all, we can work around this need through laser-focused ad delivery and retargeting of site visitors. My response is: Should the most important element in your outreach be conversion of email or text, or should it be your ability to change knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors anywhere, at any time? I think our focus should be on the latter.

With that in mind, I encourage you to consider that the marketing, advertising, and digital ecosystem is changing—as it always will. Fundraisers, marketers, and your organization’s decision makers should be focused on creating a convincing reason for your audience to pay attention and to act—regardless of whether they ever head to your website.

So, the question to focus on is: How can you make that happen in the social media spaces where people now spend so much of their time?

Derrick Feldmann (@derrickfeldmann) is the founder of the Millennial Impact Project, lead researcher at Cause & Social Influence, and the author of The Corporate Social Mind. Read more by Derrick.