The advent of Facebook fan pages has been great news for brands wanting to create communities without having to build their own social network. In many cases, it’s largely pointless trying to create your own community when the people you want to attract are already part of another one. Since Facebook has over 22 million users in the UK, it’s an obvious place to target.

But what do you do with your fans once you’ve got them? You can talk to them, engage them and encourage them to tell their network about the great things you do, but how do you actually turn them into consumers? For charities, surely fan pages are only useful if those fans are more likely to donate to the cause, or encourage others to do so.

Well, that was the initial idea anyway – why focus on attracting more fans if they’re not going to donate? Instinctively, though, you feel that someone who interacts with a fan page (not just a lurker) would be closer to a cause, or be more aware of what it does – which would potentially lead them to donate or fundraise for that charity at some point in the future. Having said that, marketing on potential isn’t really going to please your boss, is it? Unless you’re in advertising that is…

If what you do has no impact on the bottom line, or you can’t quite quantify what effect it will have, shouldn’t you be focusing on something that does? This is where the debate about measuring the impact of social media comes in.

There’s no agreed answer to this yet (well, not one I’ve seen anyway). Facebook can drive donations to charities – this is a fact, since up to 30% of traffic to JustGiving comes from Facebook. But in those instances, it is individuals that are getting the people in their networks to donate, not the charity themselves.

So is it a technological issue? Charities in the UK can’t use the Facebook application Causes, which allows people to join causes and donate to US charities. But then again, despite having huge numbers of users, Causes has only raised a relatively small amount ($16 million from 90 million users).

Charities can put a PayPal button on their fan page, but it’s much the same as having a donate button on their website – just because it’s there, it’s not necessarily going to get used. Some charities have built their own Facebook applications that allow people to donate or show off a virtual badge, but none I’ve seen have been wildly successful and brought in huge amounts of donations.

Maybe technology isn’t the answer, or just not yet anyway. There are certainly applications that could be built for charity fan pages that would make promoting fundraising easier, and allow greater interactivity between supporters and cause, but maybe we aren’t ready for them just yet.

Fan pages haven’t been around that long, so we’re only starting to get used to the new conversations they allow us to have with the people we want to talk to. And as a fundraiser, you wouldn’t ask someone for money as soon as you meet them – you would be far more likely to talk to them, tell them what you do and get them excited about the things they can help you to do. Only then would you ask for money.

So perhaps we’re still at the conversation stage – getting to know each other and talking about what we do – whilst paving the way for something else to happen in the future, at the right time. What will happen in the future, and when that will be, we can’t be sure of, but it will surely be the organisations that have laid the groundwork now that will stand to benefit.

Jonathan Waddingham is the charity champion for the online fundraising website JustGiving.