How Non-profits Should Create a Social Media Presence for Growth?
No matter the type of industry you are in, social media plays a crucial role in expanding your non-profit organization’s audience reach. So much so that it allows your organizations to do the following:
- Expand your organization’s audience reach
- Establish your organization as a thought leader in your niche.
- Deepen your relationship with your beneficiaries and donors
- Promote fundraising events
- Raise funds to support your organization’s mission
However, these are easier said than done. That’s because leveraging social media for your non-profit organization requires a robust strategy. And that is what we will share with you in this post.
Identify your marketing goals
Before you start a successful social media strategy, you should first identify what your goals are.
It also helps that you identify what social platform you’ll use to achieve your organization’s goal. It also allows you to know what metrics of success to measure.
Ideally, your social media KPIs should reflect whether your campaign is benefiting your organization. For instance, you want to use social media to raise funds for your non-profit. You should measure the number of donations you received through your social media channels.
Therefore, using metrics to measure conversions accurately and customer retention is most beneficial.
Determine your target audience
Asking for donations for the people that your organization supports does not mean you can ask anyone.
Before posting anything online, you need to know who you’re writing for. This is the secret to fundraising success.
Thus, you should determine your target audience. And you do not have to target just one demographic.
While big, private companies are willing to support many people, some can do annual pledges at the moment. Some private individuals are eager to help but do not know how to get started.
So, how do you discover these user personas?
One of the best ways to do that is to conduct surveys and interviews. Get out there and talk to your audience. This allows you to create a human face to this abstract data and classify groups for various social media campaigns.
Armed with this data, you might end up coming up with two posts on the same subject with various angles for every customer group.
Choose the right social media platform
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to know where they commonly frequent online. From there, you can start communicating with them.
You have to know which social media platforms your target audience are most active and the most vocal.
At first, try sticking to at least two or three active platforms. Many non-profits make the mistake of creating accounts on too many platforms, only for them to become inactive for months.
Moreover, not responding to followers damages your brand than not having a social media presence on a single social media platform at all.
You can use tools like BuzzSumo to understand your target audience better and the type of content they want to share.
Build a strong content strategy
Now that you’ve done audience research and identified the channels you’ll use, the next thing you need to do is focus on your content.
Without a proper framework or a plan, then you’ll end up leaving your audience confused, or worse, ignore you.
A great example would be posting interactive social media content. Doing so can encourage volunteer submission and donations.
The best part of creating this type of content is that you don’t have to spend hours crafting a unique post. You could:
- Run Twitter polls
- Run a Q&A session on Instagram Stories
- Post a survey on Facebook
- Ask your audience to share their story through a regular status update.
Engage with your audience
Data from The Case Foundation revealed that the most successful posts on social media create a dialogue between the organization and its audience.
That’s because replying to comments, responding to questions, and publishing posts that often end with a question encourages your audience to participate.
Not only dialogues encourage engagement, but it also creates a sense of connection. This allows you to keep the conversation going, just like what you usually would in real life.
Here are some helpful tips on how you can get the conversation going:
- Respond to comments with a follow-up question.
- Share a story about something you’ve posted.
- Tell your audience about a post that you’ve shared.
- Encourage people to post hashtags about your non-profit.
Track performance and measure your results
Finally, it would help if you used your social media channel’s insights and analytics tools to track how well your posts are performing.
With this data, you’ll gain insight about:
- Your overall likes, shares, tweets, comments.
- Learn about how, where, and when people interact with your posts.
- View your followers’ demographics.
- Segment your audience to target posts.
- View the reach and engagement of individual posts.
- Look for influencers in your network.
You can use this data to create contests that match your followers’ interests. Nonetheless, we encourage you to establish a social media schedule for the best results.
Conclusion
When used correctly, social media can be integral in making your non-profit organization grow. This includes building a stable of regular donors and continuously supporting your beneficiaries.
And with the help of the tips listed above, you can leverage social media for your non-profit organization’s success.
About the Author:
Kevin Urrutia is the founder of Voy Media Advertising Agency NYC. He helps businesses maximize the benefits of Facebook Advertising, leading to a dramatic improvement in sales while pushing down costs. Voy Media thoroughly studies each client and comes up with tailor-fit solutions to bring about the best results.