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If you’re looking to boost donations for your charity or NPO across the core social media channels of Instagram and Facebook you may think simply that posting on social media and asking for donations will do the trick. However, things are never that simple. You need to engage your social media audience and get their attention if you are to have any hope of fundraising on Facebook or Instagram for your charity and getting donations back in return.
Research has shown that engaging social media content can attract as high as 55% of people to engage with your charity or non-profit. With over 14 years working with charities and helping them run their digital campaigns boosting event numbers, volunteers and all important donations we thought we’d share a few ares you need to consider to get some traction.
1. Create an Event and ask your Facebook and Instagram Followers for Input
If you are looking to create a charity fundraising event, then this is the perfect opportunity to engage with your social media followers across Facebook and Instagram. One idea is to create a poll on your Facebook page that invites users to vote on what they want to do. This shouldn’t be an open-ended poll, but one with 3 or 4 entries that are all feasible. Then if you get 90% of your followers asking for a coffee morning, you know that that would be the best event to put on.
2. Get Strategic with Facebook Birthday Charity Fundraising
You can create a theme to target donations for your charity from people who have birthdays in any given month. You can direct these donations towards specific fundraising goals. You should make sure that you promote these each month. So, for example, you can suggest to everyone who has a birthday in March to donate towards a specific charitable project you are running. This allows you to directly interact with your followers and create something that is a little more personal. After all social media is all about getting social – so get involve your followers and make them feel part of something especially when they may be more reflective or full of a bit more goodwill.
3. Tell A Story with The Instagram Donate Sticker
You might not be aware, but Instagram has recently introduced a charity donate sticker that can be used on your Instagram stories. You need to be strategic about how you use this. You shouldn’t create a story that is just about asking for donations, but you should, for example, tell a story of a recent project you have created, or an charity event that you have held, and this should end with an ‘if you would like to get involved then click donate’ type message.
4. Get A Business to Sponsor Social Media Posts
If you have a corporate sponsor for your non-profit organisation, then you should get them involved in sponsoring your social media posts. This can be by telling a story of an event that you recently held with your corporate sponsor, or maybe by making a post about how volunteers from the company helped with a fundraising event. You can then promote the post across Facebook for example by saying things such as brought to you thanks to sponsorship from xxx. This also has the potential of helping to attract new sponsors as they see the benefits that other companies get from being aligned with your charity or non- profit organisation (NPO).
5. Get Corporate Sponsor Testimonials
One other idea to engage with your corporate sponsor is to get a testimonial from your sponsor. Interview them and get them to explain what drew them to the charity and why they wanted to get involved. This will both help promote your sponsor and you help you get further fundraising, but it also shows other potential sponsors as well.
6. Promote Restaurant Fundraiser
Maybe you want to hold a restaurant fundraiser where a percentage of every meal at the place on a certain day is donated to your non-profit. One great way to get engagement for this is to again create a poll on your site asking which of several restaurants people would be interested in. Then when you have decided you can search on Instagram for pictures people have taken at that restaurant. You can then engage with them by commenting on their posts explaining when your event is taking place and asking them if they want to come along, you already know they are fans of the place if they have been there before, and this creates a great interactive buzz about the event.
7. Create an Online Auction
One thing that lots of people enjoy is online auctions. This is something that you can run anytime you have something that you want to ‘give away’. It could be a donation from a corporate sponsor or some other item. There are many sites that enable you to auction off that item in order to generate funds for your organisation. You can then promote the auction on Facebook and Instagram.
8. Promote AmazonSmile Monthly
If you are a non-profit you should ensure that you have registered with the AmazonSmile program. This means that anyone that makes a purchase through smile.amazon.com from your site will cause a donation of 0.5% to be made to your organisation. You want to make sure that you then promote this method of donation monthly with your followers encouraging to make all their Amazon purchases through this link.
9. Promote Donation Drives Monthly
You need to promote a monthly donation drive. The donations should be for things other than money, it could be a canned food drive or stationery. You want to make sure that this is a monthly event and occurs on the same day each month. So, you could make the 3rd Thursday of the month the birthday drive for canned food. If you keep repeating this each month then people will get to know the schedule and be ready for it.
10. Collaborate with Influencers
You want to get to know some key online influencers and attempt to set up a collaboration with them. This needs to be in the same way as you would make friends in real life as well. You need to introduce yourself to them and find out a bit more about them and tell them about yourself and your organisation. Allow them to get to know more about you before you broach the subject of collaborating. The more you know about the influencer in the first place the easier it will be for you to engage with them and eventually work with them.
Final Thoughts
As a non-profit there are a number of key ways that you can engage with your Facebook and Instagram followers, this revolves around making sure that you have the right content marketing strategy for your sites.
We hope you find these facebook fundraising tips to help your charity get a louder voice online useful. Don’t forget alongside the social media side of things Google provide an £8,000 monthly grant to all eligible charities. It can be transformational! (managed correctly) – increasing all important donations and volunteer numbers. You can learn more about applying for a grant for your charity or organisation here.
If you are a charity and would like help growing your digital footprint, fundraising with facebook or help getting hold of the Google grant then why not give our dedicated Non Profits team a call. Over the last 14 years we’ve worked with lots of charities big and small.
Get in touch now – we’d love to hear from you!
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