With immediate access to your audiences at your fingertips, utilizing social media channels is key for a quick and effective way to spread your organization’s message. With these tools at your disposal, the question becomes how to best use social media to achieve your goals. These tips will help shape your social media plan to drive interaction and help you build connections and trust between your organization and audiences.

Know your strategy

Knowing your strategy is important to develop content to reach the right people and achieve your goals. PCI worked with one nonprofit to determine their goals and target audience, then successfully developed a strategy to engage the audience and build a relationship between the organization and its followers, which increased support for the organization.

Storytelling is key

For nonprofits sharing their story, it is the “WHY?” that matters. Why should I donate to your organization? Why should I care about the work you do? Sharing your story and impact builds a relationship with your followers and encourages them to support you.

Use high quality photos, graphics and video

High-quality photos and videos visually enhance the posts, and attract more attention to your posts, as well as lend credibility to the organization. On Instagram, using multiple high-quality photos to create carousel images will increase engagement when compared to single-image posts.

Use hashtags relevant to your nonprofit, industry and location to join relevant conversations

Insert your voice into relevant conversations using hashtags to draw attention to your nonprofit. Keep in mind that followers don’t want to be inundated with ask for money or donations, and limit it to a mix of hard and soft asks.

Use data impactfully

Data is a powerful tool to share the impact and success of your mission. By ensuring you have accurate data and using it wisely, you can lend powerful support to your core message.

Short and sweet

Lengthy posts should generally be avoided, but sometimes a nonprofit may have an important initiative or campaign that requires more content. Ensure the content is well-written, and keep lengthier posts to a minimum.

Establish benchmarks

Use benchmarks to measure success of the program. Key metrics to look at include post engagement (likes, comments, retweets/shares, clicks or views), engagement rate (total interactions per post per follower), reach and impressions to determine increase in people seeing your content, account likes and follows to determine growth or loss, conversation by channel to determine which channels are generating meaningful conversation with followers.