8 Great Ways to Use Social Media for Nonprofits to Drive Potential Donors
8 Great Ways to Use Social Media for Nonprofits to Drive Donations
By Thomas R. Reich PhD
In 2013, nonprofit organizations need all the help they can get to drive donations to their cause. To not look to social media is a big mistake, with a well organized social media network you can see amazing results, let’s look at some examples.
1) TWITTER: You need to get in the habit of tweeting fun facts about your organization and its activities. Make sure to include a link to you site and on that page have a donate now button for potential donors!
2) FACEBOOK: FaceBook is a place to tell a longer version of your mission, what you are doing about it and how your potential donors can help. You can have entire pages dedicated to events and projects. But the ultimate goal is the same as with Twitter, deliver a link and get potential donors back to your website where you can show them what you do, how they can help and ask for a donation.
3) Pinterest: A great visual site where you can pump up donors with great pictures that relate to your mission and get potential donors back to your website where they can find out more about your mission and how they can help!
4) YouTube: Everyone talks about the power of video, and rightfully so. But with a nonprofit organization, the power of video images is extremely powerful. Video helps get your message across, pulls at the heart strings, and encourages potential donors to click on a link back to your website where more videos should be available, more information about your mission and how a potential donor can help and of course a donate now button!
5) Webinars: Great, well produced webinars are the wave of the future in donor response. With a great well produced webinar, potential donors can be shown aspects of your mission and ways that they can help like never before. Potential donors from around the world can be influenced by just one broadcast, and they can be attracted to the webinar by the social media branches listed above!
6) LinkedIn: This social media site is not used in nonprofit organizations as much as it should be. Known as the business social media site, LinkedIn can help influence a higher level of potential donors. Use a business page to inform business people about your mission and how they can help, use postings, updates and group links to expose potential donors to interesting facts about your mission and its ongoing successes through your organizations!
7) Blogs: Use your website blog as an ongoing information beacon for your mission! Update at least once a week with new information or case study on your mission. Present a success story, showcase a volunteer or donor, it all attracts good feelings and points to that donate now button!
8) Contests: People love contests, and as a nonprofit you can give an award, a special trophy as a prize. Run a contest for the vest picture or video that relates to your cause, then post the entries to all your social media outlets and ask for help picking the winner. The entire event acts as a giant funnel to get people to your website and that donate now button!
Want to learn more, join me for a great free webinar this Wednesday, February 27. 2013, “Making Social Media Work for Nonprofit Organizations”. You will learn lots more about each of the items we touched on above. It is a great presentation and I believe you will learn a lot, join us!