Auditing your social media accounts as a nonprofit is key to ensuring that your marketing efforts are having a positive impact and getting you the results you need. 

Before I get into why and how to audit your accounts, I’d like to first introduce you to an essential mindset shift that we believe nonprofits should adopt to help their marketing efforts gain more traction.  

We know that social media can be overwhelming because there are so many features and changing algorithms, etc. However, nonprofits are not on social media to get skilled at social media –  you’re not trying to be a social media manager, but you are trying to connect with your audience. It’s about telling your story, using social media as the TOOL to do so. 

You don’t need to become a social media expert, you need to become an expert at telling your story. 

Now that we have that lens to operate from, let’s discuss 4 reasons why auditing your own social media accounts as a nonprofit organization is so important to help you get more supporters. 

1. Branding & Consistency: 

Conducting regular audits helps ensure that your social media accounts are aligned with your organization’s brand guidelines and messaging. This is important because consistent branding across platforms builds trust, familiarity, and recognition among your followers, donors, and supporters. Consistency is a trust marker, and trust is the foundation of every successful purpose-driven organization. Lack of consistency equals reducing the perception of trust in the marketplace. 

2. Content Quality: 

Auditing your social media accounts also allows you to evaluate the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of the content you are sharing. It helps you assess if your posts are engaging, informative, and valuable to your audience. Is your content of high quality, or are you posting just for the sake of posting? By identifying gaps or areas for improvement, you can refine your content strategy and enhance user experience. 

3. Performance and Engagement: 

An audit helps you analyze how well your social media channels are performing in terms of audience engagement and interaction. You can review metrics such as reach, impressions, likes, comments, and shares to gauge the effectiveness of your content and determine which types of posts resonate most with your audience. This data enables you to make data-driven decisions to improve engagement and strengthen your relationship with your supporters. 

4. Reputation Management: 

By reviewing comments, reviews, and mentions across platforms, you can identify and address any negative feedback or concerns promptly. Timely responses to questions, comments, or complaints demonstrates your commitment to transparency and accountability, which is key as a nonprofit. 

Now, you might be wondering how exactly to do an audit. 

I’ll focus on Instagram for the sake of this article, but it can and should be done for all the social platforms. 

Step 1: 

Open your nonprofit’s Instagram profile. Take a look at what your profile looks like at first glance. Ask yourself these questions: 

  • Is your profile picture high quality, or is it blurry? Is it your logo? Is it the same as Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever other platforms you’re using? 
  • What does your bio say – is it current? Does it explain what you do clearly? 
  • Is there a CTA (call to action)? It should be related to whatever you have currently going on, such as a campaign or event or simply to donate, and it should point to your link
  • What link do you have listed – is it up to date? Instagram now allows up to 5 links, but we recommend using a Link.tree because it’s more customizable. 
  • Are your highlights on brand, relevant, up to date? 

Step 2:

Take a look at your feed overall and ask yourself the following questions:

  • When you look at your feed (and this is especially important for Instagram because of the layout of the app), is it on brand? Is it cohesive? Or are you using random fonts, colours, images, graphics? 
  • What overall feel does your profile have? Is it professional, positive, interesting? This will vary across organizations as it depends on your branding goals.
  • Are you making use of pinned posts? If you have a campaign or event going on, those posts should be pinned to the top so they are the first thing someone sees when they come to your profile. You’re essentially saying “look here first”.
  • Are you making good use of each content type? Look in the top right hand corner of each post to see the little icon for reels and carousels, and if there is none, it’s a single image post. You should have a variety of formats. 

Step 3: 

Review your content – click into each post separately.

  • Is your use of fonts, colours, graphics on brand? 
  • Is the content relevant, interesting, enticing, or capturing? Is it something that your audience would actually be interested in, or did you just create and post something for the sake of posting? 
  • Take a moment to read the caption – does it sound on brand, does it read well? Is the caption one dense paragraph or are there line breaks and emojis? Is there a clear CTA? What is the point of this post? 
  • Did you get any comments on the post? If so, have they been replied to, and done so in a timely manner? 
  • You can also check your insights for each post here, but we will look at insights in Step 4.

Step 4:

Review your insights. 

There are multiple ways to review insights – on each post as previously mentioned, or on your profile under the bio section you’ll see your professional dashboard. You can also find it by clicking on the 3 lines in the top right hand corner, and then find “Insights”. 

  • In Insights, there is a lot of information. Choose the time frame you’d like to see – for example last month. You can see how many accounts you reached, how many accounts engaged, how many followers you gained, and then you can see how each post performed. 
  • In the Accounts Reached section, you will see more information about these accounts such as which content they saw and their demographics. Take a close look at the demographics – is it in line with your target audience? If you’re not reaching your ideal audience, then you need to adjust something so you are actually speaking to your audience. 
  • In this section you can also see website clicks, which is normally a big indicator of success for nonprofits on social media – are the posts and CTAs working? Are people actually clicking your link to donate, sign up or whatever action it is that you want them to take? 

There are many ways to create effective social media content, however, we believe that compelling storytelling is the key. If you need help telling your story through your communications materials, contact us to get the support you need today. 

Nina Staer Nathan is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Sunflower Communications, a storytelling agency bringing heart and soul to communications in order to help nonprofits and social enterprises fundraise, advocate and create awareness for important causes around the world.