How Marketers are using Social Media Platforms for Charities

Charities and NGOs have used direct marketing like phone calls, print, street advertising, etc. to reach out to their potential customers. For charities, customers can literally be anyone in the crowd, and their key objective is to grow brand recognition. There is nothing more powerful than social media. One of the charity sectors leading experts in digital communications and marketing social media guru Zoe Amar advises that social media can be managed in under 30 minutes a day. Social media strategy includes scheduling posts, measuring success or responding to comments.

Charities are hesitant sometimes to join the crowd for those who have limited resources or experience and are unable to manage multiple platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter can be overwhelming despite the willingness to engage. There are social media management platforms that help charities strop their craft in social media posts, scheduling, and analytics.

It depends on the organization their targets and strategy as well as the campaign social media helps the organization to build engagement with supporters and donors.

Marketers use social media platforms by inviting the audience to share the client’s message on social media channels and help clients to drive actions within their target audience. Marketers engage the audience in participating via social media channels and helps to build the relationship in a more natural way, and that will increase the likelihood of donating too. Tools are selected to reach the target audience of the campaign and it varies from campaign to another.

Marketers used tools like Thunderclap to schedule the launch of a campaign with multiple collaborators posting tweets during the same day. Lately, with some clients, marketers gathered the social media posts on a social wall which was powered by Flockler and created a page for the campaign. Marketers display the posts mentioning the campaign hashtag and moderate the feed to avoid anything inappropriate showing up on the site.

Marketers use YouTube:

Charities have an on-off relationship with YouTube, charities post a few videos within a short time frame, then have months without uploading. If a channel has many subscribers videos posted by charities only receive a few thousand views. For charities marketers use YouTube and their aim is to publish inspiring stories with useful content that is easy to find and answers commonly asked questions, with that marketer take quality over quantity approach.

Marketers use LinkedIn:

Charities use LinkedIn to communicate their messages and use the platform for more corporate communications, to showcase what the charity is doing as a company. When it is used to communicate the cause, it is done with more serious tome than Facebook and Twitter.

Marketers use Infographics on Instagram:

Content on Instagram often uses infographics with charities and everything is image-driven. Because of the younger audience, the tone is light-hearted and chatty. Instagram stories perform well and through this platform, marketers can reach a slightly younger audience which is important.

Marketers say when the format of Instagram was first launched they were not sure how their followers would react nut later they noticed that their supporters were really engaged buy short from, and news content. Two functions helped a lot, swipe up and read more functions proved a great way of directing audiences to Cancer Research where marketers expand on these stories and share more detailed information. 

One of the most powerful tools marketers use is Facebook lookalike audiences on the Facebook advertising platform. This feature helps marketers to target people similar to the audience who are already connected with their clients. With that marketers also use traditional marketing channels such as email marketing and print to drive more traffic to the campaign landing pages. Their target is to create a drive to web strategies asking potential donors to visit a landing page with a call to actions and inspirational social content.

Sometimes there is no direct connection between social media and campaign donations.  For that marketers have created Facebook Ads to reach out to potential donors who are easy to measure. For marketers, social media channels generate awareness at the early stage of the funnel rather than drive people to donate straight away.

There are a few challenges that marketers face when they use social media platforms for charities:

The biggest risk is misinformation about anything, as it may damage people’s confidence from where to access important and necessary information. Charities need to use an analytical and reflective mindset to learn their experiences but they often use the same techniques repeatedly without measuring their impact.

Another challenge for the future will be spotting the new opportunities and trends for charities to champion social media. Key for marketers is not to be such an early adopter that whatever things marketers are chasing that never take off but to be an early enough adopter that marketers are relatively early on the scene for the things that are here to stay.

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