As society transitions from analog to digital, it should be clear that social media is much more than a passing fad. Nonprofit organizations have a wonderful opportunity to leverage these networks and weave them into their fundraising and community-building strategies.
Here are three tips, with examples, for using social media effectively.
3 social media tips for nonprofits
Use social media to drive engagement
Social media makes it easy to share stories and showcase real-world impact, so why not use your posts to celebrate the work you do? This drives connection and brand awareness.
While organizations have come to accept social media as part of their strategic marketing plan, its overall value is still doubted. However, when you have a strong social media strategy, batch create content and use scheduling tools to work ahead, then you know you’re making the most of your valuable time and resources.
For example, our team at Anchor Marketing works at least a month ahead on our client’s social media posts, giving us time to plan engaging content that aligns with our other activities. Once the content is final, we schedule it using specialized software and spend the rest of our social media time engaging with followers and building relationships.
Measure your content’s effectiveness
Even before iOS 14 and iOS 15 rocked the digital marketing world, nonprofit marketers found it difficult to measure ROI on social media. When you’re unsure of the impact your content is making, it makes it difficult to justify putting funds or time towards social media at all.
So, how do you measure return on investment when it comes to social media?
The exact formula for calculating ROI changes from organization to organization, because this should be based on your individual objectives. You determine the value of different metrics, such as brand awareness, donations or acquisition, and develop measurements for them.
Once you determine what success looks like for you, you’re able to develop strategies to reach your targets.
For example, as much as we’d like to find that straight line between a social media post and donations, right now it’s not possible. But we can measure metrics like overall revenue growth, or create social-only initiatives to give us a good idea of how many people responded to a social media campaign.
By injecting a bit of creativity, we can find ways around the current restrictions. It’s also worth noting the more you can direct people to your website or to sign up for your email list from social media, the more valuable your metrics will be.
Make it easy for followers to donate
When determining your social media content strategy, a good rule of thumb is to post engaging or informational content 80% of the time, and posting fundraising or branding content 20% of the time.
In that 80%, you can share impact stories and celebrate accomplishments while in your 20%, you can include financial updates and posts about what your needs are. With this mix, your followers will be aware of your work without feeling like you always have your hand out.
Your primary purpose on social media may not be fundraising, but it’s still important to make that donate button easy to find. Many social media networks allow you to set up your profile or page as a not-for-profit and have built-in features making it easy to highlight ways people can support you.
For example, on Facebook, nonprofits have the option of selecting “donate” as their page’s call to action. This is a simple way to make donating easy without having it be the focus of every post.
Many people view social media as an afterthought, something you do when you have extra time, or when there’s an available intern to pump out a few posts. Unfortunately, when social media is treated like something to dabble at, without a strategy or clear objectives, you won’t find much success for your organization.
If you’re ready to explore developing a nonprofit social media strategy or want to outsource your social media altogether, get in touch to learn more about our strategic social media management services.
