Utilize Social Media Marketing to Support Your Nonprofit’s Digital Fundraising

Social media has transformed the fundraising landscape for nonprofits, providing opportunities for organizations to connect, engage, and rally support from their audience. However, getting started can feel overwhelming and intimidating. How can you craft compelling content that will make your organization stand out? Here’s how you can optimize your digital marketing efforts this giving season.

Determine Your Social Media Goals and Strategy

Before launching your digital fundraising campaign, you must have a clearly defined strategy and agreed-upon goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Is there a specific dollar amount you are looking to raise during your fundraiser? Having your organization agree on set goals allows you and your team to focus your efforts and clearly understand how to measure success during your campaign.

Once you determine your goals, you will want to consider what your social media strategy will be to execute and achieve success. Do you have the budget to take advantage of the targeting capabilities available through social media advertising? Do you have a strong online support group that you can tap into for a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign? No matter what tactic you use, it is important that all efforts are aligned with achieving your goals.

Execute Your Strategy

After determining what you hope to achieve with your fundraiser, you will want to create content focused on realizing those goals. Here are content ideas to help you get started.

1. Craft a Social Media Toolkit

A social media toolkit is a resource you can create for your audience that shares resources to make it simple for them to engage and share your campaign content. Pieces to remember to include in your toolkit include: 

• Key talking points about your organization and the campaign you are running.
• Social media tips to give your audience the confidence to share content around your fundraiser.
• Sample social media posts to assist those who might be unsure of what to say when promoting your campaign. These sample posts should also include sharable graphics that can be easily downloaded.
• Fundraising ideas to inspire and show your audience the many ways to support your organization.

2. Share Your Impact

To inspire and encourage active participation during your fundraising campaign, one of the most impactful approaches is to share the influence your nonprofit has on the community. More likely your audience will want to donate and engage with content highlighting your population served than a general post just asking for donations! Sharing spotlights on those individuals, as well as content about employees and volunteers, shows your audience the impact of their donations and support.

3. Build Your Community

Did you know that 32% of donors are most likely inspired to donate via social media? Because of this, it is important that you are actively engaging with your audience on a regular basis, especially during your digital fundraising campaign. Here are a few ways to get started building your online community.

Gamification

Gamification is the process of turning your content into an online game. You can gamify your content by creating polls, “This or That” Instagram stories and shareable donation bingo cards. 

Match for Match

Double the impact of your audience’s generosity by running a Match for Match campaign and sharing the progress regularly on your social media channels. Not only is this an easy way to stay engaged with your audience, but you are likely to see more donations as 84% of donors are more likely to donate if a match is offered. Note that this approach would require a sponsor or supporter to confirm they will match all donations up to a certain amount.

Staying Engaged With Your Audience

Engage with all comments and content sharing a message about your brand or fundraising campaign. Stories and retweets are a great way to reshare content you are tagged in by others who are spreading the word to their followers about your campaign. 

By incorporating these tactics, both you and your organization can strengthen your digital fundraising efforts and make a lasting impact on your audience.

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.