6 Social Media Practices to Build Awareness for a Nonprofit

It’s always a shock to me when I get a phone call from a nonprofit organization, or a letter in the mail, soliciting a donation or inviting me to a fundraising event. Even more bewildering is when I see flyers or posters or ads for these things, with no reference to a social media page of any kind. No Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube, no nothing. These nonprofit organizations, and there are a lot of them, are missing out on the number one tool to build support, donations and awareness.

There are, however, nonprofits that are doing it well. If you work for, founded, run or volunteer for a nonprofit organization and want to know how to maximize your resources and make the most of your contributions, take a look at these 6 practices that have the potential to change everything:

1. The Use of Calls to Action – In the past, with regards to your internet presence, emphasis has always been put on drawing traffic to your web site, watching and analyzing those numbers to see how you could lengthen the stay of each unique visitor. Web marketers helped organizations find ways to convert visitors and casual information seekers into donors with calls to action and making it easy to donate. When Facebook came about and it launched pages for businesses and organizations, marketers used those pages to draw more traffic to their web site. Now, however, that is a waste of time and is just another step in a process that people will find far too long. You should look at your Facebook as it’s own web site, where all of the traffic to it is not lost if it goes no further than Facebook. Everything you want your audience to see on your web site, should be visible in some easy way on your Facebook page and most importantly of all, you should have just as many, if not more calls to action drawing in donors as you do on your web site. Using Facebook as just an ad for your web site just creates another step for potential donors, and one of the number one rules of the web is that every step in the process, loses someone. United Way of Canada has recognized this and added a big, red, unmissable donate button to the welcome tab on their Facebook page making it the first thing you notice, even before you click the Like button. Click on it, and you’re taken to the donation page. It’s as simple as one step. They are not trying to get you to the front page of their web site, they are not trying to get you to read their mission statement or stats about why you need to donate, they just say, “DONATE”. And people do.

2. Make Use of YouTube – If you’ve never taken the time to immerse yourself in the amazing community that is YouTube, then you need to. It’s truly amazing what has grown on YouTube and what is continuing to grow and which, in my opinion, sets the standard for how video content will be viewed in the future, including Television. One of the greatest things about this community is that it is interactive and real. You can raise awareness for your organization and the issues it tackles, simply by showing the reality of it in crisp, high-quality video. You can also draw in viewers and raise awareness by showcasing the amazing people who help run your organization. Project For Awesome helped create awareness for a lot of worthy charities. The idea behind the Project was to have as many YouTubers as possible create a video showcasing a nonprofit that was close to their hearts. All of these videos were to be posted on one day. The Project successfully took over the front page of YouTube for a day and a lot of great organizations benefited from it. It was a new, unique way to use the YouTube community and I’m sure it won’t be the last time a new, fresh idea builds awareness on YouTube.

YouTube also has a nonprofit program that enables the use of more tools, click here to read about it.

3. Show up in the Facebook Feed – Once a Facebook user clicks the Like button on your page, they’re not likely to come back to it. In order for your organization to stay on their radar, you need it to appear in the Facebook feed and now the timeline. How do you do this? Post status updates, share links, photos, videos. Simple, “How is everyone doing today?” won’t really cut it anymore. Especially if you’re looking to raise awareness and general public knowledge on your issue. When tons of more interesting posts are flying through people’s streams, you need to catch the attention of your Facebook followers. Nonprofits are in a great position to do this considering the vast majority of them are dealing with issues that people don’t really know a lot about, so posting little-known facts, case studies, the human side of your issue, in picture format, video format or even just blog posts, will usually do a good job of catching attention. Encourage your readers to share the content as well by adding a quick, “Please click share to share this with your friends” at the end of your posts.

4. Remind Your Fans and Followers – Social Media can be a loud and confusing place filled with spam, trivial things and anything and everything to draw attention away from you and your organization. Just getting someone to click your like button or follow your updates, is not enough. Even if that person donates at the time they discover your social media presence, it can soon become very easy for them to forget you are there, how to donate, or how else they can help your cause. Remind them where they can go to donate, post often about volunteer opportunities, give updates to stories that received a lot of attention and continually remind them that if they can’t donate or volunteer, that they can help the organization out simply by sharing their content.

5. Make Use Of Care2 – Care2 is a social network for the nonprofit community. Like any other social media outlet, there is spam, there are annoying people and there are piles and piles of trivial information. It is, however, a social network for the nonprofit community and therefore, is a rich source of people who are already socially conscious and have the inclination to want to do good. I have found, when working for nonprofits, that using the News section of the Care2 web site can result in an absolute ton of traffic to your web site, your Facebook page and any other place you want people to go. It is essentially a sort of Digg, but with a focus on nonprofit organizations. Here, you can post links to your blog posts about your issues, or links to your videos, etc and people vote it up if they like it. If it becomes popular enough, it can explode your traffic and awareness overnight.

6. Start Using Facebook Causes – There are so many reasons why this is an absolute must for any serious nonprofit organization, such as the fact that you can accept donations through it, you get a special information page just for nonprofits, you can offer motivation for watching your videos or viewing your contact as well as extra tools to help entice your followers to share it. Your followers also have the opportunity to raise funds and recruit new followers for you, with a ranking system profiling the most successful at these things. Your supporters can also ask that in lieu of birthday gifts, their Facebook friends donate to your cause and the Causes app continually reminds them to post about it, send it to friends. You’d be amazed how successful this is in raising money. I have done it for my own birthday and raised a significant amount of money for a charity that I support.

Raising awareness for a nonprofit on the web, while there are so many other distractions, can be a difficult thing and it can take some time to build up the kind of audience you want. Stay on task and don’t give up. Ask your followers on a frequent basis what you can do to make it easier for people to support you, and actually listen to their responses. The whole idea behind social media is being social. If you do this, you will be successful and your hard work will pay off.