This article is contributed by Murad Bushnaq, Founder and CEO of Morweb.
As a nonprofit professional, you understand the importance of a strong online marketing strategy. By tapping into digital channels and creating quality content, your organization can expand its reach, boost its following, and direct supporters to get further involved in your efforts, whether that’s by donating, volunteering, or participating in your events.
Two of the biggest assets nonprofits have to increase their online visibility are their website and social media presence. Rather than treating these as standalone tools, your nonprofit should integrate them to create two-way traffic between these platforms and effectively introduce new audiences to your cause (and keep them actively engaged).
Connecting your website and social media is easy when you have the right tools and strategies. In this guide, we’ll cover the top tips to unify your marketing strategy:
- 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 boost your follower count and site visitors. Let’s begin.
1. Share your website content
Your nonprofit website contains a wealth of information and resources that can be easily transformed into engaging social media posts. This is an effective 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, let’s say you want to highlight your annual year-end fundraising event on social media. You might include a photo from the last time you hosted the event, then include a mobile-friendly link in the caption to your event landing page. This way, once you intrigue your social media followers with your exciting event, you can immediately direct them to learn more event details and register on your website.
Here are a few types of content you can post on social media to pique your followers’ curiosity and successfully lead them to your site:
- Videos. Your nonprofit might already have videos on your website that cover your history, introduce your team and volunteers, or highlight your events and programs. Instead of creating new videos, repurpose these videos by sharing them on your social media. This is an easy way to generate more content on your social media channels and point viewers to your website to get more information.
- Podcasts. If your nonprofit records a regular podcast or appears on a guest podcast, share snippets of the episode(s) on social media and direct followers to your website to listen to the full thing. A podcast can be a great outlet for helping your 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 related to your projects or upcoming events for your social media profiles! Share sneak peeks of blog posts on LinkedIn or Facebook to intrigue your followers, then lead them to your website to read the whole piece.
Create 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
Putting social media buttons on your blog posts, web pages, and donation form can empower your supporters to share these resources on their own feeds when it’s fresh on their minds. With one easy click, they’re on their way to creating a post about your nonprofit for their followers to see.
To enable social sharing on your website with ease, your nonprofit needs to work with the right website builder. Morweb’s guide to the best nonprofit website builders recommends looking for a CMS that allows you to add social sharing buttons for popular platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn—with no coding required, saving your nonprofit valuable time.
Once you launch your social sharing buttons, place them by your navigation bar to make sure they’re prominently displayed on relevant web pages. You can also design them to match the branding of your website, including the typography and color scheme, 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. Live feeds automatically update when you post on social media to display your new content. Choose your most active accounts to showcase in a live feed, as this will ensure your supporters are seeing fresh content.
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 indicates 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 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. By leveraging both of these tools together, 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 and even sign up for monthly giving.
- Encourage peer-to-peer fundraisers to post. According to OneCause, peer-to-peer fundraising empowers your loyal supporters to take the fundraising reins and introduce your cause to people in their personal networks. Have your top supporters create peer-to-peer fundraising pages online, then instruct them to share links to their pages and your website on social media. This way, their followers can give and learn more about your cause, leading to greater involvement down the line.
- Share information about how to increase impact on your social media profiles. Post on social media about ways that donors can easily give more. For example, if you partner with a matching gift company to embed a matching gifts database on your donation page, you can create a related social media post. In your post, you could discuss how to check whether you qualify for matching gifts and share it with your donors so they can take advantage of their employers’ corporate philanthropy efforts.
Social media gives you the opportunity to promote your organization’s fundraising campaigns 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
By using your social media to promote your website and vice versa, you can level up your donor engagement, create stronger relationships with supporters, and bring in more revenue. First, you’ll need to make sure your website and social media are updated and accessible, so be sure to work with tools like ready-to-go website templates and social media schedulers to build out a strong digital presence. Remember to keep your audience in mind and plan out mission-centric content that will resonate with your supporters.
