Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 5 No 1

SHAMA HYDER Featured Personality

Increase Your Nonprofit’s Impact with Social Media

For nonprofits, social media can be an incredibly powerful way to connect with their communities. Just think: the platform is free, the reach can be incredible, and the immediacy allows your donors, volunteers, and clients to see how you’re impacting the world right now . Despite these facts, many nonprofits aren’t yet fully comfortable using social media to interact with their various audiences. Even if they do use the medium regularly, many don’t see the results they’d like. The last thing a nonprofit needs is to waste resources on something that isn’t delivering. If you’re not using your social media presence to its full potential, here are five easy ways that you can increase your impact as soon as next week. Streamline your presence and posting Social media can eat up a huge amount of time and resources, but it doesn’t have to. When it comes to ROI, the most important social media practice for nonprofits is to streamline both their presence and their posting rate. How many platforms is your organization on? You want to spend your time only on the platforms that are truly relevant to your audience, so look at your engagement levels. If your Facebook page stays pretty quiet, but your Instagram account is steadily growing, put your energy toward Instagram. Check and

post several times a week, if possible, and save Facebook for a quick weekly scan. You can also help streamline your methods using one of the many social media management tools available, like Buffer or Hootsuite. These tools allow you to manage multiple social media profiles on multiple platforms, as well as schedule posts in advance.They can be a huge help when it comes to increasing your team’s efficiency. Take advantage of social media’s visual aspects If you’re trying to attract donors, grantors, or volunteers, you know how important it is that they see what you do in action. Social media is an ideal way to give your supporters what they want. The text and visual format of most platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, allows you to share important information like statistics and numbers, while incorporating the emotional appeal of a photograph or video. Since we all carry smartphone cameras with us nearly everywhere we go these days, any of your staff or volunteers can snap a few photos at your next event, service project, or fundraiser. To keep things simple, you can create a Google Drive folder for any photos that your staff takes, so that multiple people can upload photos and the person in charge of social media always has a cache to choose from.

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