Case Study: Social Media

As a nonprofit consultant, I have worked with several clients to increase their social media presence. The key is really posting on a regular, consistent basis and interacting with followers while adhering to steady brand messaging. Know your audience, know your mission, and be able to pivot if something is not working out. There is no way to copy what another nonprofit does because the voice of each nonprofit is singular and unique. 

The largest nonprofit I work with primarily focuses on Facebook due to their demographic. Currently, they have 338,000 followers on Facebook, and they generate between 400-750 new ‘likes” each week. On Twitter they are followed by 26,000 with little communication but several mentions per week. Since there is no advertising budget, the main focus has to be organic reach.

I began working with their all volunteer social media team starting in 2018 to increase audience engagement. Their Domain Authority is 73, so there were things that they did not need to do which left them open to explore. At the time, posts were spotty, inconsistent and there were no central guidelines. The team consisted of 3 volunteers, only one of whom was regularly active. The first thing I did was check the Insights and see what was working and what was not. 

In mid 2018, there were very few posts per month on any platform and many of them had little community and no traction. At the time, the percentage of engagement was between 0% and 5% per post, with an average of .3%. Since there were not many posts for the previous years, it was easy to see which ones were working.

To bring more cohesion to the team, they created a shared document that included best practices and a style guide incorporating brand voice and colors, general posting protocols, and saved replies to answer FAQs. Using Insights, they could see when their audience was online, and added best posting times to the guide. Additionally, they included copyright and trademark information, both to promote and protect their brand and help team members not to breach others’ intellectual property. 

All this helped volunteers to create posts on topics that are relevant to the mission of the nonprofit. To further that goal, they included general topics and hashtags for the team to use. They added a google alert for the organization, the Executive Director, and several fundamental topics so they could repost relevant articles from other sites. They also created a calendar of events for organizational milestones and statistics, UN days and of events sponsored by similar, often smaller, nonprofits to promote. 

To increase original created content, they asked the Executive Director to apply for Canva for Nonprofits, a free subscription to Canva Pro at canva.org, and a shared account for the team to use to create original graphics with uploaded versions of our logo. The team is encouraged to also use their own photos and imagination. 

Successful campaigns are defined as those with the most engagement per post and by reach, though they welcome any level of participation on their page to continue the conversation on the issues most important to the organization. The team comments and likes posts when they are mentioned, looks at hashtags, and checks notifications at least twice daily. In the first two months of 2020, engagement is running much higher than average on Facebook, better than .69% and as high as 9%, with an average of 1.88% per post. In 2019 they had doubled the posts of 2018 and in the first 2 months of 2020 they have already posted half as many times as in the entire year 2018.

One campaign they love is the monthly Book Club started late 2019. They promote the Executive Director’s favorite books with a link to the authors’ homepages. Engagement regularly averages about 2% on those posts, but the ones that do the best are the posts that cover upcycling items into art as a topic. The more creative, rare and non-mainstream the articles reposted from other sites are, the more they resonate with their followers. No one wants to see the same stories in their feed from 10 different places.

Attempting change with volunteers takes dedication and time. My client had to stop posting what did not work, and pay attention to what did. They had to embrace change in areas not anticipated. A year and a half later, they have one of the original team members remaining and have had 4 new and committed people step forward. They have a plan to expand into other Social Media areas when they are able to recruit more team members and are working on several regular promotion campaigns for when the nonprofit makes some large systemic changes later this year.