Although social media may not be essential to a Non-profit, it can widen the horizon and raise awareness about their mission for much cheaper than it would be to pay for traditional marketing methods.
If you already have social media channels for your Non-profit, you might be wondering, ‘how can I grow my social media presence?’ or ‘How can I increase my engagement?’. Before we give you our tips, it’s important to understand what engagement is.
Engagement is the measure of shares, comments and likes. This is often measured as a percentage, and each social media channel has its own range of what classes as good and bad engagement.
To work out the engagement rates on your posts, you use the following formula.
How do I increase my Non-profit’s Engagement?
The first step to take before you start trying to increase your engagement is to measure your current engagement score. Once you have this percentage, you then have a foundation to work and build from.
Make sure you note down your current engagement rate and followers so you can see your progress!
Share Valuable Content
Creating content is a challenge itself, but sharing content that others have posted which have relevance to your Non-profit is a great way to get more engagement. Mixing up your content is a great way to keep your Non-profit’s social media fresh with new ideas and perspectives. Some content ideas that you can share include other Non-profits that have similar interests and any sector news.
Another great content idea for your Non-profit is to share a ‘behind the scenes’ viewpoint. Sharing pictures of your staff and volunteers is a great way to keep your social media relevant to your cause. Pictures with people typically do better with engagement than images of objects.
Encourage Conversation
When posting content, try and create a conversation around the causes you care about. Using questions like ‘what do you think’ or ‘how does this make you feel?’ will encourage the reader to get involved with the conversation.
There are many other ways you can get the reader involved on your Non-profits social media. These include:
- A mini-competition
- Asking questions
- Polls
- “Ask us Anything” session
- Test their knowledge
- Media upload contests
- Gifs
- Spotlighting customers/volunteers/funders
- Custom stickers or filters for Instagram Stories
Using a variation of the above will keep your content fresh and your users engaged.
Collab with Others
Collaborating with other organisations is an excellent way of getting your Non-profit in front of a new and different audience and increasing your non-profit’s engagement rate. There are many ways you can collaborate with others. You can guest blog on their site (and vice versa), do a live Q&A, or start a short campaign together for a cause that’s related to both parties.
If you would like to read more about ideas and the benefits of collaborating, Project Child has a great blog post here.
Engage yourself
Being active on Social Media is crucial to increasing your engagement. Posting on social media and expecting your engagement and followers to follow is unattainable. Although spending time liking and commenting on posts on social media may seem like a waste of time, its actually a very underrated skill! Searching for relevant hashtags, accounts and posts to reply to will help your Non-profit to appear in front of the users with the same interests. Time is valuable when working for a Non-profit, so finding the time to partake in engagement can be difficult. A good way to make sure that you have an active presence on social media can be to allocate 15 minutes per day to each employee in the office. You can split this by having some employees use their 15 minutes in the morning and the others using their 15 minutes in the afternoon. The more engagement, the better!
We hope this blog will help you on your way to increasing your Non-profit’s engagement rate on social media.
