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Chapter 17
Social Media and Crowdfunding for Your Cause

“We’ve entered a world where everyone is smarter than anyone.”

—Anonymous

Introduction

Social media is changing the way we interact with each other and with the causes we care about. People of all ages and generations are using social media to connect with nonprofits in unprecedented ways: identifying new causes to support, tapping their social networks to raise money on their behalf, and actively engaging them in dialogue. Facebook is now the equivalent of the world’s third largest country—almost a billion and a half people logged on in the last 30 days, including 71 percent of American adults, according to Pew Research—and it’s not just “the kids” who are tuning in. In fact, women over the age of 45 are Facebook’s fastest growing audience.

By embracing social media and meeting people where they’re at, nonprofits can take advantage of the huge opportunities the digital landscape provides to attract and engage supporters, while generating tremendous exposure for your cause. Without a robust social media strategy and audience, your organization will never have its own ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which tripled a nonprofit’s annual budget in just eight weeks, nor a Kony2012 video, which reached 100 million viewers on YouTube faster than any video in history and was produced by a small nonprofit in San Diego. Moreover, you will miss out on a vital opportunity to deeply engage younger generations who will become future donors.

Perhaps most exciting, social media presents an opportunity to turn your donors into fundraisers. After all, professional fundraisers are fond of saying, “The most powerful form of ask is a peer ask.” And what is social media, other than the most powerful peer-to-peer-based communication platform in history? Moreover, with the rise of crowdfunding (an online campaign to raise individual donations toward a larger goal) as a viable fundraising tactic, nonprofits need to understand how to harness the power of people online and turn them into donors and advocates.

To learn more about effectively using social media and running successful crowdfunding campaigns, I sat down with Beth Kanter, renown #nptech blogger, trainer, and author of The Networked Nonprofit and Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, and John Haydon, digital marketing expert and author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.¹

Critical Skills and Competencies

1. Start with the Basics

Having a simple and well-designed website is the first step in preparing yourself to embrace social media (see Chapter 15), and you’ll certainly want to link to any social media platforms you’re active on from your site. Once you have that dialed in, you can turn your attention to unlocking the power of social media. The first platform you’ll likely want to focus on is Facebook, since it’s by far the most popular outlet, plus 96 percent of nonprofits are already there, according to NonprofitMarketingGuide.com’s Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. Catch up first, and then you can lead the pack. After Facebook, Twitter is the second most popular social network, but you may want to concentrate on others, depending on your goals and audience; for example, Pinterest is great for nonprofits targeting women, which is two-thirds of their audience, and for groups with compelling photos or infographics. Read the appendix immediately following this chapter for tips on specific social media platforms.

Regardless of which platform(s) you’re active on, success doesn’t just happen; you have to plan for it. Create a monthly editorial calendar to map out your social media and crowdfunding campaigns. This is a simple spreadsheet or calendar used to plan the timing of your posts and to coordinate messaging. Instead of only having one staff member handle your social media posts, engage multiple people to distribute your expertise and let individual voices and perspectives shine through. Remember, people don’t give to organizations; they give to people. That said, coordinating efforts can be difficult without a simple tool to plan who is going to post what, where, when. Simply knowing that I’m posting a blog about our annual gala on Thursday at 12 noon, and then Laila is posting our auction items on Facebook that afternoon, and so on gives everyone the basic information needed to efficiently support the organization’s efforts.

Note you can free scheduling tools like Hootsuite to pre-plan posts, so you don’t have to actually log on during evenings, weekends, and holidays. An editorial calendar will help you manage multiple social media contributors efficiently and avoid duplicated efforts. Simply organize a monthly group meeting to plan out your content and document everything in the calendar, and then everyone knows what’s expected of them. Of course, you can also add in timely posts if there’s an exciting announcement or relevant article that pops up, but this gives you a baseline.

The most important thing when launching your social media strategy is to commit dedicated resources and ensure a constant stream of new content. Not doing so results in what I call the “empty store phenomenon,” and sadly, it’s far too common. Just as you wouldn’t open up a store on Main Street with no plans to keep the shelves stocked, so too should you never launch a social media presence without a plan and commitment to stocking your presence there with content. You can actually hurt your cause by establishing a substandard, dormant presence, so if you’re unable to commit, then hold off.

Once you’ve built a sizable and engaged social media audience, you are better positioned to experiment with crowdfunding. Before starting a crowdfunding campaign, you need to organize and create your campaign media: key messages including sample social media posts, shareable content like infographics, photo and video footage of projects and programs, photos of your team, testimonies from program beneficiaries, and whatever else helps convey your work.

P.O.S.T. to Social Media

Kanter shared a helpful framework to help you plan successful social media and crowdfunding campaigns:

P Is for People You Are Trying to Reach

What do they care about, and what do you actually want them to do? How can you engage this audience? Create an archive of compelling photos, videos, and surveys as you prepare your launch. After mastering your presence on Facebook and Twitter, find out which social media platforms the majority of your donors and prospects are on, and focus your efforts there, but again, remember to go deeper versus wider, and don’t dilute your efforts by establishing a mediocre presence on too many platforms.

O Is for Objectives

Whether establishing a social media presence or launching a crowdfunding campaign, the key to your success is clearly communicating the outcomes of your work and spelling out the impact of donations. It’s not about getting more “likes” on Facebook; your objectives should map directly to your mission. Start with a S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Timely) goal, not something generic like “Help us raise as much money as possible to build as many playgrounds as we can.” Rather, be concrete, for example, “Help us raise $15,000 in the next 50 days to we can build a playground for the 637 children at Mission Elementary School. Research shows that schools with playgrounds have 27 percent higher attendance rates.” Again, remember to ensure these objectives integrate with your overall fundraising and marketing goals; social media and crowdfunding campaigns are simply another channel for advancing your work and spreading your message.

S Is for Social

As Kanter says, “Crowdfunding is really the marriage of fundraising and social media. It’s about engaging people and raising money.” In order to inspire people to give, you need to engage them with your story. And if you’re trying to create a “viral” message—meaning that you hope that those who read your message will pass it along—it’s critical that your story be shareable. The secret to going viral is composing a message that is compelling, concise, and credible.

Short videos under three minutes, even more than photos, are key to creating appealing content that helps you make the case for raising money. In fact, crowdfunding platform Razoo says that campaigns with a video raise an average of 800 percent more money! And before you publicly launch a crowdfunding campaign, be sure to privately invite your inner circle of donors, board members, and supporters to contribute; that way when the floodgates open, people won’t see an empty thermometer. See Chapter 15 for more on this “seeding the tip jar” concept. Additionally, as outlined in Chapter 4, it’s helpful to recruit a “social media marketing committee” before you launch. These well-connected supporters agree to share your social media posts and actively engage with your content through likes and comments, magnifying exposure. When your campaign launches, these tips will help the public see that you’ve made progress in inspiring people to contribute both financially and emotionally, and others will be much more likely to contribute and engage.

T Is for Tools

There are a variety of tools available to help nonprofits manage their social media presence and crowdfunding campaigns:

Social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and many others.
Crowdfunding platforms include CommitChange, Indiegogo, KickStarter, Network for Good, StayClassy, Razoo, causes (now Brigade), Causevox, CrowdRise, Fundly, GoFundMe, WePay, RocketHub, Sponsume, StartSomeGood, Patreon, GiveFoward, and more. (More on choosing the right crowdfunding platform in the next tip, and see the appendix immediately following this chapter for tips on effective crowdfunding.)
Content curation tools like Scoop.It, Storify, and Listly help you identify relevant content on the Web and make it easy to share it with your social networks.
Scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer that allow you to pre-schedule your posts and tweets and ensure a steady stream of content for your followers.
Analytics tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Sprout Social, RowFeeder, and Klout allow you to analyze the performance of posts and followers, plus measure things like audience engagement. (More information and links in the Resource Review below.)

And finally, good old-fashioned spreadsheets will help you track analytics and create things such as editorial calendars.

Non-traditional “tools” also include things like the people on your team supporting your efforts and promoting content, as well as giving days (a designated day like #GivingTuesday, where nonprofits promote an area- or industry-wide campaign and request gifts). Giving days are great for inspiring donors, because they hear about the campaign from multiple organizations, which drives increased giving.

2. Pick the Right Crowdfunding Platform

There are many platforms to consider, and every nonprofit has its unique set of needs and requirements. As you’re reviewing the aforementioned platforms and more, keep in mind the associated costs (Is there a fee? What percentage of the donation do they take?), the platform’s ability to integrate into your website or social outlet (you don’t want people to feel like they are leaving to make a gift), whether it automatically makes your presence and donation page mobile responsiveness so people can easily view it on a mobile device, and user reviews (Are people who have used this platform happy with the results?). For more tips on effective crowdfunding, see the appendix immediately following this chapter.

Whatever tool you choose, it’s critical that whenever people donate, either through your website or via a social media or crowdfunding platform, your donation-processing engine must prompt donors to invite their social networks to follow their lead after they give. This is as simple as adding a couple buttons to the thank you page where donors can click to share on Facebook or Twitter, after which a pre-populated message pops up saying something like, “I just gave to Save the Children and encourage you to join me in supporting their good work,” followed by a link. Donors can choose to edit the text if they like, but either way this simple functionality typically improves revenue by 20 to 200 percent; plus it magnifies your campaign’s audience.

Take the time to do your homework and make sure you’re happy with the platform you choose, because once you start a crowdfunding campaign, you’re pretty much stuck with it. Swapping out a donation-processing platform for social media or your website is a bit easier, but still entails a cumbersome transition that should be avoided if at all possible. A little work now saves you a lot of effort down the road!

3. Become a Content Curator

Social media should be leveraged as a platform for thought leadership, rather than as a megaphone to promote your work. To make it simple, I encourage nonprofits to follow the 50/50 rule: at least half your posts should not be about you, your organization, or its needs and impact, but rather about the cause and issue you represent. This includes relevant, insightful information and updates, such as research, articles, infographics, and industry events, including those of like-minded organizations. This also includes posts you share and retweet from relevant media and nonprofits. Your goal is to get people to think of you as the go-to resource for information on your cause, so when they decide to support the issue, they think of you. At the same time, this builds up social capital by strengthening relationships with industry experts and other organizations in your space and establishes your expertise. Pitch a big tent and the more people and groups you invite inside, the more you will become a pillar of the community.

4. Master Frequency and Timing

Again, it’s key to have a steady stream of content to engage your users, but you also need to find a good balance. Social media is nothing but a digital cocktail party, and you never want to be the one sucking up all the air in the room. On Facebook, post no more than twice a day if possible, as engagement drops off after that point. To avoid hosting an empty store, post at least twice a week. Post at least daily if you’re on Twitter, and ideally more, as there’s really no limit to how often you can tweet—follow @GuyKawasaki if you don’t believe me. But most importantly, as Ritu Sharma, executive director and co-founder of Social Media for Nonprofits, is fond of saying, find your drumbeat: consistency is key, and never let your social media channels go silent. Give your followers enough content so that they expect more, but not so much that you burden and overwhelm them.

Now, what time of day and what days of the week should you post? In general, it’s best to reach people in their down time. I call this the “burrito principle,” since during the week this tends to be during the morning commute, on their lunch break when they’re checking their smartphones while eating a burrito, at the end of the work day, or even better, from 9:30 to 11 p.m. after the kids go to sleep. Weekends tend to perform even better. This formula varies for different organizations and audiences, so you’ll want to test posts at different times of day and days of the week and analyze their performance, in terms shares, likes, comments, retweets, etc. You should also use Facebook Insights to identify when your audience is online. (See the Facebook tips below for more information.)

5. Test and Learn

The only way to truly optimize your social media and crowdfunding presence is through testing and experimenting. Try posting and tweeting at different times of the day or days of the week, using different social media outlets, experiment with and without images and videos, try out surveys and questions versus statements, and so on. If you have a good analytics tool in place, you will quickly learn what produces the best results and engages the most people. You can also play with using different tones for your messages (serious, light-hearted, humorous) to see what works, but once you find your “voice,” you’ll want to stick with it for consistency’s sake. Of course, remember that your social media posts are an extension of your overall messaging, so not all tones will be appropriate for experimentation.

Social Media Case Study: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

If you were alive and online in 2014, odds are you participated in what was one of the most viral nonprofit awareness and fundraising campaigns the world has ever seen: the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. For a brief time, our newsfeeds were full of videos of friends, family members, and celebrities pouring ice-cold buckets of water over the heads, all to support the ALS Association and a relatively obscure cause. In only eight weeks, the $66 million organization saw over 440 million Facebook users upload videos with over 10 billion views, and raised over $115 million from donors across 200 countries, generating both tremendous financial support and awareness. To unearth the magic that made this incredible campaign possible, I spoke with Lance Slaughter, chief chapter relations and development officer of the ALS Association, who shared some tips that can benefit any nonprofit looking to embrace social media:

Be Open

The idea for the Ice Bucket Challenge didn’t actually come from the ALS Association. Chris Kennedy, a professional golfer whose brother-in-law has ALS, posted a video and challenged his sister to raise awareness of the disease. That caught the attention of Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, two young men living with ALS, who saw the video and realized the stunt was a great way to convey the tremendous shock of being diagnosed . . . and a viral phenomenon was born.

The concept bubbled up through the ALS Association’s regional chapter, and headquarters saw a considerable spike in online donations, but more importantly, embraced it as a tremendous awareness opportunity. They jumped on board and put out the call to their local chapters to support the campaign by leveraging pre-existing communication channels, especially social media. Slaughter’s big takeaway here? Be open to ideas from both outside and within your organization, and embrace opportunities that come from your supporters.

Be Prepared

Before the Ice Bucket Challenge was born, the ALS Association had already recognized and embraced social media’s ability to deliver content and resources. For them, it was a key communication channel that enabled them to share information with those afflicted with the disease, many of whom suffer from limited mobility, but can still use a computer. Perhaps your nonprofit makes the same strategic decision to master social media for a different reason, such as wanting to reach youth, 24 percent of whom “live” online today, according to Pew Research. Either way, it is because of this commitment and capacity that ALS’s 38 affiliates already had the infrastructure and expertise in place to leverage this transformative opportunity. By devoting resources to building your social media profiles and followers, and learning how to best engage them, you too will be poised to seize opportunities as they arise.

Be Adaptable

Using the kind of donor research and segmentation techniques outlined in Chapter 5, the ALS Association quickly realized the Ice Bucket Challenge was connecting them with an entirely new audience. Previously, they principally communicated with donors aged 45 to 64 and affected by the disease, either directly or through a loved one. But now, they were reaching younger donors, ages 18 to 34, the large majority of whom had no affinity to the disease. Once they realized this, they appreciated the need to adapt their communications and messaging to those new to the cause and with younger perspectives. They redesigned their website with new visuals and messaging, they cancelled a planned direct mailing campaign, and revised their tagline. Change can be hard, but by being willing to make strategic shifts in response to changes in the fundraising landscape, you will open up new opportunities.

Earn Ongoing Support

Every donor and participant in the campaign who provided their contact information was thanked, informed about the work of the ALS Association, and was told exactly what impact their contribution made possible. The ALS Association now faces a new, exciting challenge: how to continue to engage this enormous new group of supporters and sustain concern and loyalty to the cause, not just to the organization.

Given these new supporters’ low affinity to the disease, and youth’s overall predisposition to support causes versus organizations, they are finding success by focusing their communications on education, as well as sharing updates on progress toward a cure, instead of the success of their own work. By focusing on the impact, rather than the process to get there, you will have a better chance of creating an ongoing movement.

6. Survey the Landscape

Once you’ve established a solid social media presence, it’s helpful to conduct Google, Facebook, and Twitter searches of key terms related to your issue, as well as to look up like-minded organizations. See what’s out there and reflect on how you’re different. Aside from programmatic considerations, look at what similar organizations are doing with their social and overall online presence. Try to get a sense of what these groups and people are saying and what their followers seem to be most responsive to.

Set up a free Google Alert at http://google.com/alerts to keep you abreast as new content is posted for key phrases and search terms, as well as news stories on your executive staff, board, allies, and similar organizations. Hashtagify.me is another great tool to help you stay on top of the most popular “hashtags” related to your cause. Hashtags are a way to group content into a stream, so that others searching or posting that keyword can find it. They’re how “trending” happens in social media and are critical for helping people discover what other folks are talking about at the moment.

Conclusion

Social media has become an expected form of communication for many people. If your nonprofit isn’t taking advantage of this huge opportunity, you are missing out on the biggest conversation happening in the world right now. Sure, there are lots of platforms out there, tips for the most important of which are outlined in the appendix immediately following this chapter. It may seem scary and overwhelming to jump in, but you can start quickly and easily with small steps and recruit others to help you. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a “social media expert”; the field is simply too new and evolving too quickly for that, so we’re all learning by doing. Crowdfunding isn’t quite as commonplace as social media, but it is quickly rising, and you don’t want to be left in the dust as this becomes an even more powerful and popular fundraising tool. By following the tips we’ve outlined in this chapter and the appendix that follows, and learning from the success of organizations like the ALS Association, you will quickly be on your way to leveraging the power of the masses and catapulting your organization’s impact and fundraising forward.

Do’s and Don’ts

Do. . .
. . . create a monthly editorial calendar to map out your social media and crowdfunding campaigns.
. . . use a scheduling tool for social media posts to make sure there is no lapse in your content stream.
. . . enable donors to easily invite their social networks to follow their lead after making a gift.
. . . participate in giving days like #GivingTuesday and regional events typically supported by your local community foundation.

Don’t. . .
. . . launch a crowdfunding campaign without first preparing all of your marketing materials and securing at least 20 percent of your goal from your “inner circle” of supporters.
. . . post content from your own organization more than 50 percent of the time.
. . . rely only on scheduling tools like Hootsuite; make sure you are adding fresh and timely content.

About the Experts

Beth Kanter is the author of the best-selling books The Networked Nonprofit and Measuring the Networked Nonprofit and producer of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the world’s longest-running and most popular nonprofit technology blogs. Kanter has more than 30 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, with a focus on technology, training, capacity building, evaluation, fundraising, and marketing. Kanter is an internationally recognized trainer who was recently named as one of BusinessWeek’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.”

John Haydon is one of the most sought-after digital marketing experts for nonprofits and charities. He is founder of the nonprofit consultancy, Inbound Zombie, and is a frequent keynote speaker on all aspects of nonprofit technology. Haydon is also an instructor for CharityHowTo and MarketingProfs University. He is the author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies and Facebook Marketing All-In-One and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Social Media Examiner, npEngage, and the Razoo Foundation blog.

Resource Review

Beth Kanter’s blog (www.bethkanter.org)
This is a great resource for tips on crowdfunding, social media, and all aspects of nonprofit technology. Check out her posts on the “Five Best Practices in Nonprofit Crowdfunding,” the “10 Best Practices for Planning Successful Crowd Funding or Giving Day Campaigns,” which includes a detailed description of her P.O.S.T. framework, and the interesting case study about the Dalai Lama Foundation’s use of crowdfunding.
- www.bethkanter.org/5-crowdfunding-tips
- www.bethkanter.org/10-best-practices
- www.bethkanter.org/dalai-lama-crowd
John Haydon’s Blog (www.johnhaydon.com)
This blog is full of helpful tips and tools regarding all aspects of social media. Download the guide to the “51 Best Social Media Tools for Any Nonprofit Marketer or Fundraiser,” and sign up for John’s weekly newsletter.
Socialnomics on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jottDMuLesU)
This is a series of well-produced videos with compelling social media statistics that will help you make the case that social media should be a priority for your organization. They’re constantly posting new videos, so be sure to search and see what’s fresh.
Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org)
Find many great online fundraising and social media resources, including an active, insightful blog, as well e-books on crowdfunding and online fundraising.
GuideStar (www.guidestar.org)
Find helpful tips on fundraising, social media, and crowdfunding, and be sure to subscribe to their newsletter and join their LinkedIn Group, which is quite active.
NTEN (www.nten.org)
This website has great resources on all aspects of nonprofit technology; be sure to check out their annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, NTC, for a phenomenal networking and educational opportunity.
Association of Fundraising Professionals (www.afpnet.org)
Their site offers a wide range of fundraising resources, and their annual international conference always features content on social media and crowdfunding.
Social Media for Nonprofits (SM4NP.org)
This is the only conference series devoted to social media for social good, with events throughout the U.S., Canada, and India. They also produce a great blog and newsletter and offer a range of helpful tips on their website.
Crowdfunding Platforms with Great Resources
- StayClassy.com—active, insightful blog.
- StartSomeGood.com—another active blog focused on social media and online fundraising.
- Indiegogo.com—check out their giving day playbook and field guide.
- Kimbia.com—great webinar series and useful online fundraising blog.
Analytics Tools
- Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) is a great free tool to assess your website traffic.
- Facebook Insights (find the tab at the top of your page when signed in as an administrator) helps you analyze your Facebook traffic and identify your most engaging posts and most valuable followers.
- SproutSocial (www.sproutsocial.com) is a paid analytics tool that also manages content and has scheduling capabilities.
- Klout (www.klout.com) is a tool that allows you to measure your online impact and influence.
Kanter, Beth. The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change. Jossey-Bass, 2010.
This book shows nonprofits a new way of operating in our increasingly connected world: a networked approach enabled by social technologies, where connections are leveraged to increase impact in effective ways that drive change for the betterment of our society and planet.
Miller, Kivi. Content Marketing for Nonprofits: A Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money. Jossey-Bass, 2013.
This book explains how to design and implement a content marketing strategy, an essential component to any nonprofit’s effort to raise money with social media.

Appendix

Practical Tips for Key Social Media Platforms and Crowdfunding Case Study

Facebook

Ask questions. If your post ends in a question mark instead of a period, you can expect twice as many likes, comments, and shares; the currency in today’s “attention economy.”
Use photos and videos. Typically, you’ll generate twice as many likes, comments, and shares if your post includes a photo, four times as many with a video. If you use a video on a crowdfunding campaign, according to crowdfunding platform Razoo, you’re likely to receive eight times the amount of donations!
Use the right photos. Since people will likely only see the small thumbnail version of your photo, cut out the background and use cropping to zoom in on one subject. Ideally, use photos with pictures of people or animals, and focus on faces. As author Guy Kawasaki likes to say, “ABC: Always Be Cropping.” Don’t use boring photos—instead of people posing next to a house they just built, use an action photo of them carrying a ladder or building a roof. Use photos that capture your work in action and convey a sense of impact.
Promote the right posts. If you have a budget and choose to do promoted posts on Facebook, choose posts that have the best response rates, rather than promoting donation requests and other posts that fall flat. This may seem counter-intuitive, but your resources are best spent promoting posts that have proven to be most engaging.
Keep it short. Ideally, under 80 characters. Bufferapp.com found a 66 percent increase in engagement when you get to the point.
Learn about your donors. Upload your email or donor list and see how many of them are on Facebook. You can use Facebook Ads to gain invaluable donor segmentation information about them, including household income, home ownership, device use, how active they are on Facebook, how much they engage with your posts, etc. The more you know about your donors, the better equipped you are to effectively engage and solicit them!
Reply to comments. Again, think of social media as a digital cocktail party. If someone at a party says, “Hey, nice dress,” you need to say “thank you” and reply back. If someone posts a comment or asks a question, reply in a polite and conversational manner.
Leverage Facebook Insights. To succeed at engaging people, you need to listen. Insights is a free analytics tool that allows you to analyze your posts and how they perform, that is, how many likes, comments, and shares or retweets they receive. It will also help you determine when the majority of your users are online, which can help you plan the timing of your posts. (Facebook Insights is accessed through a tab at the top of your page when you’re signed in as an administrator.)

Twitter

Ask for retweets. Include the term “Please Retweet,” often abbreviated as “Pls RT,” to significantly increase the percentage of people who share your posts.
Use photos, videos, and links. Just as with Facebook, this will encourage people to spend a few more seconds with your content and increase the likelihood that they share it.
Recruit influencers. Twitter is a great place to make initial contact with donor prospects and key influencers like celebrities, leading academics, journalists, and bloggers. But before asking VIPs to support you, build up your social capital by retweeting them and writing comments on their posts.
Get your leadership active. Having your executive director and other leaders active on Twitter develops additional communication outlets for your organization and can establish them as thought leaders in your field.
Use keywords. Add keywords and hashtags to your profile so that people interested in your cause will find you when they search. Using these in your posts will also help people who aren’t following you find your content and organization.
Create a hashtag. Come up with a short yet descriptive hashtag to include in many of your posts. Ideally, it’s something that others in the field can adopt as well, promoting your thought leadership. For example, Social Media for Nonprofits launched #SM4NP, which is now widely adopted by others in the industry.
Use lists. Lists help you easily screen content and manage different categories of users. For example, if you are a breast cancer organization, lists can help you easily look at what’s trending from breast cancer bloggers, pharmaceutical companies, academics, journalists, competitors, as well as things like campaign hashtags.
Use tools. Social media tools like Hootsuite will help you manage mentions, scheduling, and lists. Use tools like Klout (available as a Hootsuite plug-in) and BuzzSumo to identify key influencers in your field, so you know who to cultivate and prioritize.
Be active in the Twitter community. Twitter is a circular economy. Participate in Follow Fridays by sharing the handles of other leaders and organizations in your field on Fridays and including “#FF” in your posts to gain social capital. If someone mentions you with an @ sign, especially if it’s an influencer, you should definitely take the time to retweet it and thank the person.

Get your board and volunteers to link to you. When people include you in their profiles, it gives you additional exposure, and since this is a relatively new feature and not many nonprofits are using it, you will stand out.
Ask questions. People on LinkedIn tend to be very engaged, and you can receive well-thought-out answers to robust and complex questions. This will help you to build conversations and further engage people.
Start a Group. You can create a LinkedIn Group for free, which is a great way to mobilize and engage your community of interest. Invite people to join and make sure to post content, questions, or links to a blog post or article at least twice a month.
Ask for testimonials. Ask past employers, partners, and clients to write testimonials for your organization and on your personal profile. This provides credibility and reinforces your expertise.

YouTube

Create “Call to Action” overlays. YouTube offers nonprofits free access to this service, which increases subscriptions by 400 percent by creating a pop-up window inviting visitors to subscribe or even donate.
Keep it short. Keep your videos on YouTube and crowdfunding sites short, ideally 90 to 120 seconds. This will result in people watching the video when they first see it, instead of being daunted and saving it for later, which usually means they’ll never watch it.

Instagram

Use hashtags. Just as on Twitter and Facebook, hashtags are a great way to create a conversation and create more avenues to your presence.
Focus on faces. The photos that typically receive the best response are close-ups of people’s faces and animals. Remember Guy Kawasaki’s ABC: Always Be Cropping.
Use action shots. As mentioned in the Facebook tips, instead of staged pictures, use images of people in action, delivering impact.

Girl power. Pinterest is a great place to reach women, as they’re two-thirds of their audience, which recently surpassed 100 million users a month.
Get visual. This platform is best suited for visuals and infographics, both for finding and posting.

Crowdfunding Case Study: RE-volv

RE-volv provides solar technology for nonprofits and community centers by raising money through crowdfunding. They provide low-interest 20-year loans on the projects, which their beneficiaries pay out of energy savings, and then reinvest the funds into future projects. Over the past three years, the grassroots organization in San Francisco has conducted three crowdfunding campaigns on Indiegogo and raised over $120,000. They’ve managed to obtain over 1,000 contributions from donors in 38 states and 22 countries. To learn the secrets of their success, I sat down with their founder and executive director, Andreas Karelas, who shared some of the lessons he’s learned along the way:

Prepare in Advance

Part of RE-volv’s success has been due to the time and hard work they put in before they launch their campaigns. Establish partnerships, plan events, and create marketing materials in advance of any crowdfunding campaign, including a short video, email and social media messages, and website copy to enable you to focus on the campaign as it unfolds. You should also create an editorial calendar before your campaign, so you’re clear about who is sending out which messages, where, and when, thereby ensuring a coordinated effort.

Events Drive Results

To drive awareness and garner initial support for their crowdfunding campaigns, RE-volv conducts what they call “small engagement tours.” These are live events around the country that allow them to recruit campaign “champions” who agree to become volunteer marketers and promote the campaign on social media, similar to the “social media marketing committee” concept outlined in Chapter 4.

They also use these events to recruit initial donors to kick-start their efforts and seed the tip jar before launching the campaign to the public. In the beginning, before they implemented this tactic and launched campaigns with no donations secured, getting these efforts off the ground was much more challenging. And finally, in addition to engaging these champions online, they always bring marketing materials to hand out at their events, including posters, flyers, and stickers that people can easily use to evangelize the cause. Karelas says that nothing is better than an in-person experience to really share your passion and engage people in your cause.

Secure Marketing Trades

Trading marketing opportunities with like-minded partners is a great way to gain exposure with relevant audiences. RE-volv lists partner logos on their campaign page or mentions them in press releases in exchange for outreach support on social media and elsewhere, promoting the circular economy concept. It is important to agree on specifics of any trade in advance, and document it in a simple agreement so that both parties are accountable.

Engage Businesses

RE-volv reaches out to local businesses and national corporations to sponsor their engagement tour events and crowdfunding campaigns. They’ve recruited businesses like Whole Foods, Patagonia, and Aveda to donate supplies for events and even perks to offer donors to their crowdfunding campaigns. Having sponsor logos on your website and materials also helps lend credibility to your efforts.

Recruit Celebrities and Influencers

Karelas has successfully recruited key influencers to support RE-volv’s campaigns by connecting them on Twitter and asking for retweets, especially when he offered to offer books they’ve written as perks in their crowdfunding campaigns. Although you may have much smaller reach than these movers and shakers, even celebrities respond to this gesture. Think about what you can do for a VIP passionate about your cause and amazing things become possible.

Experiment with Social Media

As outlined in this chapter, RE-volv experimented heavily on social media. In the process, they learned to post screenshots of their campaign thermometer and post late at night to maximize results. Both of these tactics have proven effective for a wide range of other nonprofits.

Simplify Your URL

RE-volv quickly learned that having a complicated link that isn’t memorable hurts your campaign. Create a simple URL that’s easy to remember and have it redirect to your crowdfunding page. This also helps you brand your campaign consistently.

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