- Determine What Role Social Media Plays in Your Nonprofit’s Outreach/Communications Strategy
Whether you run a large organization with a global scope or a small organization that serves a specific community, social media can be a very effective and resourceful tool that can take your organization to new heights. Social media can help your organization reach new people (who probably wouldn’t have stumbled upon your organization) who can end up being donors, partners, volunteers, members of the community you serve, and all around supporters. Going into social media, it is important to have an idea of what kind of audience you want to attract. This audience will become the foundation of your following, however, always be mindful that people who fall outside of your “envisioned audience” will also join you on your road to complete your organization’s mission. This doesn’t mean that you have to “mission creep”, it just means that your organization has attracted other audiences for a reason, which is a good thing.
- Determine What You Want to Accomplish
Every nonprofit has a mission and so should every strategy. When it comes to social media, your mission should be the social goals you want to achieve. Social goals should be clear and easy to define.
For example, goals that can guide your social media strategy can include:
- Community outreach/engagement and education
- Brand building and reputation management
- Program recruitment
- Fundraising
- Identify Your Target Audience
Typically, large social media websites such as YouTube have built in audience analytics tools. However, we all understand that sometimes looking at different analytic tools amongst social media sites can get confusing and tiresome. That’s why our friends at Social Blade came up with the idea to create a hub where you can measure all of your audiences on one site. Visit: https://socialblade.com/ to get started. Social blade has features such as user summary, live view count, future projections, detailed statistics, consulting, and even a compare option where you can compare your social media accounts to other nonprofits, businesses, celebrities, and any other kind of account you can think of.
Moreover, nonprofits can develop audience personas, which are representations of your ideal supporters based on a combination of demographic data and information about individual members of your target audience.
- Figure out The Best Sites for Your Strategy
After you have identified your target audience, study social media demographics to find out where they are active online, and focus your efforts on those networks.
Don’t spread yourself too thin by worrying about adopting every network that comes up. Building a strong online following is about quality not quantity (although quantity is nice if it is paired with quality). Instead of spreading yourself thin, focus on doing an excellent job on two or three networks with a large potential for reaching your target audience.
- Content Strategy
Your content strategy is dependent on your organization’s niche, mission, audience, needs, etc. Furthermore, it is important to create promotional material with your logo, these can include but not limited to:
- Funny and inspirational memes
- Promotional materials: videos, flyers, organizational success stories, meet the staff post, etc.
- Polls and other post that encourages engagement.
- Contest
- Use custom hashtags to promote your events and build awareness for your organization
Finally, here is a link to 39 free tools to create unique social media post: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/free-image-creation-tools/
- Measure Social Engagement
Once you have identified and began (if you didn’t have one already) your audience, its now time to start measuring your social engagement to become more efficient and effective via social media. Social engagement can be measured in various ways: “social engagements”, shares, retweets, comments/responses, likes, poll responses, impressions, etc. Like publicity, all social engagements are good social engagements (besides a few unfortunate exceptions), but it is also important to figure out which social engagements are the most important for you so that you can begin to figure out how to get the most out of social media. For example, if your goal is to get donations, your goal may be to post a social media post that triggers the viewer’s emotions with the hope that they will share the post on their social networks to build awareness of your post as well as to your donations page (by clicking the donations link listed at the bottom of your post).
- Engagement Comes First
Social media is far more than a publishing platform—it’s a place to capture people’s attention, connect with supporters and build communities. From day one, track your social media efforts to ensure that you are progressing toward your goals. Demonstrating results will show your leadership the importance of investing time and resources into social media, and it will help you adjust your content strategy to focus on the type of content that performs best.
With limited time to spend on social, engagement should be a priority. Respond to questions, comments and posts tagging your organization, and look for relevant hashtags to find new conversations to join. While your tone may be more formal on other outlets, social media is a particularly good place to cultivate a personable brand voice that helps supporters feel connected. Don’t be afraid to use humor to connect either.
- Empower Your Advocates & Cross-Promote Your Content
Even the most enthusiastic proponents of your organization may not realize that social sharing is a powerful way that they can raise awareness for your cause. If you are creating or ramping up your presence on a specific network, make it known to all of your constituents that they can connect with you there.
Show them the value of following—the stories, tips and images they can expect to see—and educate them about the best ways to show support. Don’t be afraid to cross-promote your social media content on other channels.
Here are a few suggestions to get advocates of your organization active/social:
- Start a Private Group: Invite them to join a private group or another mechanism of communication so you can let them know when there’s something important or interesting that needs to be shared. Make sure to cheer them on and thank them when they do share.
- Promote via Other Communication Channels: Support your social with monthly newsletters, email, phone and other forms of communication outside of social media. You accomplish this by sending a link to board members, and ask them to like it, share it, comment and tell you what they think. However you want them to interact with you let them know. People can’t read our minds. It’s not obvious to them; their universe doesn’t revolve around our nonprofit or our social media outreach.
- Provide Sample Posts: Finally, you can make it even easier for them to share by providing sample posts for Facebook, sample Tweets, etc. Send an email with pre-written Tweets and graphics people can share when you’re launching a big campaign, telling them one of the ways they can support you is to share on Facebook, Twitter or whatever network you think they’re most active on. If you have high profile advocates or an internal team that’s active on social, you can use an advocacy platform like Bambu to curate content and messaging for your advocates to share. This way, all your team has to do is login and start sharing content with a few clicks.
- If All Else Fails, Contact A Social Media Expert For Help
If all else fails you can contact Prince Matthews at Prince@ViralPyramidMarketing.com for further assistance on your social media outreach needs!
