In marketing, we know that carefully curated and compelling content moves people.
We see this every day on social media, where viral campaigns compel people to take action every day.
There’s no doubt that well-crafted social media content can turn followers into active donors. Nonprofit fundraising campaigns have raised millions of dollars, such as Charity: Water with $1.8 million and the ALS ice bucket challenge with $115 million.
The good news is that powerful content can be harnessed to activate a nonprofit’s social media followers to take action and give.
The not-so-good news? Creating and curating compelling content isn’t always easy.
But it’s important—even critical—for nonprofits to maintain active and engaging social media accounts not only to raise awareness and build brand, but to also drive donations.
Social is Everywhere and Everything
Experts project that there will be three billion social media users by next year. That’s close to half the global population.
A good chunk of social media users are known to check in sometimes by the hour or even the minute on top sites like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter.
While people of all ages use social media, there’s no doubt that younger generations are typically the first adopters.
This is important for nonprofits, because younger people use social media to support and donate to their favorite causes. According to this blog post, 43% of millennials made charitable contributions through social media compared to other channels.
Nonprofit Source also finds that 55% of people who engage with nonprofits on social media take some sort of action, such as donation.
Knowing this, how can a nonprofit fundraising team turn social media followers into active donors?
Tips on How to Activate Donors to Give to Your Nonprofit through Social Media
Build
You gain followers by posting content consistently daily or twice a day.
Your content should include a healthy mix of inspirational videos, photo features, donor spotlights, action alerts, motivating statistics, memes and more. Your content can include direct appeals for donations too. Just make sure to balance them with other content.
To build your following faster, consider devoting some budget to sponsoring content, including boosted posts on Facebook and Instagram. Boosting posts can cost as little as $25 for a campaign and can allow you to target specific users, ensuring that your posts wind up at the top of the right people’s feeds.
Activate
You accomplished the seemingly impossible: you built a following of engaged fans on your social media pages.
But they’re not giving.
How do you convert these loyal social media followers into active donors ready to give?
Awaken and engage your social media followers with calls to action. Create content that tells your story through video and animated gifs. Suggest they give even a small amount to your campaign to help solve the problems you’ve illustrated. Remind them that every little bit helps. Most importantly, make it as easy as possible for them to give.
Make Action Easy
If you’ve succeeded in moving your social media followers to take action, but then made it impossible for them to donate easily online, you’ve lost a big opportunity to raise funds.
Make the process of donating in a few clicks safe, secure and seamless. Add an easy-to-use, secure donation management plugin like DonorBox to your website and directly link to your donation appeal on your social pages so your followers can donate in a couple clicks.
Make It Shareable
Understand the psychology behind social sharing and tweak your content to see what your followers are most likely to share. You’ll not only increase your following, but also inspire your new fans to follow their friends’ lead and also make donations to your cause.
Coming up with a creative campaign with inspiring events, videos and strategic hashtags around a moving theme can also turn those lurkers among your followers into active donors ready to share and give.
Maintain
The shelf life of a social media post is only a few days or weeks at best.
This means that even if you’ve had a huge success, it’ll just be a matter of time before your viral campaign is a distant memory for most people.
Try to maintain your followers’ interest by creating different types of social media campaigns that can be run seasonally. Think strategically and make data-based decisions. Test different ideas to see what works best. Study the analytics made available by the different platforms to see who is engaging and sharing.
This Medium blog post offers some helpful tips for strategic ways to maximize fundraising through social media.
One not-so-small caveat: while it may seem like raising more than a million dollars via a viral social media campaign is the be all, end all of fundraising, you may be cannibalizing other fundraising efforts in your success. The best thing you can do is weave a social media component into an omni-channel campaign. Social media may be just one element of your fundraising strategy, and that’s okay.
Want more? These five successful nonprofits got it right using social media to drive donations.
About DonorBox
Used by more than 20,000 organizations from 25 countries, DonorBox is a donation platform centered around the fundraising needs of nonprofits by offering a state-of-the-art, recurring donation plugin that can be seamlessly embedded into a website or with a popup widget, allowing nonprofit organizations to accept monthly recurring donations managed by the donors themselves.
View a live example and sign up for free at donorbox.org.
