Whether your an organizer, parent, or one of the kids involved. You likely know all about how difficult fundraising can be. From the very beginning of the concept’s execution, problems seem to spring up out of the blue. Almost as if Murphy’s Law were written specifically for fundraising organizers.
That said, there are a variety of ways in which you can mitigate risk while increasing your community outreach through social media. This article will give you a quick breakdown. On five of the most common social media marketing strategies that community organizers use to boost funding results.
Post Frequent and Consistent Content
Original content tends to perform better than shared or “stolen” content for most organizations. When it comes to fundraising for school or other youth organizations, that is doubly true. As many people can’t resist donating to children. In fact, people tend to have such a difficult time saying “no” to children, that Psychology Today wrote an entire article telling people how to Boost Funding Results.
If your organization doesn’t have the time to generate original content on a reliable schedule, then that’s fine. But you have to put out something. Whether you’re creating original content or sharing the content of others. What matters most is that you post content frequently and consistently in order to maximize your readership.
By sticking to a content schedule. You increase the likelihood of people seeing your content, which in turn increases the likelihood of you converting them from a viewer to a buyer. In this case, that means more money for the organization and more joy for the kids!
Practice Performing “Competitive Analyses”
Many community organizers fail to take the proper steps in the strategizing phase of social media marketing without hiring a social media manager. But odds are that you’ve conducted countless competitive analyses already. Anytime you’ve looked at somebody else’s content and thought, “How can I do that?” you’ve conducted a basic competitive analysis.
Of course, conducting a more detailed social media competitive analysis requires a bit more work. Start out by identifying your most successful competitors. If you’re looking to raise funds for a non-profit or charity organization, replace the phrase “competitors” with “people in the same line of work.”
Next, gather data on what it is that they’re doing differently from you. Carefully monitor their activity on social media for a week or two in order to get a close look at their operating practices. Once you’ve got that information. You should be able to begin answering the question of whether or not those techniques could work for you.
Consider Hiring Push Models
You may have heard it said before that social media is more than just social media. Not everything that helps boost social media practices is done on the actual social media platforms themselves. In fact, there is quite a lot of work that goes into creating the events that forms social media content.
While any organizer, parent, or fundraising youth can tell you that fact. You most likely are unfamiliar with the phrase, “push models.” Push models are models who are hired through a trade show staffing agency and sent to high-profile events with the goal of “pushing” your brand through direct contact (e.g., one-on-one conversations) as well as indirect contact (e.g., appearing in the background of a prominent photo shoot.
Unfortunately, this practice can be quite expensive, prohibitively so for smaller organizations. In order to gain access to this level of social media signal-boosting, consider applying for grants.
Pay Attention to Your Target Audience
When it comes to social media marketing. There is one thing that matters more than any other: knowing your target audience. At its simplest, knowing your target audience means “selling” to the right people. For example, if your goal is to raise funding results for a food drive for the local poor. You’re not going to want to target your content at the people you’re trying to help.
There are a few great questions that you can ask yourself in order to ensure that you have as great an understanding of your target audience as possible. One is, “What are you doing?” By being able to explain your organization’s purpose in three sentences or fewer, you increase the odds of finding the right people looking to donate.
Another important question to ask is “How does the audience use social media?” If you’re marketing your fundraising campaign to seniors. You might not want to rely too heavily on Instagram, for example.
Be Engaging
When we say to “be engaging,” we don’t mean simply to create entertaining content. Rather, we mean to build relationships with your followers instead of just tossing your content to the wolves.
Studies have shown that, by engaging with your followers on a frequent basis, those followers become more likely to return–assuming that said engagement ended on a positive note. Simply put, people like to interact with people who interact back with them.
By setting aside only an hour a day to reply to comments and retweet your followers. You increase not only the number of comments and likes (and thus notice) that your social media content receives. But you also increase the likelihood of convincing your followers to donate.
Conclusion
These five tips aren’t likely to make the difference between night and day mere minutes after you put them into practice. However, they have been shown time and time again to significantly increase the long-term viability of commercial and charitable organizations the world over.
By setting up accounts and putting these tips to work on at least two social media platforms. You can reduce the amount of grassroots work necessary for community outreach while increasing the chances of bringing in higher levels of funding results.
Planning the fundraising events themselves are still going to be a challenge, but that’s all part of the fun for a community organizer!
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