Social media can be a very successful fundraising tool, if you have the strategy to back it up. But sometimes, it can be difficult to know where to start.
Here are five key steps to help you launch your organization’s social media strategy:
1. Determine your goals and more, importantly, how they support your larger marketing, fundraising, and organizational goals.
Every single social media post should tie back to these goals in some way. In other words, every post should have a purpose.
Here’s an example: Let’s say your organizational goal is to increase giving to your 2018 holiday campaign by 20%. A corresponding social media goal might be to increase your following across all social media platforms by 40% between January – October 2018. That way you have an audience in place when it comes time to promote your holiday giving campaign!
2. Define your target audience.
A clearly defined target audience will help you craft messages that resonate with your audience, and ultimately, lead them to give. Start by taking a look at the demographics of the people you’re already reaching such as volunteers, social media followers, and donors.
From there, develop these demographic profiles into personas. MakeMyPersona by HubSpot is a great tool to do so. When you’re crafting these personas, be sure to think about where these audiences hang out online, as this will drive your social media strategy.
3. Develop your voice.
Think about how you want your organization to be perceived. Knowledgeable? Fun? Playful? Innovative? Your word choice, sentence structure and overall style should work together to communicate this.
A great way to ensure a consistent voice is to create a content style guide, especially if you have multiple people managing your social media accounts. Mailchimp offers up their own style guide here, which serves as an excellent starting point when creating yours.
4. Create a content strategy
When developing your content strategy, it’s important to consider what your audience wants to know and what information would benefit them.
Why? Because like all of fundraising, it’s about mutually beneficial relationships. The more you provide value for your audience, the more engaged they’ll be with your organization.
5. Measure success
As you’re building your strategy, be sure to include SMART goals – specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused and time-bound. These should focus on key metrics, which will vary based on your goals.
For example, if you’re looking to measure brand awareness, you might track impressions, reach, and page likes/followers. For engagement, on the other hand, likes, comments, share, retweets, engagement rate, and video views are all useful metrics.
Plus, all of these metrics can be found within social media platforms themselves, which means there’s no added cost to track your progress.