In the digital age, social media is one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools for building relationships with your donors. For most nonprofits, social media used to mean merely having a presence on the various available platforms, but social media has transformed the way that organizations — and even massive, global brands — connect with their target audiences.

The new year brings new opportunities to drive deeper connections with your organization’s donors. Leveraging social media platforms, your organization can connect with individuals across the world whose passions align with your mission while fostering great relationships with them in the process.

Your organization’s presence and activity on social media is paramount to driving connections with donors. Successfully attracting them requires a strategic approach to not only what you share, but when and where you share it. Using these five steps, your organization can amplify its social media strategy for 2020.

Establish Realistic and Measurable Goals

Attempting to tackle the social media landscape without goals can feel daunting and time-consuming for your team, which is why the first step in developing your organization’s social media strategy for 2020 should be identifying the outcomes it hopes to produce.

Are you trying to gain more followers in the new year? Do you want to use your social media presence to drive more individuals to your website or build your contact list with gated content pushed out through your social media channels?

No matter what your organization is trying to achieve through having an online presence, setting goals for social media is important. Having goals will guide your planning and budget, increase accountability for your team and ensure your efforts are successful.

Know Your Audience

Your organization’s ability to successfully attract and create connections with its donors requires a better understanding of who they are. Identifying their characteristics, passions and desire to give back is the best way to craft personalized, meaningful content that motivates them to act.

Instead of aimlessly attempting to reach these individuals, creating donor personas can serve as a guiding light for effectively reaching and connecting with them. With a deeper understanding of your donors, your organization is able to create curated content that speaks to their emotions and values while effectively reaching them by knowing where, when and how they use social media.

Collect and Create Curated Content

Once you’ve established your goals, identified your donors and developed a deeper understanding of who they are, you can begin connecting with them more personally with purposely curated content. From blog posts and fact sheets, to webinars and podcasts, content is the vehicle for engaging your prospects and existing donors.

But your donors have unique needs and requirements, and they won’t all gravitate toward the same type of content. You can begin by taking an inventory of your existing content and choosing which pieces can be repurposed. Then you can match these pieces to your newly crafted donor personas with your team.

The fact remains, that content in and of itself does not equal engagement. Having a better understanding of your donors and prospects will help you determine the type of content that will best resonate and encourage them to become an active supporter of your mission.

Develop A Social Media Content Calendar

Having a social media calendar is the best way to keep track of your content and campaigns. It ensures that you’re posting the appropriate content at the right time and leveraging hashtag holidays to maximize results.

You can use an Excel spreadsheet, your digital calendar or even some of the various social media platforms like Hootsuite. This will streamline your posting and alleviate a lot of time and effort for your team. Additionally, using a social media calendar will allow you to track and test different strategies, such as identifying the best posting times and most relevant content for your audience.

Evaluate Your Strategy

When you’ve finally put your new social media strategy to work, you’ll need to evaluate how it’s working. Evaluating your efforts means more than simply counting how many “likes” a post has received. Engagement metrics such as comments and shares, as well as responses to your call-to-action, like downloading a specific content piece, should be taken into consideration.

The insight you acquire through evaluating your strategy will help you tweak your efforts where needed for ultimate social media performance.

The new year is a perfect opportunity to rethink your social media strategy for 2020. By now, nearly every nonprofit is on social media, but it’s not just a matter of being there — it’s about leveraging these platforms to drive deeper connections with your donors and ultimately maximize your organization’s impact. If you found this blog insightful and aren’t sure where to begin with planning your strategy, we can help guide you through it. Just schedule a quick, 15-minute call with us here.

Photo Credit: Danil Aksenov via Unsplash