Leveraging the Power of Social Media: 3 Tips for Nonprofits

Social media is a powerful and cost-effective tool for nonprofit organizations to promote and support their causes, and to build relationships within the community by giving members an online forum to stay informed and updated. But building and maintaining a successful social media presence requires strategy. To help, we’ve put together the following three tips that your organization can use to better leverage its social media efforts.   

1.Be choosy when it comes to selecting a social media platform(s). Before deciding, consider the following questions: 

• Who is the organization’s target audience?
• What social media platforms does that target audience use most?
• How much time and effort are involved in creating and managing the selected platform(s)?

 2. Create a plan for building the organization’s online community.

• Begin with clear objectives and goals. For example, are you looking to increase donor support, reach potential volunteers and employees or promote an event? It’s okay to have more than one goal, but don’t lose focus by implementing too many all at once.
• When you know who your target audience is, begin to seed your online community with relevant content that will be of interest to members.
• Keep the momentum going by continually engaging with your community. This includes monitoring the platforms and responding to visitor postings.
• For event promotion, establish an editorial calendar and schedule relevant posts leading up to the day of the event. For a fundraiser, build excitement by posting regular updates. For example, how close is the organization to meeting its fundraising goal?
• Leverage your social media platforms. For example, content posted on Facebook can be repurposed and promoted via LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

 3. Measure your results. Once your social media program gets rolling, it’s important to determine what is working and what isn’t. For example, was the fundraising campaign successful in reaching its goals? Did the community outreach plan gain enough local interest for recruiting new volunteers? Remember, it doesn’t require an IT department measuring metrics to determine how successful your social media efforts are. Simply measuring your success based on goals and objectives is a good basic tool.

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