Make Your Nonprofit Social

Engage Your Users With Social Media

Lindsay Chambers, Jennifer Morehead, Heather Sallee

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781952538650
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

This book is a collective project from three authors who have worked with nonprofits in developing and managing effective social media marketing tactics. Within these pages, you will find what you need to ensure your nonprofit is using social media platforms to boost your branding and marketing.

When you use social media in your personal life, you connect with old friends, discover new interests, or belong to specialized groups that share your values. However, for nonprofits, social media is a way to connect with those who believe in your purpose. Social media allows nonprofits to showcase their human connection and garner more support.

In Make Your Nonprofit Social, you will learn how to: - Expand your nonprofit's audience - Showcase the human side of your nonprofit - Choose the best platform to share your nonprofit with the world - Identify practical strategies you can use to amplify your nonprofit's mission - Design graphics to put your nonprofit front and center - And much more!

This book is a collective project from three authors who have worked with nonprofits in developing and managing effective social media marketing tactics. Within these pages, you will find what you need to ensure your nonprofit is using social media platforms to boost your branding and marketing.

CHAPTER 1

Why Spend the Time on Social Media?

Social media is about entering a conversation with a diverse group of people. Each nonprofit, whether it has a staff of 1 person or 1,000, has something profoundly personal at the heart of it. You can take your organization to the next level by unlocking the magic of social media and its power to connect your ideas, culture, and mission to a broader community (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Social media is all around us

In Chapter 2, we’re going to start getting interactive with you and ask questions about the particular social media needs of your nonprofit. But here, in Chapter 1, we’ll get right to the point to convince you of the need for social media. Social media acts as a focus group for your nonprofit, an easier and cheaper form of advertising, creates customer loyalty like you wouldn’t believe, and helps you build your brand. When viewed in this way, you can understand why social media has become so popular and necessary for nonprofits.

We will do our best to explain everything social media can do for you, but first, we’re going to provide takeaways of the entire book for those of you in a hurry. After all, you’re busy running your organization. Here are the essential takeaways for social media that we will detail in the pages to come.

Key Takeaways throughout the Book

1. Remember the landscape of social media and be strategic about which platforms you choose to use for your nonprofit. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

2. Use fun and noncontroversial topics to look for questions to ask your audience, to get them into the practice of answering on your social media platform.

3. You can use the responses to your posts to determine, in real time, what resonates with your audience and what does not.

4. Use hashtags creatively to build your brand and set your nonprofit apart from the competition.

5. Get personal with the story behind your nonprofit. Your audience will appreciate the authenticity.

6. If you’re just getting started with social media, focus on one platform at a time to avoid taking on too much at once.

7. Cultivate an audience by starting with your current audience.

8. Develop a strategy, and be intentional with what you post.

9. Use graphics to grab users’ attention, maximize the impact of what you post, and help you stand out in the crowded landscape of social media.

10. You don’t need a degree in design to create clean, professional-looking graphics. Plenty of websites offer free software to help with this.

11. Don’t make every post a sales pitch or a shout for donations for your organization. Mix it up with content that shows a more personable side of your nonprofit. Use graphics wherever possible.

12. It may take some trial and error to find the ideal times of day and frequency to post content. That is ok...the important thing is that you find a time that works for your nonprofit.

13. You can create Facebook ads to get highly targeted with your audience. Facebook advertising doesn’t have to be expensive. You can reach hundreds of people for a few dollars per day.

14. Use the power of LinkedIn groups to generate new leads. Join groups that are relevant to your nonprofit and become part of the conversation. Post articles that demonstrate your expertise.

15. YouTube is free to use and has virtually no barriers to entry, making it an ideal platform for small nonprofits trying to grow their online brand on a shoestring budget.

16. People find video content engaging and memorable and will spend time watching videos you post, though shorter clips (1 minute or less) are usually more effective.

17. Be sure to include keywords and calls to action in every video you upload.

18. You can gain a following on Twitter by using hashtags creatively, following and engaging with influencers, and posting several times per day.

19. Use Twitter lists to keep up with competitors, boost your relationships with industry leaders, and stay abreast of trends and news.

20. It’s smart to stay on top of emerging social platforms, in addition to maintaining an active presence on established ones such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

21. Find micro-influencers within your niche or industry, and reach out to explore a partnership.

22. Use your logo when posting visual content.

23. Many different nonprofits have found success in sharing funny, relatable posts featuring photos of their staff or supporters interacting with them at events.

These are the high points of our book. As you know, though, the devil is in the details, and we’d like to explain more. Let’s jump back into how to build the case that your organization needs a presence on social media.

Making the Case That Your Nonprofit Needs a Social Media Presence

Your first challenge may be convincing your organization’s leadership team that investing the time and effort in building a social media presence will pay off. After all, your nonprofit likely has limited resources, and there is no way to guarantee that social media will result in the desired growth—especially in the short term. You also don’t want to spend so much time chasing new followers on social media that you lose sight of the big picture for your nonprofit. Where do you begin? Here’s some ammunition you can use to make your case.

• Social media platforms are free to use. That’s good news for any nonprofit organization that is working with a limited marketing budget. You can expand your reach and your branding without spending much, if any, money.

• Social media is dynamic and fresh. If you lack a vibrant presence on social media, people might view your organization as stale, boring, or irrelevant.

• Millennials (generally defined as the cohort born between 1981 and 19961) are the world’s largest generation, and your organization can’t afford to live without them. Millennials rely on social media to get the majority of their news and information and that includes their understanding of your nonprofit’s mission and goals.

• You believe in your organization’s ability to make the world a better place, but merely doing great work isn’t enough anymore. Publishing interesting and relevant content via social media is the rising tide that will help you raise more money and attract new supporters.

Focus Group Created Just for Your Nonprofit

Have you ever launched a program offering what you thought would be wildly popular with your members, but it fell flat? Think about the time, energy, and expense you put into creating it, and how much you might have benefited from bouncing the idea off supporters, who could have pointed you in the right direction. Think of social media as a focus group tailored just for you and your nonprofit. Chances are, the people in your group have joined because they are already interested in what you are doing. As long as you nurture and reward your audience and followers, you will get their honest, and instant, feedback. You’ll have an invested focus group at your fingertips just by growing your social media following.

To get there, you’ll need to intentionally build and maintain your social media accounts. Maybe you already have some, but they could use a little care and curation. We’ll give you some great strategies later in this book to build your following, but for now, start with the followers you already have and get their opinions like you would from a focus group.

In a successful focus group, participants feel free to give open and honest feedback. They’re not fearful of being judged, and the moderator and other participants validate that their opinions matter. You can build the same sort of natural, comfortable interaction between followers on your page by setting the rules and the tone. Not every conversation should be directly about your organization, however.

People love to give their opinions on things, especially when they don’t feel obligated to give them. Ask your members to share their opinions and feedback and then respond to their replies. You can start with fun and noncontroversial topics from the pop culture realm to generate some fun questions. By asking followers to weigh in on how they feel about an upcoming football game or a popular TV show, you show that you’re in touch with what they’re interested in and you care about what they think.

One example of an easy, inoffensive question most people have strong opinions on is which way to hang the toilet paper roll: over or under. On the surface, of course, this feels like a really nonsensical thing to ask, but use this question as a guide to thinking outside the box of fun things you can do to get people to respond. You can ask funny questions, brainy questions, and the types of queries your audience will respond to. Take it to the next level by asking a more controversial question and watching the comments spike—you need to do this carefully, though. Then, you can start to sprinkle in questions about your organization, and presto, you’ll have some quick and easy answers, directly from those invested in your mission.

Next, you will want to get in the habit of offering a small reward for audience members who are willing to share their thoughts. You can reward participants for their feedback by entering them in a raffle to win an experience from your organization, sending them a virtual thank you note, posting on their social media page, or offering some sort of benefit linked to your nonprofit. For example, if you operate a community center, you could offer a free exercise class to those who reply to your question. If you run a nonprofit to feed the hungry, you could offer free T-shirts with your logo on them. Whatever you do, make sure you make participants feel heard and appreciated.

Advertising Made Easy(er)

Can you recall an advertising campaign you launched way back when in the Yellow Pages (remember those?) or, more recently, on Google Adwords? Many nonprofits waste precious funds on ineffective advertising until they finally hit on a strategy that works. Advertising can be more art than science, and it’s tricky to get it right. As your audience grows, posting on social media can become a more affordable and easier option than advertising.

Advertising for your nonprofit can take many forms on social media. The secret is to make it feel natural, like it is part of an ongoing conversation with your followers. You can share updates about how your organization is serving the community or how your mission is enriching supporters. Show inspiring and fun photos of your organization in action. Give updates on events before, during, and after they occur. Sharing news about your nonprofit will show your followers what you are all about and make them want to be a part of it.

The more advertising you do on social media, the more data and insights you will have to analyze. You can also see in real time what flops and what lands big with your audience. Because social media is so malleable, you can change the way you are marketing and the type of content you are posting, and your fol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Why Spend the Time on Social Media?
• Chapter 2 Take It Offline to Develop Your Social Media Content
• Chapter 3 Cultivate an Audience
• Chapter 4 Making It Visual
• Chapter 5 Facebook
• Chapter 6 Instagram and Pinterest
• Chapter 7 LinkedIn
• Chapter 8 YouTube
• Chapter 9 Twitter
• Chapter 10 Next-Level Social Media
• Chapter 11 Hear from Those Who Have Done It Well
• Appendix
• About the Authors
• Index
• Back Cover