Best Fundraising Practices for Nonprofits on Facebook Nonprofit Tech for Good
go to original June 17, 2022

5 Ethical Principles for Digitizing Humanitarian Aid (TEDWomen)

Without a doubt, your nonprofit’s donors and supporters use Facebook on a regular basis and thus Facebook should be your first priority in your social media strategy. With 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. Without a doubt, your nonprofit’s donors and supporters use Facebook on a regular basis and thus Facebook should be your first priority in your social media strategy. However, to stand out from the other nearly one hundred million Facebook Pages vying for likes, comments, and shares, your nonprofit needs to excel at Facebook to ensure feed exposure.

Set up your nonprofit’s Facebook Page to make a good first impression

First impressions are important on social media. Ensure that when potential new followers land on your Facebook Page, the design of your cover photo and your profile photo is visually compelling.

To begin, use a profile photo that can be easily recognized in the feed. Too often nonprofits upload their logo as their profile photo, but when viewed in the feed the text in the logo is too small to read and the graphic in their logo is often cropped and illegible. In this example, Heal the Bay does not include the text in their logo in their profile photo and their cover photo powerfully speaks to their mission which creates a very good first impression upon first-time visitors.

To ensure your nonprofit’s page is well-designed, you can hire a graphic designer that specializes in the nonprofit sector or do-it-yourself using a low-cost design tool such as Canva.

Finally, it’s worth noting that after a new follower likes your page, it’s unlikely that they will ever visit your page again as the experience of your page will occur primarily in the feed through posts and ads.

Post 2-5 times weekly to your Facebook Page and respond to your followers

The hard truth is that organic reach on Facebook is almost non-existent and unless your nonprofit is investing in Facebook Ads, it is likely that your organization is investing too much time into your Facebook presence.

According to the M+R Benchmarks Report, posts by nonprofits are only reaching 4% of your followers. That’s equivalent to sending an email to one hundred of your donors and supporters and 96 of those emails going into spam folders. That would render email marketing pointless, yet according to Rival IQ in their 2022 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, nonprofits are posting an average of 7.6 times per week to their Facebook Pages. Unless your nonprofit has an advertising budget or a large following, posting every day is a bad habit that needs to be broken.

Even more abysmal, Rival IQ also found that nonprofits have an average engagement rate of .11% meaning that on average one out of every 1,000 of your followers will either like, comment, or click any on any given post.

Knowing that organic reach and engagement are essentially non-existent, how often should your nonprofit post? Hubspot Research found that the first two posts per week on Facebook earn a median of a single click. After that, it drops to zero clicks, so Nonprofit Tech for Good recommends that most small and medium-sized nonprofits post twice a week to maximize organic reach and engagement with the understanding that your organic reach and engagement will be very low regardless of how good your content is. Let that sink in.

All that said, if your nonprofit absolutely can not invest money in Facebook Ads, here are five tips to maximize organic reach and engagement:

1. If your nonprofit has 10,000 followers or less, posting twice a week is a good starting point. The only nonprofits that should be posting four or more times weekly are those that have 100,000+ followers. For the past decade, conventional Facebook marketing advice has been that nonprofits should post once, or even twice, daily. Today, that’s a worst practice not grounded in data or experience.

2. Craft a compelling message (behind-the-scenes, a call-to-action, a positive story, etc.) that grabs your follower’s attention (easier said than done!).

3. Share photos and videos that communicate the story of your mission and programs.

4. Curate high-quality content that is relevant to your mission and programs.

5. Respond to those that comment on your posts – even if it is simply liking their comment – engaging with your followers does make it more likely that they will see future posts.

Read the rest at Nonprofit Tech for Good

Related: Facebook Donations for Nonprofits – Top 10 Pro Tips (WhyDonate)

Related Webinar: Facebook & Instagram Best Practices for Nonprofits (Nonprofit Tech for Good)

Related: How to Turn Customers Into Advocates With Loyalty Marketing (Facebook.com)