Benefits Of Using Social Media For Nonprofits

If you are using social media for nonprofits, you are probably accustomed to the all the challenges & struggles.

But despite all the challenges, the benefits of social media for nonprofits are immense. If you use social media with a proper strategy, it can enormously boost your organization's growth.

Nonprofits primarily use social media for fundraisers, campaigns, awareness, advocacy, and recruitment of volunteers.

Usually, nonprofits have small management teams with limited funds. With thin budgets and a limited set of resources, spending too much on advertising for organization's visibility isn't feasible.

But fortunately, social media in 2021 can help nonprofits reach their goals without spending too much money or efforts.

In this blog, we'll talk about the benefits of social media for nonprofits along with social media best practices practices for nonprofits that can help your organization to create impact in a budget-friendly manner.

To create a wholesome idea about the advantages of using social media for nonprofits, we will also discuss tips to choose the right social media platforms and transforming awareness into action to fulfill the goal of your nonprofit organization. Let's get started.

• Top Benefits of Using Social Media For Nonprofits
• How To Choose The Right Social Media For Nonprofits
• How To Turn Awareness Into Action Using Social Media For Nonprofits
• Tips To Make An Impact On Social Media With Limited Budget
• How Can Statusbrew Help Your Nonprofits?

You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.

Top Benefits of Using Social Media For Nonprofits

With social media, your nonprofit organization can quickly connect to the stakeholders, donors, or the people who support your cause. Using popula social media channels, you can create a inclusive network with your target audience.

According to the Nonprofit Tech For Good survey, around 97% of the nonprofits use Facebook, 85% of nonprofits use Twitter, 61% use Instagram, and 63% use LinkedIn.

If you consistently put some effort into social media, it can be impactful and rewarding for your organization.

Social media is the best channel to build communities with minimal resources.

Furthermore, you can foster sensitivity among your target audience through social media to stand with your cause. It also creates a sense of belonging towards an organization, which later transforms into charitable action.

Now let's check out in detail how social media for nonprofits can help your organization.

Relationship Building

Nonprofits require continuous support from the stakeholders or volunteers to work effortlessly on the mission & vision. To get that support, relation-building is an essential part of nonprofits' social media marketing strategy.

You can follow certain tactics to gain supporters' trust, which helps build a relationship with them. Through social media, nonprofits can share information about organization's work or the usage of funds. It is an essential step to enhance the organization's credibility, and it helps to gain the trust of the donors, stakeholders, and supporters.

Image Source: American Red Cross Instagram

Further, you can focus on enhancing the engagements on social media. To attain this parameter, share your organization's performance or share the progress you've made or other crucial elements that can enhance engagement.

With this two-way communication, you can easily gain more attention from your supporters or stakeholders and they get to directly interact & share feedback.

This communication on social media for nonprofits helps you in crafting a solid relationship with your target audience.

Awareness And Action

Social media for nonprofits can help you to generate awareness among the masses about your organization's objectives. By following a good social media marketing strategy for nonprofits, you can create awareness within a short period.

You have to post regularly to be visible on the timelines or the feed of your target audience. Besides making the impact, concentrate on coherent branding logos, colors, or fonts across all the social media platforms. It helps in creating a solid and defined identity for your organization.

Social media enables you to turn awareness into action. You can post visual content related to the mission of your organization to create an impact. You can easily appeal to your followers to take an action via such content.

Visuals can tell your organization's story in front of your supporters, which can result in gaining more and more supporters for your organization.

Image Source: Kiva Facebook Page

Creating Campaigns & Fundraising

Social media for nonprofit organizations can help you to create a campaign or fundraising activity in advance. It is primarily helpful when running on a thin budget and time, and you can not blur your social media strategy.

In such scenarios, you can create specific content, video, and images, explaining your campaigning cause and then schedule them in advance. You can also rely on social media marketing tools like Statusbrew to schedule posts in advance.

Break the content into different parts, like the positive impact of the campaign or experts sharing messages on the cause, etc., and then schedule it in a content calendar.

Storytelling Through Content

You can attract stakeholders or supporters by adding an emotional touch to your content. While creating content, ensure adding elements that appeal to the masses.

You can share your content in video, text, or image format.

To get the most out of social media for nonprofits, you can start sharing stories like what motivated the founders to start the organization or share the journey of the volunteers or employees on why they got involved with your organization.

You also can share stories like how your campaigns and fundraising activities impacted the target communities.

Storytelling can help build the image of the organization and at the same time make the organization's activities more transparent. It increases the engagement with the supporters and can help you to achieve your goal.

How To Choose The Right Social Media Platform For Your Nonprofit

While it's better to have a presence on every social platform possible for maximum reach, limiters such as time & money makes it hard to acheive that.

It's better to focus on one or two platforms and consolidate your efforts on maximizing the potential.

Choosing & working on the right social media platform is vastly important for your nonprofit's performance. Let's try to understand how you can choose the right social media platform for your nonprofit.

Start With Research

While using social media, remember that knowledge is power. Social media is not simply a platform to generate awareness or disseminate messages, but it is also a storehouse of insights. Try to get an in-depth understanding of ongoing trends, needs of the community, etc.

It is a good idea to try and understand the response other nonprofits are getting on certain social media platforms.

Doing social media research will give you an insight into if people can resonate with the cause your organization stands behind on that platform. Analyzing all this data together will help you choose the right social media platform for your organization.

Identify Your Goal And Priorities

Determine your goal and set the organization's priorities before choosing a social media platform. Identifying your aim makes it easier to execute a social media strategy for your organization. Compile your research and your priorities together to create an impactful social media campaign using the right channel.

Set your target audience and a part of your aim; only then will you be able to choose the right platform to reach them. It is essential to know for whom you are creating the content. Usually, nonprofits have a fair idea of their audience's demography, but it is always good to create a user persona.

If you are targeting to reach a comparatively young population, Instagram is a good platform. It is primarily used by young adults. Facebook is used by the young generation as well as the 30+ age groups.

Twitter has been the hot favourite of nonprofits in recent times & is excellent for building a community.

How To Turn Awareness Into Action Using Social Media For Nonprofits

The primary goal for nonprofits to use social media is the overall growth of the organization. And nonprofits need to connect to the donors or the stakeholders to raise funds for the smooth running of the organization.

Hence organization requires to focus on transforming the awareness of the target group into action. Following are a few points for your organizations to give you an idea on how you can turn the sensitivity and awareness of your supporters into action.

Appreciation, Advocacy, And Appeals

To create action through social media for your nonprofit, start appreciating your donors or supporters. Feature supporters on your post to encourage them & give a shout-out to your volunteers as well.

Also, focus on creating content for advocacy. Let your followers know the issue that your organization is trying to solve. In that way, you can enhance the reach of the organization, which impacts the donation drives.

You also can create content that directly asks your supporters to donate to the cause. Just be sure to maintain the transparency of the fund usage through social media.

Image Source: Nazdeek Facebook Page

Display Your Activism

Be an activist; show your supporters that you are an expert in the cause you stand behind. You can share your knowledge with your supporters. Using social media, encourage your followers or supporters to ask questions about the organization & the mission.

You can use Instagram stories for Q/A rounds or can use reels to be creative. Also, it is a good idea to go live on Facebook and Instagram to answer your followers questions. Regularly engage with your audience by sharing your experience with them.

To educate and engage your audience, include those Q/A rounds a part of your weekly or monthly social media marketing strategy.

Showcase What Goes Behind The Scenes

One of the benefits of social media for nonprofits is that you can show your authenticity. Share with your audience about your organization's day-to-day activities. Go for Instagram/Facebook stories, or Twitter fleets to share such content.

This is an excellent way to win the trust of your followers. When your supporters get to know your organization inside out, there are more engagements, turning supporters into donors.

Image Source: American Red Cross Instagram

Tips To Make An Impact On Social Media With Limited Budget

We've now understood that social media can quickly enable your organization to create a mark on your target group with a limited budget. If you create & strictly follow an excellent social media strategy for your nonprofit, you can boost your organization's growth.

To help you get started with a social media strategy for your nonprofit, here are some tips.

Set Up A Nonprofit Account

The first thing for you to do as a nonprofit is to create a nonprofit account on social media platforms.

Most social media platforms let you create special nonprofit accounts.

Creating a nonprofit account comes with some added perks and abilities that are otherwise unavailable with regular accounts. For instance, nonprofit accounts come with built-in fundraising tools, production resources, and dedicated technical support.

Technical support is beneficial as nonprofits run with a limited workforce and a thin marketing budget, proving troublesome at times to afford personal tech support. Special accounts further provide you with analytics options, which further help you to track your progress online.

Add As Much Information As You Can

For better use of social media for nonprofits, update and complete your profile. Spare no details while doing so. First, since you have the provision, add the "Donate" button on your profile. This way, anyone willing to donate can straightway do so without any limitations.

Also, keep your account updated with information like email & all possible phone numbers. Add an address of your establishment, and if possible, add a location for the same. Address and directions for your nonprofit will take the trust and your establishment a step further.

Know Your Followers

To know your followers and supporters better, invest some time to find out their likes and dislikes. By doing that, you can design your future posts and social media activities so that they are liked by more of your followers and are retained in their memories.

A simple way to know your followers better is to take time to explore the kind of pages and accounts they follow and the kind of posts that appeal to them the most. This will give you a fair idea of the followership that you have.

Create Content That Tells A Story

What you post on your profile is essential and plays a vital role in keeping up the engagement.

Your content can get you more donors and more volunteers.

It has been found out through various surveys that social media users tend to engage more with content that tells the story. Tell the story of a community that has been benefited from your actions. Show their faces, show first-person interviews. First-person narratives attract more engagement, make a lasting impact on the viewers, and call them to act.

Image Source: Polaris Facebook Page

Visual content has an immense impact on social media users. It can invoke emotions amongst your followers; people usually prefer visual content. Post pictures about the donation action drive or the awareness camp you have organized. Share pictures about the charity auction or your volunteers or team members working with the community to create a digital memory.

This is the recommended way to create more impact with a limited budget also; it can also help you reach new audiences.

Team Involvement

Involving your team to keep the nonprofit's social media presence up is far better than you acting alone. You can divide tasks among a closed group of members or volunteers to handle certain aspects of the social media game.

It is advisable to organize occasional group huddles and devise the plan for the week or so. It is also advisable to keep rotating responsibilities among this social media circle. It will keep contents and actions fresh while also training members to handle multiple aspects.

Members knowing multiple aspects of the social media game is helpful in situations when a member of the core group is incapacitated due to some reason. In cases like these, the person who knows their part can step in.

If you worry about risks of sharing passwords & unchecked content going out, use a social media tool like Statusbrew.

Statusbrew requires no password sharing of your social profiles & you can customize permissions, access & setup approval workflows.

Appreciate Other Nonprofits

Another effective technique to boost your image and presence is to talk about other nonprofits. Such partnerships are always a positive indicator. Your stories of partnership with like-minded nonprofits, influencers, and other corporate entities will further elevate your organization in front of your supporters.

More people will be willing to associate with your cause in the form of volunteers and donors. So, share stories of your collaboration with influencers, tell stories about your associated nonprofits and other establishments.

Humorous Content & The Use Of Hashtags

Finally, social media is all about keeping it exciting and trending. Keeping up with the trends will ascertain maximum engagement on your profile and new following. Always use hashtags that are relevant to your posts and nonprofits.

Occasionally post fun pictures; it could be a meme or a funny candid of your members at work. Use customizable branded stickers that are available on most of the platforms.

Fun posts like these will increase engagement on your followers and have a high probability of being shared. With your branded stickers on the posts, these shares will boost your presence.

Stay Active 24/7 Without Being Active 24/7

Social media engagement demands regular posts and updates. But nonprofits running with a thin workforce may find it challenging to make time to stay online at all times. It may hinder your whole social media presence.

However, most social media platforms have the option to schedule your posts. With this option, you can schedule posts to be uploaded later, whenever your audience is most active.

It is also advisable to create and fill up a social media calendar. This calendar should also have a rough outline of your plans for social media. It will also attract the involvement of more of your team members.

Your calendar must distinctly point out the essential days, events, and holidays related to your organization.

How Can Statusbrew Help Your Nonprofits?

Statusbrew offers a 50% discount to eligible nonprofits.

Uplift your nonprofit's social media strategy with Statusbrew. Statusbrew helps you in publishing, engaging with the audience, and creating customized reports for all social media platforms from one single place.

With Statusbrew, create and schedule multiple social media posts across the platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google My Business with just a click.

With Statusbrew's comment management tools, you can manually or automatically delete, hide, or mark unwanted comments as spam.

Build a strong community base of donors and followers by transforming awareness into action with the help of Statusbrew.

Book a free demo with Statusbrew to understand how it can work for your nonprofit organization.

Try Statusbrew Today!

Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, and even Google My Business.