This article won’t teach you any tricks — we’re not into magic. It will teach you how to create a sustainable nonprofit social media strategy, one that’s ROI-oriented. You’re not an influencer, so you don’t need cheap tricks on how to attract irrelevant traffic.
You need to increase your donations, find more donors, and make your cause known to more people. So, this is what we’re talking about in our guide for social media marketing for nonprofits.
Any good strategy starts with a why. So why do you need social media in the first place?
Almost everyone’s on social media. I’m sure you knew that already, so I won’t dwell on it too much. Just a quick number here: there are nearly 5 billion social media users worldwide, and this number keeps growing. Some amazing stats from 2023.
2024 will prove to be even more explosive!
What do all these people do for two and a half hours every day on social media? Glad you asked! We have a data-backed answer:
This is where the real gold is! You’ve already got 16% of people saying that they use social media to support or connect with a good cause.
The top five reasons can work in your favor, too, albeit they’ll be second-order connections:
This reframe can work for all the reasons in the graph above. You just need a bit of creativity.
For example, here’s how UNICEF, a SyncApps subscriber, leverages news stories to make its mission more popular.
Want more inspiration from UNICEF? Check out their story about using data for good and for better campaigns.
However, this is not an art exhibition, so your creativity has to be correlated with your goals. What good is an excellent campaign if it doesn’t align with your goals?
Did you know that goal tracking is easier when your mission-critical solutions “talk” to each other? Integrate Nonprofits Success Pack (NPSP) and other Salesforce solutions with your email automation platform. Start here, it’s 100% free to test it out!
First order of business: do not get fixated on vanity metrics. Sure, audience size is relevant — you don’t want to be talking to yourself.
But talking to the wrong audience is equally harmful. You’ll be wasting precious effort engaging with people and organizations who can’t or won’t support your nonprofit’s mission.
We can do better than that.
The most common goals in social media marketing for nonprofits are:
Remember that your goals need to be SMART. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
For example:
These goals are specific, measurable, relevant, and time-bound. How about achievable, though?
How do you make sure you don’t set impossible goals or, on the contrary, goals that are too low?
You can use a few benchmarks for this:
For your goals to be attainable, you need to be in the right place, though. You need to meet your audience where they usually hang out.
Nonprofits are notoriously understaffed. While marketing 101 rules dictate that the more platforms you’re on, the better, it’s understandable that you can’t be everywhere and keep churning out great content.
You have to pick. But you also have to do it wisely.
Start with where your ideal audience is. You already have socio-demographic data on who your ideal donors are.
Use that to choose the platform(s) you dedicate most of your time and energy to. Cross-reference it with platform-specific data for better results.
For instance, did you know that 48% of social media donors donate on Facebook? If you want to organize fundraisers on social media, Facebook is the platform to focus on.
But only if it matches your donors’ profile. Here’s how to figure that out:
Speaking of bandwidth, let’s make social media easier for you to manage.
Do you often find yourself scrambling for ideas on what to post on social media today? Let go of last-minute panic by batch-creating your content.
On average, it can take you as little as one hour to create the social media content for a week, depending on the format, of course. If you need to do a lot of photo and video editing, it’s closer to four hours.
Allocate this time once per week and get all the posts done in a single sitting. You can then schedule them in advance or copy-paste them when you need to.
You don’t need any fancy tools for this, either. If you use Mailchimp, you already have a social media planner included in your plan. To make your work even easier, integrate your Salesforce account with Mailchimp so you can get a bird’s-eye-view over all your communication efforts.
Not on Mailchimp? You need nothing fancier than a spreadsheet to keep track of your social media marketing. Semrush has a good free template you can use.
Vanity metrics may not be your end goal, but social media engagement is a good indicator of how well your campaigns will fare on other channels. Of course, you need to take this with a grain of salt. Sometimes, your posts will fall flat simply because the algorithm doesn’t favor them.
Here’s how you can use data from your nonprofit’s social media marketing to improve your campaigns:
Did you know most social media platforms have dedicated tools to help nonprofits market better?
You can’t run a nonprofit on social media alone because the algorithms are fickle, and you have no control over them. Nonprofit social media marketing is a great way to get more donors and make your mission more popular.
But at the end of the day, you should always look for ways to bring donors and other stakeholders to a platform you own and control.
WWF South Africa, a SyncApps customer, does this very well. Check out this tweet:
The link takes you to a website where you can buy tickets for their event. The tickets are free, but WWF gets to collect email addresses. And they add it to their own platforms so they can continue to target the attendees with more campaigns.
Get more insights into how WWF uses an omnichannel approach for precise targeting through the NetSuite and Mailchimp integration.
Once you have access to potential donors’ or volunteers’ contact data, you can continue to target them more precisely. Since you own that data, you’re no longer at the whim of social media algorithms.
Another way to create an omnichannel experience that results in more conversions is to integrate your Facebook leads ads with Salesforce. This way, the information will flow freely in your systems, and you can target your leads more precisely.
Social media is ever-changing. We barely got used to the low organic reach, now, most platforms have paid options.
The best advice for your social media strategy is to keep experimenting. Don’t stick to a single network and, more importantly, move your audience to a platform you can control. Collecting email addresses is the best way to make sure you will be able to reach them in the future.
Once you have their email addresses, it’s time to leverage them to the fullest. Integrate your email marketing platform with your CRM or Marketing Platform to get cross-platform insights and save dozens of ours every week.
Check out the NPSP integrations and test them out for free. After you create your account, tell us about it so we can add a discount to it — it’s our way to support nonprofits and their important missions.
