This article is contributed by Murad Bushnaq, Founder and CEO of Morweb.
Your nonprofit’s website and social media profiles are two important tenets of your online presence.
For instance, social media enables you to connect with your supporters through regular posting and sharing. You might share photos from your last volunteer appreciation event or post a video of your executive director explaining your mission. The interactive nature of social media allows you to see your supporters’ reactions to your posts and directly communicate with them one-on-one through commenting and direct messaging.
On the other hand, your website is an excellent place for featuring more in-depth information about your mission and organizational history. You can also publish blog posts and image galleries to share stories about your fundraising events or memories with your volunteers. And you can host critical online donation tools on your site to maximize your funds, like a donation form and matching gifts database.
Both social media and your website are excellent standalone tools for your nonprofit to garner support and spread its message far and wide. But when you integrate both of them, you can create steady two-way traffic between these two platforms, taking advantage of their unique characteristics to increase your mission’s reach and garner more support for your work.
If you’re unsure about where to start, you’re not alone. Most nonprofit professionals aren’t expert web developers or social media managers. But with a few tips, you can begin integrating your website and social media to strengthen your online presence. In this post, we’ll cover four of those tips:
- Share your website content.
- Encourage sharing with social media buttons.
- Add social media live feeds to your homepage.
- Use social media as a fundraising tool.
By pairing your newfound knowledge with a content management system (CMS) built for nonprofits, you’ll be well on your way to successfully integrating your nonprofit website with social media. Let’s dive right in!
1. Share your website content
Your website is a treasure trove of information and resources that can be easily transformed into engaging social media posts. This is a great strategy for improving content creation on your social media profiles, as you’ll begin to create natural opportunities for social media followers to explore your website.
For example, say you want to introduce a new member of your nonprofit staff on social media. You could post a picture of your staff member with a few fun facts about their life and career. Then, you could link to your “Meet the Team” page so that followers who want to know more can click through to your website.
Of course, when deciding which website content to post to your social media profiles, you’ll want to choose high-quality, informative content that will make people want to click a link to learn more. Here are a few types of content you can post to pique people’s curiosity:
- Videos. According to Getting Attention’s roundup of great nonprofit videos, the videos on your nonprofit’s website are great for posting on social media. This is because they highlight your organization’s authenticity and personability while demonstrating your impact. Plus, videos can be entertaining, are easy for your audience to process, inspire them to act, and are generally more shareable than other types of content.
- Podcasts. Similar to video, audio content is also excellent for sharing on social media. If your nonprofit records a regular podcast, share the episodes on social media and encourage people to subscribe. A podcast can be a great outlet for helping your community of supporters get to know your staff and volunteers through interviews, drumming up excitement for upcoming events, and discussing current events or societal issues related to your cause.
- Blog posts. Keeping up with your website’s blog means that you are consistently creating new content for your website. This can translate into consistent new content for your social media profiles! Share blog posts that lean into storytelling — for example, you might share a blog post that spotlights a volunteer who has been donating their time to your organization for more than 10 years. Alternatively, you can also share informative blog posts, such as posts that help your supporters understand how a hybrid silent auction works and how they can sign up for the one you have planned.
Sharing your website content on your social media profiles is an excellent first step to fully integrating the two platforms and increasing your organization’s reach. We recommend creating a content calendar that includes what will be published on your website and when it will be shared on social media. This will help you stay on track with posting in both places regularly so your followers and website visitors have new content to read and view.
2. Encourage sharing with social media buttons
Social media buttons get your website visitors sharing your content on their own social media profiles, which can help your organization reach people that you couldn’t otherwise — your supporters’ friends, family, and professional colleagues. Plus, social sharing can have a ripple effect, meaning that when Person A shares your web content, Person B and C might also share it, helping you connect with Person D and, eventually, Person Z!
Putting social media buttons on your blog posts, web pages, and donation form can empower your supporters to share these resources when they’re top of mind. With one easy click, they’re on their way to creating a post about your nonprofit for their followers to see.
Which social media platforms should you provide buttons for? The answer is twofold. First, shoot for popular social media platforms. According to Pew Research Center, as of 2021, some of the most popular platforms for American adults include Facebook and Instagram, with Twitter also in the running. The second thing to consider is what platforms your organization is active on. For example, pushing for your supporters to share your content on Instagram can be helpful, but doesn’t make much sense if your organization doesn’t have an Instagram account.
Whatever buttons you decide to include on your web pages, make sure they are prominently displayed. You can even design them to match the branding of your website so that they blend nicely with your site.
3. Add social media live feeds to your homepage
If your nonprofit CMS offers a social media module, you can easily add social media live feeds to your website’s homepage. Live feeds automatically update when you post on social media to display your new content. Similar to choosing which social platforms to add social sharing buttons for, make sure you’re choosing your most active accounts to showcase in a live feed.
A social media live feed is a great tool for showing that your organization is active on both your website and your social media profiles. By demonstrating that your organization is regularly updating its content and interacting with supporters on various platforms, your organization will appear more organized, accessible, and trustworthy. For example, if a supporter is interested in volunteering with your organization on Giving Tuesday and sees a recently-updated social media live feed that signals an active online presence, they’ll know that your “Volunteer Information” page is likely accurate and up-to-date, too.
To encourage the flow of traffic between your website and social media profiles, put a “Follow Us” button near your live feeds. This will help your website visitors to take their exploration of your cause a step further and get regular updates on your organization’s work in their social media feeds.
4. Use social media as a fundraising tool
Both your website and social media profiles can help you pull in online donations for your cause. And when you combine your efforts using both of these tools, you can boost the support your organization is receiving. To do so, you’ll need to encourage both your social media followers and website visitors to use the online giving tools hosted on your website.
Here are a few ideas for getting started:
- Set up a Facebook fundraiser that leads supporters to your online donation page. Facebook is an excellent platform for online crowdfunding. Because Facebook handles payment processing fees, 100% of the money raised goes directly to your organization. For the Facebook fundraiser, your supporters will use Facebook Pay, but make sure to include a link to your donation page on your fundraising page to encourage additional contributions after the campaign ends.
- Add social media buttons to your donation page. According to Morweb’s guide to donation page design, you should pay special attention to the buttons on your donation page. This not only includes your “Submit Donation” button, but any social media buttons as well. After a donor has submitted their donation, they may feel inspired to encourage others to do the same. Give them that power by including social sharing buttons.
- Share information about how to increase impact on your social media profiles. Donors love to find easy ways to make more of a difference in the causes they care about. Often, the only thing holding them back from doing so is a lack of information. You can bridge this information gap by posting about ways that donors can easily give more. For example, if you partner with a matching gifts software vendor to embed a matching gifts database on your donation page, you might write a blog post about matching gifts and share it with your donors so they can take advantage of their employers’ corporate philanthropy efforts. Similarly, you could share information about your monthly giving or planned giving programs.
Social media gives you the opportunity to promote your organization’s fundraising campaigns and tools to your community of current supporters, but don’t forget that it also enables you to connect with new supporters. Encourage your supporters to share your fundraisers with their own personal networks to increase your reach.
The Gist
Integrating your nonprofit website with social media is an excellent way to improve your organization’s marketing efforts. Though it may take some time and strategizing to get right, creating a flow of traffic between these different platforms can help you grow your community of support and, ultimately, help you do more good.
