Ensuring your nonprofit organization is successful requires a dedicated focus in a variety of areas. Effective community engagement is one of those critical areas, playing an integral part in telling your organization's story while giving you the ability to gain new supporters.

Social media has become one of the most effective ways for nonprofit organizations to engage with their communities, support fundraising efforts, and develop strong relationships. You may have already realized this and created some social media profiles to build an effective engagement strategy.

However, while social media can be a great tool for nonprofit organizations, there are right and wrong ways to approach your social media strategy.

Below, we'll cover some relevant tips you can follow when using social media effectively in your nonprofit organization.

Establish Your Nonprofit Goals

Before beginning any social media initiatives, it's important to identify the goals for your nonprofit. Imagine that, a strategic planning company suggesting you should begin with the end in mind and be strategic about your goals!

Are you building general awareness about your organization and its mission? Are you looking for new donors or funders? Are you trying to encourage community discussions on particular topics or issues? Answering these questions will help ensure you serve the right content in the right channels to be successful.

Decide Who Should Manage Your Social Media

When beginning any social media initiative for your organization, maintaining consistency in your messaging and level of engagement is essential when building credibility in your organization. One way to ensure consistency in messaging is by relying on the same person(s) to manage your social media engagement. Assigning one or two people to manage your organization's social media presence will help keep your team accountable and ensure your goals and objectives are met.

Over time, you should also develop branding and social posting guidelines so that other team members, or potentially interns, could take over the work of drafting and expanding your social media presence.

Diversify Your Social Media Channels

Some nonprofits make a mistake when establishing a social media presence by sticking to one or two social media channels and not diversifying their outreach approach. When building social media profiles for your nonprofit, it's crucial to establish yourself on multiple platforms and cater your engagement strategies to each applicable channel. When diversifying your social media channels, however, it's essential to diversify your content.

Social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are all great places to engage with potential donors, staff, or board members. Still, the type of content you deliver should be catered to the kind of audience found on each social channel. Rather than posting the same content across multiple channels, take the time to adjust your engagement strategies depending on the goals you're trying to achieve.

Develop a Social Engagement Calendar

Creating a social engagement calendar helps to keep you on task and ensures all of your social media platforms have a balanced and consistent amount of content.

A common mistake for nonprofit leaders is a lack of consistency when it comes to posting content, following up with emails or direct messages, and active outreach campaigns. Develop a social engagement calendar to stay consistent with social media activities. Whether sending organization updates, staffing announcements, fundraising requests, or thought leadership pieces, the more regular you are when engaging, the more credibility you'll develop for your nonprofit. Engagement calendars will help you stay on top of initiatives and keep you accountable for maintaining your social media presence.

Make Effective Use of Hashtags

When posting content on various social media platforms, use hashtags (i.e., #nonprofit or #our-mission). They’re a great way to bring targeted traffic to your social media posts or website. Hashtags act as keywords relevant to your posts and help categorize your content for other users who aren't already part of your network.

When making proper use of hashtags, it's important to reference as many non-branded key terms as possible, as most people won't be familiar with your organization's name and will be less likely to find your content otherwise. So #StopViolence or #SupportVictims are much better than #RichlandViolanceShelter.

Create Opportunities for Easy Donations

Social media platforms are great places to host fundraising campaigns and events for your organization. However, while creating fundraising events is a great proactive way to use different social media outlets, there are also passive ways for you to encourage donations to your nonprofit. When establishing social media profiles on various public platforms, most of them offer the ability to categorize your organization as a nonprofit, and therefore allow you to create specific call-to-action buttons or pages in support of your financial goals. Making use of these "donate" buttons is an easy way to simplify the process for new community members who want to support your organization's mission.

Engage With Purpose

A final important note about your social media engagement strategy is that it’s vital to engage your audience with purpose. Creating a content calendar can help you with this initiative. Ultimately, however, one of your primary goals when posting on social media platforms is not to come across like you're simply posting information to gain web traffic or simply to keep your social streams active. Your objective should be to always consider the emotional appeal of your posts and the audience who reads them.

While your social media objectives may be different from other for-profit organizations, it's okay to view certain aspects of your nonprofit's engagement strategy the same way highly recognized brands do. Think about your core values and how they relate to the posts you submit. Does your content display the attitudes, values, benefits, and vision your nonprofit represents? Considering this question aligns your social media objectives with the reputation your nonprofit has worked hard to obtain.

Final Thoughts

Social media platforms are an invaluable tool that nonprofits can use to gain new constituents, engage with a broader audience, share with the community, and learn from other nonprofit leaders.

By following these basic steps, you'll avoid bad habits when creating your social media presence while building the credibility your organization deserves.

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