How to set your charity up for success

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Whilst it’s not quite the beginning of the year, you can still start the year off on the right foot by getting your social media ducks in a row. In this post, we'll show you how to think strategically about your content as well as offer top tips on how to manage your social media, create engaging content and how to measure how successful you are.

If you’re a small charity, you’re probably wondering why you need a social media strategy. You probably wear many hats in your role and just don’t have the time to create a strategy for social media. However, if you don’t have one then how will you know if you’re successful? Before you start looking at how to create engaging content or how to manage your social media, start with creating a social media strategy.

A social media strategy doesn’t have to be a big scary document that, quite frankly, will gather dust in a drawer. It can be really simple. Here’s how to create one for your charity.

Now that you’ve created a social media strategy and set yourself some goals, it’s time to create engaging content that will help you reach your goals. The key is to understand your audience and what their needs are and then create content to meet those needs. Of course you will also have needs that to be met – for example, asking people to volunteer their time to help your cause - but make sure that this type of content only makes up about 10% of your content plan.

Social media shouldn’t be used as a broadcasting tool. Instead, it’s a powerful tool to help you build and strengthen relationships.

Here’s three charities we think are winning at Twitter and three that are winning at Facebook – hopefully they’ll give you some inspiration for your content.

Once you have your strategy in place and your content planned out, how do you make sure you’re managing your social media effectively?

To ensure consistency in the frequency of your posts, plan all your content in a content calendar. Create a simple calendar in Google Sheets or use the calendar in your social media management platform. This way you can ensure that you have enough content, that it’s balanced and that there aren’t too many ‘asks’.

A social media management platform can also help you with scheduling posts as well as measuring how your content performed. Some also let you collaborate with team members and assign tasks. Lightful has a feature called Story Builder, which helps you plan campaigns as well as in-built charity-specific awareness days in their content calendar.

By taking the time to create a social media strategy, plan and create engaging content and then learning from your metrics, you’re setting yourself up for success.

Lightful are running webinars for Online Centres on 22 Feb around improving your social engagement which you can sign up for here.