9 Social Media Ideas for Nonprofits
April 2, 2020 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek
Social media can be a fantastic way for your nonprofit to connect with potential donors and volunteers as well as spread awareness about your cause. As you build your presence on social media, you want to try out different types of content to see what resonates the most with your audience. If you’re stuck when it comes to what to share next, here are a few social media ideas for nonprofits to help inspire you:
1. Share Facts, Statistics, and Quotes
Education and awareness are essential for any nonprofit. If you want people to care about your cause, they have to know what it is and why it matters. Sharing interesting facts, information, statistics, and quotes related to why you do what you do and why it matters can help build awareness.
Make sure you feature the information you’re sharing in an image or a video. You can use the caption or message section of the post to elaborate, but posts with images tend to get more engagement on social media.
Using visuals to your advantage is one of the social media marketing tips for nonprofits, and for good reason! With a great image and the right attention-grabbing fact, you’ll not only get more attention on your original post, but you’re also more likely to benefit from people sharing the post and increasing its overall reach.
2. Feature Touching Stories
There’s a reason emotional human interest stories tend to spread quickly across social media. We love to connect and we love content that makes us feel smart and that makes us feel something. Whether it’s heartbreaking, inspiring, motivational, enraging, or something else, featuring someone’s story makes your nonprofit and your cause personal.
Dig into the people behind your cause and share their stories. It could be people who work at the nonprofit and what prompted them to get involved, people who need what your nonprofit provides, people who have success stories, and more. All of these add a relatable human element to your nonprofit and put real faces and real stories at the forefront of your organization.
3. Post Updates from Events
Events are a great opportunity to connect with people and are one of the ways to promote your nonprofit. Whether you are running your own event, partnering to run an event, sponsoring an event, volunteering at an event, or just attending one, you have a ton of opportunities to share updates from those events to social media. Depending on the nature of the event and the content formats your audience likes the most, you can post pictures, short videos, or even try out native live video!
4. Give a Shout-Out to Partners and Sponsors
If you have national or local partners or businesses that sponsor your cause, you can give them a shout-out on your social media platforms. In addition to a general thank you-type post, you can also re-share their social media content if it would relevant or interesting to your audience to help it reach more people.
5. Take People Behind-the-Scenes
Before many people donate to a cause, they want to know it’s actually benefitting the people it’s supposed to. This means your nonprofit also needs to build trust and be transparent about who you help, how you help them, and where donations actually go. You can use your social media profiles to do this and take people behind-the-scenes.
Show them your office, who works there, what they do, how donations are put to work, etc. Giving people this look behind the curtain provides tangible evidence of their donations doing good, helping people, and more. Plus, it lets people who aren’t familiar with your organization get to know you in another way.
6. Promote Fundraisers and Ask for Donations
As a nonprofit, fundraising is also an essential part of your organization. You don’t want to overdo it and have your social media feeds packed with requests for donations. But, it makes sense to promote fundraisers as they occur and ask for donations occasionally on social media. Just make sure you keep it balanced and you’re providing entertaining, interesting, valuable, etc. content as well.
7. Run Polls and Ask Questions
Asking questions or asking users to fill in the blank on social media are great ways to start a conversation. You can also make it more interactive by creating and running a poll. This can be a fantastic way to start connecting with your target audience on social media, having conversations with them in real-time, and also getting insights and opinions from them on a variety of topics. Be serious if you need to be, but don’t be afraid to make it fun and silly every now and then!
8. Answer FAQs
You probably have a section for frequently asked questions on your website. If not, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add one. But, answering FAQs on social media can be a great post idea as well.
You can provide answers to FAQs you’ve gotten in the past, even if you already have answers for them on your website. And, you can also answer any questions you’ve gotten recently, that people have asked a few times on your page, etc. You can even host a live Q&A session! Reddit AMAs (ask me anything) are a great example of this.
9. Join in on Popular Post Trends
Hashtags are a great way to compile related posts and increase reach on the social networks that use them. Before you jump into a trending hashtag, make sure you research it first and make sure it is something you want your brand associated with. Not only is failing to research first one of the major hashtag mistakes to avoid, but researching first also helps you use popular hashtags correctly and can help you avoid a potentially disastrous social media fail.
Thankfully, there are plenty of business and organization-friendly hashtag trends you can participate in. #ThrowbackThursday and #FlashbackFriday can be used to share some photos from your archives. #MotivationMonday, #WisdomWednesday, and more can all be used to share motivational or inspirational quotes. Using hashtags like this is one of the tips for improving social media engagement.
Take a look at what your target audience uses and what’s popular on the platforms you’re using and go from there. You can even create your own hashtag series related to your nonprofit and your cause.
These are just a few social media ideas for nonprofits to help inspire your next batch of updates. There are a lot of different types of content to post on social media, so don’t be afraid to get creative and experiment. By trying out different types of posts and formats for those posts, you’ll be able to figure out what resonates best with your target audience. You’ll also likely get ideas for new things to try next!
Social media is used to connect with people, but it is also often used to bring people back to a website to complete an action. Whether it’s learning more, making a donation, signing up to volunteer, etc., your nonprofit’s website needs to be designed and built to make it as easy as possible to complete the desired action.
If it’s been a while since your last website update or your site just isn’t performing, it may be time for a refresh or a complete overhaul. Contact us for a meeting of the MINDs to find out how we can help get your website back on track and delivering results for your organization!
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