Are you looking for fundraising opportunities for your nonprofit organization, or are you planning for a campaign?
Whatever might be your goal, Facebook can be the perfect social media platform for your nonprofit.
2020 was a challenging year for many nonprofits. Right from fundraising to operations, the year was crucial, and the performance pressure was always there.
However, nonprofits leveraged social media to connect with stakeholders, donors & beneficiaries.
But with fierce competition to gain visibility on the platform, it can be challenging for your nonprofit to stand out. Especially since organic reach and engagement on Facebook is dwindling constantly, you may feel like your efforts are going down the drain.
To help you maximize the use of Facebook for nonprofits, we have compiled a list of tactics to use for your nonprofit's growth. We also talk about few Facebook marketing strategies for fundraising & mention ways to handle social media crisis on Facebook.
Let's get started and get a better understanding of using Facebook for nonprofits.
- How To Use Facebook For Your Nonprofit’s Growth?
- How To Use Facebook Fundraising For Nonprofits?
- Facebook For Nonprofits: Social Media Crisis Management
- Statusbrew An Unified Solution For Your Nonprofit
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
How To Use Facebook For Your Nonprofit's Growth?
Facebook hosts 86% of Americans with an annual income level over $100,000. This data shows how Facebook can be leveraged for fundraising & growth.
Let's learn more about how to use Facebook for nonprofits' growth.
Kick-Off With A Strategy
Plan a social media strategy for your nonprofit to use Facebook effectively. Ask a few questions to yourself like, what is your mission & vision, what is your goal & priorities, within how much time you want to achieve these goals, etc.
It is vital to choke out your preferences to get the most out of Facebook for nonprofits. Besides, make sure to do in-depth research about how similar nonprofits are using Facebook, also how your Facebook activities can match your organization's overall marketing strategy.
Make sure to involve your team members while brainstorming about the strategies. It is always good to decide roles & responsibilities for your social media management team to avoid chaos in using social media for nonprofits. Decide on content creators, community managers, etc.
If you're a Statusbrew user, you can control which team member get access to what section of your Facebook page. You can also set up approval workflows to ensure nothing unchecked goes out.
In that way, there is no threat of posting embarrassing, unfiltered, or controversial posts, which can hamper your organization's image.
Focus On Your Profile
Add a profile picture, add a description, update the cover photo and add latest contact information to complete your profile.
Image Source: The Humane Society of the United States
Also, add a description of your organization's work. It makes your profile more credible and authentic.
To create an engaging Facebook profile for your organization:
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Rather than a personal profile, set up a Facebook page for your organization.
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For the profile picture, use the logo of your organization; make sure it is recognizable.
Image Source: The Humane Society of the United States
- Choose a username for your page that is similar to your nonprofit's website URL.
- While adding the description in the About section, add keyword-rich content.
- Also, add your website URL and the office address of your organization, along with the email address and other contact information.
Brainstorm For Quality Content
If you want to gain the most from Facebook, posting quality content is the way to go. Posting high-quality content related to your cause can enhance your fundraising efforts, or it can strengthen your connection with stakeholders.
Besides, posting relevant and compelling content helps you to engage with your target audience. Make sure you follow a social media calendar as a part of your strategy. It ensures consistency in posting, which is vital for your organization's growth.
Statusbrew's Planner helps you plan and can schedule content for months in advance.
Also, you can plan the post timing as per your audience; it can enhance the visibility of your content, resulting in more engagement.
Following are a few things to keep in mind while creating your content:
Content-Type
Share content that talks about your nonprofits' journey, or show the work of your teammates or highlight impact narratives. Also, share posts appreciating your donors or supporters.
Share your blog, along with videos & images of your events and campaigns.
Occasionally share memes or humorous posts. Sharing varied and balanced content helps to gain followers' attention.
Call To Action
Create content asking your followers to support your cause. Share your message and post-Q/A's, to get them to interact with you. Create fill in a blank post for an issue and ask them to share their opinion. In that way, you can transform their awareness into action, which is beneficial for your growth.
Post Visual Content
Posting visuals can enhance the impact and reach of the message. Apart from images, post short videos, infographics, GIFs, and Facebook 360 photos. Social media is a smartphone led platform; hence, make sure that your content design is mobile-friendly.
Make Impactful Communication Through Video
When you use Facebook for nonprofits, posting videos is highly recommended.
Interactive visuals, audio, dialogues, and music makes videos immensely powerful to communicate with your audience or stakeholders. Video is emotionally engaging, and hence it can stir up engagement. It can go viral, creating an enormous impact towards organization's growth.
While creating videos for Facebook, you need to work according to the Facebook algorithm. Facebook videos play on mute by default, but users have the option to activate the audio. Hence you need to create captivating visuals to impact and reach your target audience even without audio. You can deliver the message using text as captions.
Make sure to keep the video short and effective, also; use description and an enthralling title so that users can easily find the video. To build trust with your audience, occasionally go live on your page. Ensure that the videos that you have created are mobile friendly.
Invest Time And Resources To Make Engagement
Invest time and resources to engage with your audience or stakeholders on Facebook. While using Facebook for nonprofits, responding & replying to your supporters increases impression and reach. It also makes organization look more credible and helps in relationship building.
Reacting or reciprocating to your target groups on Facebook helps create a voice for your nonprofit.
Respond to supporters' questions, answer relevant questions on other pages, and search for relevant hashtags to join the new conversations. Besides, connect to your stakeholders & donors personally through email to keep them up to date on the organization. Through Facebook stories, you can also share behind the scenes, which is a great way to enhance engagement.
Find More About: How To Manage Social Media Engagement For Nonprofits
Learn About Facebook Fundraising Tools
Facebook for nonprofits is a valuable social media platform for fundraising.
Facebook lets you set up a "Donate Button," which allows your supporters to donate to your organization. You can direct users to your website's donation page, or they can directly donate through Facebook.
Facebook's fundraising feature supports peer-to-peer fundraising.
Individuals can raise funds through this feature on behalf of your nonprofit organization as well. They can even set up a page to collect donations to support your fundraising activity.
Peer-to-peer fundraising comes under the phenomenon of donor acquisition strategy. This crowdfunding strategy uses your existing donor or stakeholder network. Your supporters reach to their peer network to collect funds for your organization.
Share Clickable Links & Boost Visibility With Facebook Ads
The current Facebook algorithm gives more visibility to the links shared in the link format. Through clickable links, you can share additional information about your organization's work and performance or share data. It helps to maintain transparency, also.
From your overall marketing budget, set up an advertising budget for Facebook. You can try boosting Facebook posts for more reach and visibility. Boosting posts is a kind of advertisement on Facebook, where putting some money on a post helps you lend on more news feeds.
If you want to go for an ad campaign, make sure to set your goal and get well acquainted with the Facebook business manager tactics.
In addition, when you boost a post, make sure that your message is clear and the content on the post is related to your nonprofit's mission. Especially when you create posts with a call for action, like posts for donation drives, ambiguous captions can decrease the attention of the supporters.
Build A Community With Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are a great way to share your work and nurture a sense of community among your volunteers, stakeholders, or the people who support your cause.
Use Facebook groups, to host discussions about your organization's mission, share work progress, share information about employee hire or volunteering opportunities in your organization.
Maintain a balance between sharing valuable content and promotional content to maintain the integrity of the group.
Apart from having your own group, join other nonprofit groups as well. It helps in building partnerships with organizations working for similar causes.
Also, be transparent about the usage of donation funds with your community, let your supporters know how their efforts are helping in creating an impact on the target community.
Facebook groups have three options: creating a public group, a private group, or a secret group. It is good to go with a private group; any user can find the group, but it requires you to manually approve members.
Asses Growth
To conduct a successful Facebook campaign or fundraising activity, make sure to assess the growth as part of your social media for nonprofits' marketing strategy. Assess the critical performance indicators to know if a post is doing good or not. Check reach, views, and impressions.
Check growth by monitoring followers and subscribers.
To understand engagement check clicks, likes, shares, and comments.
Statusbrew can help you in tracking your growth. Through our reports, you can measure the impact of your Facebook strategies from one single post to big picture. You can check activity, engagement, audience growth, reach, impression and a lot more.
Statusbrew can also help you understand your audience's perception of your brand through sentiment analysis.
How To Use Facebook Fundraising For Nonprofits
Social media for nonprofits is an effective medium to build awareness among your supporters and transform their awareness into action.
With your Facebook page, consistently share organization activities to establish a sense of legitimacy, transparency, and trust among your target audience and stakeholders.
Let's check these Facebook marketing strategies that nonprofits can use for fundraising.
Signing Up As A Nonprofit Account
To effectively use Facebook fundraising options, make sure that your nonprofit is eligible for it. There are specific countries where Facebook allows to raise funds through the platform. The first step to use the Facebook donation icon is that your nonprofit must operate within the counties or regions where Facebook fundraising is available. Find out if your nonprofit is eligible for Facebook fundraising.
If you are a nonprofit operating within the list of countries where fundraising is permitted by Facebook, you'll be required to submit your credentials as a nonprofit. Along with that, you also have to provide your bank statement and contact details of the organization's head.
Eligible organizations can leverage Facebook page to receive payments and donations. Make sure that you have signed in as a nonprofit to avail these Facebook fundraising facilities, and you have added your address in the about section of the page.
Ways To Receive Donations From Facebook
Once you start a fundraising campaign on Facebook for your nonprofits, you can accept payment through Facebook payment. Here you can receive money directly from Facebook in the form of ACH payment. If you don't want to go with Facebook payment option, then you can receive funds through donor-advised funds by Facebook or through PayPal.
- While using Facebook for fundraising, remember that the minimum payout threshold for Facebook is $100.
- If your fundraising amount is less than that, you will not receive any funds from Facebook. Facebook processes donations every two weeks, and the payment is received about a month after the donation is made.
- If a donor donated this month, you could expect the payout in the same week of the following month.
Image Source: Wounded Warrior Project
Find Out Your Donors & Appreciate Them
Appreciation of the donors comes under best practices of social media for nonprofits. It helps in organizational growth and helps to enhance the brand image. Also, keeping a record of your donors helps you in planning strategies for future donation drives. It's worth mentioning that you can get the list of donors if you choose Facebook Payment as your payout option. To get the list, you can follow the process mentioned below:
- Tap on the publishing tool on your nonprofit's Facebook page.
- Choose the donation setting present on the left side of the page.
- To get the report click on Download Donation Report.
- Choose Transaction report, select a time frame & click on the download option.
You are not required to send a payment receipt to your donors as Facebook sends it automatically.
Facebook Birthday Fundraising
There is a trend increasing where more & more people are raising funds for nonprofits on their birthday.
For birthday fundraising, Facebook sent a notification to the respective individual two weeks before the birthday and invited them to start a campaign. The user has the option to set the fund limit and the end of the campaign.
Image Source: Humane Society and Adoption Center of Rockport-Fulton
You can encourage and directly communicate to your donors or supporters through direct messages or in the Facebook group. Request them to set up their birthday fundraising campaign keeping you as a recipient. You can directly send them an email with an advanced birthday card, or if you have a large following, you can create a CTA post on your profile.
Facebook Marketing Strategies For Nonprofits For Fundraising
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Set up small and achievable campaign goal. It further encourages the donor to be a part of the campaign.
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Use Facebook as a peer-to-peer fundraising platform. Create a post asking your supporters and followers to request their peer network to join the campaign. This strategy is beneficial to gain new donors.
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Share the cause of the campaign along with impact stories.
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Be transparent regarding fund usage.
Facebook For Nonprofits: Social Media Crisis Management
Social media for nonprofits is a tricky and a competitive business. You must keep your image and social media presence up at all times to keep your donors, supporters, and volunteers engaged.
One minor social media crisis and you risk losing necessary resources to other nonprofits.
Crisis on social media is incredibly hard to avoid.
Social media is a fast-paced business, so it doesn't take long for a minor crisis to reach a full-blown state.
Hence, you should try to prevent such situations from happening. And to do so, you should strictly consider the following rules. As much as it is impossible to avoid crises to 100%, with these in place, you will have a better chance at mitigation:
Rule With An Iron Fist
As harsh as this may sound, you need to put strict policies for employees handling your social media presence. It is, after all, a matter of your nonprofit's image, which in turn, regulates your donors, supporters, and volunteers. You can rely on Statusbrew for managing post approvals created by your social media team.
Keep Up The Formal Tone & Scrutinise Casual Posts Carefully
When making important announcements, be it a progress report or a statement for a competition, always make a sensible, to-the-point post.
Be very careful with your casual posts. As much as it is essential to make casual, fun posts, from time to time, you need to understand that most social media crises arise from casual posts. These posts, in multiple instances, suffer backlashes and lead to a full-blown crisis.
Minutely observe these fun posts before posting. Make fun posts at your own expense, but it is always advisable not to post fun at others, be it other nonprofits, a community, or pretty much anything else.
A Well Groomed Social Media Team
You should have a small group of people managing your nonprofit's social media presence. A well knit team means better connections and better synchronization in posts. It keeps the possibility of posts having sensitive outbursts on a lower side.
It is also vital to ensure that all the members are on the same page.
You must constantly talk about things that all members should strictly keep away from; while also discussing things that can potentially increase the image.
Creating a social media guidebook having all these guidelines is a must.
Be Sensitive While Commenting
One central element that can lead to crises is commenting. Comments that you or your team make on your posts, or any related correspondence, have the potential to act as a time bomb that would eventually lead to a full-blown crisis.
You may be commenting on all your posts in good spirit. But it doesn't take a lot or long for someone to point out something in your comment and take offense with that. With the suitable catalyst, this will lead to a crisis, small or big.
So, it is advisable for you and your social media team to review your comments a hundred times before posting. You should go back to the statements later and see if there have been any potentially controversial developments.
And another significant thing for you to do is appropriate credit and cite information or anything you share from other sources. Copyright is a very troubling crisis creator.
Monitor Privacy & Analyse Sentiment
As comments and the public domain are a combination that often calls for trouble, you and your team should have a proper guideline about the right time to shift to a private conversation channel.
Your comments may attract potential donors, supporters, and volunteers. But you need to understand that what may seem sane and exciting may be offensive to others. So, for the interest of your nonprofit, you must know the right time to invite a person to interact with you on a personal level.
To understand the sentiment of your followers, you can try the Statusbrew sentiment analysis feature. Also, to maintain the brand image, you can hide, delete or mark spam the unwanted comments according to your convenience with Statusbrew.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is an essential aspect that, though indirectly, can help you manage crises to a great extent. You need to keep confidential information about your nonprofit and the operating procedure of your nonprofit on a need-to-know basis for employees outside the managing circle.
Not all operating procedures may be acceptable to all kinds of audiences. And the importance of maintaining confidentiality lies in the fact that, provided an employee goes rogue, confidentiality will act as your primary line of defense.
This is another reason for you to keep your account credentials locked within the most trusted circle.
Stay Updated And Informed
An essential activity for you to perform regularly is to stay updated about what is going on in social media. You should keep track of the kinds of gossip going around and the types of comments and posts people objecting.
It would help if you also looked at the kinds of crises and controversies making the rounds and the steps to handle them. This will give you a fair idea of the kinds of content to stay away from, and had any crisis struck you, you would know the correct procedure to follow.
Be Ready To Apologize
Even after you do everything in your power to prevent crises, a crisis may still hit you. And if that happens, you should be swift in responding to it. Apologize to the concerned parties; or generally.
You must apologize and make your intentions clear behind making the post or comment at the same time.
Simply apologizing and taking down a post may at times only fuel further controversies. This decision is finally up to your discretion.
A Unified Social Media Solution For Your Nonprofit
To maximize the use of Facebook for nonprofits, try Staustusbew.
Statusbrew helps you create & schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google My Business with a single click.
Using Statusbrew, easily engage with your supporters or beneficiaries across social media from a single dashboard.
Statusbrew offers 50% discount for eligible nonprofits.
Book a free demo with Statusbrew to understand how it can work for your nonprofit organization.
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, and even Google My Business.
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