Having trouble on social media? We often think of social media as one step more complicated than expected. After all, most of us have social media accounts…we know how to use social media, right?

Except, at work, we aren’t getting the results we hope for. Our nonprofit’s content isn’t doing as well as we would like. 

To improve this, we have a few tips.

First, an important principle. Your goal is shares, not likes.

There are essentially three levels to your nonprofits communications work. In fact, when Capital Hope works with nonprofits, we consciously organize our questions around these three categories. Our 34-point intake diagnostic is designed to help clarify how a given organization is doing in these three levels. 

So what are they?

Branding & Identity, Strategy, and Content Creation.

We use two common storytelling tools with our work in nonprofit communications. The first is a well-known set of paradigms called “The Hero’s Journey.” That’s what we’ll talk about in this post. It was articulated most clearly in the Western World by Joseph Campbell. You might recognize his name from his novel,  The Heart of Darkness. 

We discussed how simple nonprofit audience research really is. That’s great! It’s not complicated. It takes time, but nonprofit market research isn't complicated.
I wanted to take a few minutes to examine exactly what we can do with that research, with a few examples. 

It’s crucial for a nonprofit to realize they have multiple different audiences. Some people are interested in your nonprofit because they believe in a particular staff person. Others are constituents receiving services from your nonprofit. Some are interested because they care about a very specific aspect of the mission, while others care about a different aspect of the mission.

What is a content strategy? Like, specifically? In this post, I want to show you how to bring together lots of individual items to create an annual Communications Calendar. Most of your strategy gets embodied and realized in that calendar.

The basic idea of branding is very helpful: Branding is just thinking through your nonprofit’s identity. How do you want to be perceived by the public? This is more straightforward for an individual than for an organization, because an organization has multiple people involved. That’s why you need organized branding.

There are four basic goals we can try to achieve with nonprofit communications:

1.Fundraising Goals

2. Programming Goals (such as community education, etc)

3. Recruitment Goals

4. Brand Leadership Goals

Recent research from Hootsuite puts numbers to an insight that you probably already knew intuitively: a third of social media audiences have a negative view of organizations that “promote themselves too much.” Maybe you feel that way, too.

But uhm…isn’t it literally your job to promote your nonprofit? If you work in nonprofit communications, isn’t promotion literally your job? How can you be expected to promote your nonprofits brand if people have negative views of that sort of thing?

Here’s the trick:

Don’t promote your nonprofit directly (at least, not much); promote your nonprofit indirectly.

Why Shares Are Better Than Likes