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Social Media Ads for Nonprofits: Are They Worth the Investment?
Social media is constantly changing. Whether it be new platforms or updates to existing ones, there is a lot to learn in a short amount of time. Creating and posting regular content can also take time and energy.
Now imagine trying to do all of that while running social media ads. It can be exhausting! However, don’t discount the power and effectiveness of social media ads, especially if you’re a nonprofit. There are numerous benefits, including creating new ways to engage donors.
Let’s examine the importance of social media with nonprofit organizations and review some tips for nonprofits to make a significant impact with a small budget.
2.5 billion reasons
Here’s some food for thought. Did you know that it is estimated that there will be over 2.5 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) active Instagram users in 2023? Not only is that nearly double the number of active users since 2020, but it’s also your opportunity to interact with one-third of the entire planet’s population!
As the digital world continues to grow and improve, we also see the decline of the traditional brick-and-mortar business. As everything continues to go online, this is where companies need to keep growing. It’s the same brick-and-mortar business; you’re just taking it to new places and faces!
Proof that Social Media Marketing Is Important
Let’s play the numbers game for social media marketing. It may surprise you just how vital social media marketing can be to your nonprofit. Here are a handful of stats that demonstrate the importance of social media marketing in today’s world.
55% of consumers learn about new brands via social media.
68% of consumers agree that social media helps them to interact with brands and companies.
43% of consumers increased their use of social media so they could discover new products.
78% of consumers are more willing to buy from a company after a positive experience with them on social media.
80% of business execs believe investing additional resources in social media marketing is important.
72% of businesses use social media data when making business decisions.
Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing
We're going to learn about a few reasons why social media marketing is a precious asset to your nonprofit.
Brand Awareness
As previously mentioned, there are at least 2.5 billion reasons why social media can be a great tool to build awareness about your nonprofit. You can utilize your social media ads solely as a vein to share news, launches, product updates, or any other information your audience may find relevant or interesting. Even if you reach many people who are not directly interested in your service or products, they may still help promote you directly or indirectly. If they don’t share your content with their friends, their connections, and even friends of their followers, etc., they may see your information. So keep posting!
Profit Increase
More people learning about your nonprofit also increases the potential for growing your client and donor base. It’s possible to generate donations from organic (non-paid) social media posts, stories, etc. However, even a small budget for paid social media ads can take your posts to the next level, reaching hundreds, if not thousands, of targeted individuals who could be directly impacted and interested in your nonprofit.
SEO Improvement
You read that correctly. Social media content can help improve the search engine optimization for your website (where your website ranks on Google searches). The more your best content is shared, or the more people click on links to your website (through targeted social media ads or simply on your social media profile), the more your website domain authority can improve in search engines like Google.
Better Customer Service
Customer service phone calls, emails, and live chats are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Many customers now turn to social media outlets as their main point of contact with businesses. Usually improving response times, social media provides companies with an improved way to interact with customers to create a better experience.
Added Benefits of Social Media Advertising (That You Probably Weren’t Even Thinking About)
There are numerous benefits to social media advertising (yes, like creating more sales and building a wider audience), including some that may not initially come to mind. Here are a few from Forbes.
Hyper-Target Your Customers
Okay, so you’ve used social media advertising and have had seemingly minimal results. Well, how well did you target your audience? Maybe you threw in some relatable hashtags or the location of your business. That’s all well and good, but you might have felt you didn’t get the results or responses you wanted from the kind of people you were hoping to reach, potentially wasting your ad spend.
You need to ensure that you have quality ads and that the right people are seeing them. You could have the best-looking ad in the universe, but if the right people don’t see it, then what’s the point? This is where hyper-targeting your customers comes in.
Don’t throw a Hail Mary and expect a touchdown.
With hyper-targeting, you can narrow down your audience based on exact demographics. Don’t throw a Hail Mary and expect a touchdown. Instead, consistently gain results by targeting your ads based on a myriad of demographics, including age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, visitors to your website, and even email lists!
Build Your Audiences
You’ve run a more successful social media ad campaign by hyper-targeting your customers (often called an audience). Now take it one step further and save your audience (or audiences if you have multiple campaigns with different hyper-targeting aspects).
Not only does this save you the hassle of reinventing the wheel every time you want to start a new post or ad campaign, but you can also repurpose it by retargeting those audiences with contextual advertising of new offers or updates that you might have about your nonprofit.
To top it all off, these audiences that you have built via hyper-targeting also give you historical data from which to learn about your ad campaigns, refine them for consistency, and realize continued (and improved) success in future campaigns.
ROI Tracking
One of, if not the most important, is the need to track all of your social media ad campaigns from a financial perspective. This is essential for reporting and consistency.
With platforms like Instagram and Facebook, this process is seamless, as it is built directly into the Meta Ads Manager platform (Meta owns and operates both Instagram and Facebook). With their ads manager tool, you can properly access the necessary data to analyze your ROI for social media ads. This allows you to effectively and accurately refine your campaigns to increase results.
The best part: outside of your ad spend, it doesn’t cost anything! Social media platforms give nonprofits with limited budgets a way to grow rapidly.
The Complete Picture Trifecta
As previously mentioned, having a solid social audience is critical. Combine that with FundEasy’s fundraiser software integration tools (links with Facebook Pixel, MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc.), branded web pages, and emails, and you have the trifecta to balance all of your fundraising efforts.
Building a social presence combined with social media advertising allows your fundraising efforts to grow exponentially because it will enable your nonprofit to engage donors socially and increase brand awareness, all while promoting fundraising initiatives. Nonprofits must have a social media presence to effectively maintain a strong personal connection with their audience.
Seven Ways to Make a Big Impact on a Small Budget (All Free)
Alright, you see the effectiveness of social media advertising with your nonprofit, but maybe you’re not sure how to get started. Here are seven freeways from Non-Profit Pro to help your nonprofit make an impact.
Post Interactive Content
Posting interactive content (posts with interactive polls, asking your audience to ask you questions, contests, etc.) help make your social media presence social. It's a great way to keep your audience engaged while casually building awareness about your nonprofit!
Include Hashtags in Your Post to Increase Your Reach
Hashtags are a great (and free) way to help increase your reach. You can include hashtags of keywords with your nonprofit or topics of interest in the specific social media post. Whatever hashtags you choose to utilize in your posts, keep them simple and relevant to the topic, especially considering that these will help narrow your audience but not as effectively as hyper-targeting.
Use Visuals in your Posts to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Video and exciting visuals are kings in social media (whether regular posts or paid ads). With endless scrolling for social media users, you must make your posts stand out visually to attract people to your website.
Why not incorporate one of the best FundEasy features from its Peer-to-Peer Platform: its visual tools, like an animated fund meter or leaderboard? Everyone likes fun competitions for good causes! What better way to share and increase engagement than through social media?
Check-in and Engage Daily
You have to stay social on your social media account. That means checking in at least once a day to respond to any questions from users engaging with your content and to also engage with other users and their content. Liking and commenting on other social media accounts (a few a day is all you need) shows that your nonprofit is actively engaged and helps build awareness (a comment on someone else’s post from your nonprofit is another opportunity for a potential new client/donor/user to see you and know that you exist.
Make it Easy for Followers/Users to Donate
If your followers or users have to jump through hoops (one link after another) to donate, they won’t make it to the final destination. Have a direct link in the post (for platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn) or have a bio link (Instagram).
Fun fact: with FundEasy’s online and offline donation tracking, you can monitor how well your donations perform on each platform and tweak your strategy accordingly!
Schedule Content In Advance
No one can effectively manage anything if they constantly have to create and post content on the same day. Schedule a limited time each week to develop and then schedule content for your social media account. It doesn’t take much.
Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Strategy
With any business endeavor, it's important to continuously assess the effectiveness of your strategy so that you can fine-tune it to fit your needs. This could be as simple as seeing which posts have the most engagement (likes, saves, comments, shares) and creating more content to match the style of those posts.
Bonus Tip: Don’t Be Afraid to Have Fun!
As you create and post content, share stories, etc., don’t be afraid to embrace humor and highlight the real-world impact your nonprofit is making.
Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Tips: Social Media Edition
Put the FUN Back into Fundraising with a peer-to-peer fundraising social media ad campaign.
How Peer-to-Peer Works with Social Media
What is Peer-to-Peer fundraising, and how does it work with social media? This is when a nonprofit has many of its supporters actively reaching out for donations, acting on behalf of the nonprofit.
Do you remember the ALS ice bucket challenge from a few years ago? This is one of the most outstanding examples of a successful peer-to-peer social media campaign.
To begin, the nonprofit organization must establish a goal and a primary campaign page with a peer-to-peer fundraising platform. From here, the nonprofit must recruit volunteers to be fundraisers and set up and share its campaign pages using social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
It is crucial to have a well-thought-out peer-to-peer fundraising campaign to ensure that time and effort are not wasted in its execution.
Just Getting Started
Social media is not only continuing to grow but is actively changing how we conduct business daily as consumers and businesses.
While it's clear that social media can and should be a substantial part of your nonprofit, it can feel complicated and overwhelming to learn where and how to start. The simplicity and cost-effectiveness of executing and monitoring social media campaigns with minimal budgets make it a solid asset to FundEasy’s tool chest of products. Utilizing Peer-to-Peer, Attendance, and Crowdfunding can ensure that your fundraising campaigns maximize ROI.
If you have any questions or want to learn more about our products, contact us today!
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Madison Hull
This article was inspired by our customers and written to encourage your fundraising efforts. Although we work with nonprofits and events daily, our team members are not Event Consultants. We encourage you to consult with your event consultant, executive team, and/or affiliate organization before making any major changes to your events.