Social Media for Nonprofits: The Power of Emotion

Many businesses and brands successfully used social media networks to increase awareness, research consumer sentiment, respond to consumer inquiries, improve their products, and implement marketing programs.

Nonprofits have been slower to embrace social media. Yet, social media offers multiple opportunities for nonprofits to engage their constituencies, sometimes without investing great amounts of staff time or other resources.

Post the Right Messages

Creating and publishing the right content is essential for nonprofits to achieve social media success.

The best strategy is to create stories – or produce a video – about the people you serve.  Stress your constituents and audience over your organization. Describing individual challenges and triumphs of your members will attract more interest and engagement than announcements of how many people your group has served, its wordy mission statement, or the awards it’s won.

The best messages make your contributors, not your organization, the hero of the story and include an explicit or implicit call to action. The most successful messages tap emotions.

Pulling Heartstrings

The video below from Charity: water demonstrates how to employ emotions while describing the charity’s mission to bring clean water to the impoverished Sahel region of West Africa. Through subtitles, the video allows women to talk about the hardships of drawing water from wells and the lack of clean water. One woman tells how she was injured when she fell into an open well.

“The coming of clean water changed our lives,” a woman says. “Life is very good now. You wake up in the morning and can get clean water easily.”

More impressively, the video concludes with a clear call to action.

Connecting to Donors through Social Media

Many people, especially young people, prefer to communicate through social media. Enabling a variety of social media communications is likely to be well-received by members or constituents of your organization – and will almost certainly increase their engagement with your organization. Caution:  Allow them to “opt-in” voluntarily to your social media platforms. Collecting social media profiles when visitors register on your website might only require an extra field in your registration form. You can then connect with people and store their information in your donor database.

Nonprofits can accept donations though social media. For instance, Charitweet offers simple, micro-donations directly through Twitter.

Finding a social-media-savvy volunteer, perhaps someone willing to serve on your board, can aid your marketing efforts.

Many companies provide discounts or free services to nonprofits. For instance, Google for Nonprofits offers free or discounted Google products.

Goals and Strategies

Creating social media goals and strategy is the crucial first step for implementing social media activities. The key questions to ask are: What do we want to achieve and how can we best achieve the goals on social media? A solid strategy combined with social media monitoring can help nonprofits find relationships between a social media post and a donation.

Monitoring and measuring your social media efforts can help ensure your nonprofit is meeting its intended goals. Obsessing over “vanity metrics,” such as number of followers and likes, is a common social media measurement pitfall. While those metrics should not be completely disregarded, the point is to focus on what ultimately matters. For businesses, that’s typically sales and profits. For nonprofits it’s mainly donations and memberships. Measure social media efforts against those organizational goals.

Bottom Line: Social media can help nonprofits increase awareness of their missions and meet their membership and fundraising goals. Emphasizing the people it serves, telling their stories, and tapping into the emotions of potential donors can be powerful social media and content marketing strategies for most any nonprofit organization.

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