Nonprofits Must Take Advantage of Social Media

Most nonprofits fall back to very traditional means of new member acquisition, looking at mailed appeals and one on one meetings. These methods are tried and true, so they become easy fallbacks. Obviously, these tried and true methods of nonprofit marketing strategy can’t be ignored, but more and more social media is becoming a necessary component and yet the majority of nonprofits ignore it. Maybe we dip our toes in the social media universe on #givingtuesday or perhaps even through a crowdfunding website. However, just like mailed appeals and one on one meetings the best methods are sustained efforts and not one-off attempts. In fact, dollar for dollar we’ve seen social media get better returns than mailed appeals. One of the great things about social media is we can, for a relatively inexpensive price, measure and adjust our messaging to a variety of groups over a variety of platforms.

Maximize Touchpoints

Thinking of this another way, we often talk about needing 4, 5 or 6 touch points with a donor to help them understand your mission and your need. Social Media often becomes the cheapest way to put out those touchpoints. Sometimes they close the member and sometimes they add to your messaging and engagement, either way, they add value to your mission.

Nonprofit Messaging

Messaging is such a key point to any meeting or outreach. Sitting in a meeting if you don’t give the right reasoning a donor does not respond. Social Media allows you to test different messages and what people best respond to. Measuring responses and refining messaging through social media also play a role in more expensive mailings and appeals. For $20, $50, or $100 you can start to gain insights into what and who is responding to you. A great example of testing messaging is running A/B testing to the same audience with one message about the benefits a donor receives and one message about your mission. Which one do they respond to? There are a lot of ways to think through this and measure, a one-time test never gets you a complete answer, but you can start to build patterns and improve your response rates while decreasing your costs for results.

Without a plan, you are planning to fail. At NMBL Strategies we stand by that statement. We help nonprofits and small businesses develop the right plans that bring them proven results. Talk to us today about how we can help you plan and find success. 

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