Garner Greater Support for your Nonprofit

How can you gather greater support and make yourself more visible to increase your ability to contribute to the mission of your nonprofit?

First, properly utilize social media. Considering what a big faction of the population consists of millenials, it would be an oversight not to use the media platforms they engage with most.  In terms of the way millenials use social media for charitable causes, it seems that they relate more with causes or issues than specific organizations. Therefore, marketing yourself as particularly in support of a cause versus your organization itself can be more productive.

Let your audience know where their money and/or time is going. Transparency is key in garnering support for your issues. Additionally, conveying that assisting either financially or through one’s time is making a legitimate difference is important in encouraging people to jump on board.

Use the Facebook “insights” tab and the Twitter “analytics” option to examine how many people are seeing your posts and engaging with them. This can give you information about what type of posts your followers find most interesting and what times of day they are most engaged.

Another seemingly obvious way to engage the community is through personal, community stories about the successes of your nonprofit. The key is to write stories that both exhibit true success and tug at the heartstrings without being too cheesy or seeming insincere. A blog can be a really great platform to post these sorts of things, and then you can “share” the link through Facebook and Twitter. This should also bring more traffic to your blog.

“Share” posts from other nonprofits. This shows commitment to philanthropies in general and positions yourself as being dedicated to charitable missions and their impact as opposed to exclusively fundraising.

Fundraising, however, is a really important part of running a successful nonprofit. There is no denying that money is a necessity when helping people on a large scale is concerned. Transparency about your financials and disclosing where potential donors can access that information can be very useful in encouraging people to donate.  In addition to using online media platforms as marketing methods, classic fundraising events are always an effective hit. Maybe create an online fundraising event. Marketing a specific day as a day of giving for your organization can be a quick way to earn donations and visibility.