Friday Five 007: The Untapped Potential Of Social Media

What is the Friday Five?

Each Friday, we will be answering your most pressing questions from our Digital Marketing for Nonprofits Facebook group. If we don’t cover a challenge that you or your nonprofit colleagues are facing, drop us a comment below or tweet us @CommunityBoost and we’ll add it to the queue. 

Let’s dive in! 

Nonprofit Marketing Challenges

1) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge:  “Video and graphic production. Getting people to join and donate through posts.” – Tesmore, Huntington Museum of Art. 

Our Solution: When it comes to video and graphic production it can be as simple and affordable as using your smartphone and doing your own videos. However, you can also look into hiring young talent from colleges. There are many students studying film and this is a perfect opportunity to tap into up and coming talent and put out some postings.

In regards to getting donations through social posts, Facebook and Instagram ads are a great way to drive revenue. Also with social posts you have to make sure you are providing value to your audiences and really make sure you’re sharing your impact with them.

Learn more about how you can utilize Facebook and Instagram ads in our latest post: Why Your Nonprofit Needs to Be Using Facebook

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “I worked to steward and grow our mid-level donors of $1,000 annually or more. Marketing to them is different than the lower dollar, mass marketing.” – Mara, World Wildlife Fund

Our Solution: The best way to go about this is segmentation and separating your bigger donors from your smaller ones especially when you are trying to market to them. This can be done through Facebook ads where you run targeted ads by uploading a custom audience.

You can also make sure your donors feel appreciated. The best way to do that is either doing gratitude videos or sending gratitude emails. It is important to make sure they are being thanked personally and they feel the love.

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Social media conversion amongst older donors.” – Keith, Samaritan’s Purse

Our Solution: The good thing about social media is that almost everyone is on it. Whether they are young or old, so your older donors are on social media it just comes down to how are you marketing to them? As of late, social media platforms have become pay to play. You have to be running ads on these platforms and making sure you’re using compelling storytelling and visuals. Once you get those nailed down, you will start to see a return on ad spend with these platforms especially during giving season.

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “What to post and how often.” – Mildred, Able Angels Residential Care Home

Our Solution: With digital marketing and social media, it all comes down to having a game plan. That means knowing your audience and what you think they want to see. Also, it is very important to make sure you are providing value to them and you just aren’t posting to post. The engagement and the numbers aren’t going to increase overnight, it all takes time to generate and you have to be patient.

Cameron Ripley