Deliver efficient social media communications

Introduction

A lack of resources often means some smaller charities are not able to invest as much into communications. We’ve put together a Communications Toolkit specifically for smaller charities offering quick, simple solutions to common challenges.

In Part One of our Communications Toolkit for Small Charities series, we provide our top tips for managing social media channels easily and effectively for your charity.

Top 15 tips for managing social media channels on a shoestring

Consider implementing the following tips at least once a year… you will reap the rewards:

1. It’s better to manage one channel well then to manage several inconsistently. Review the channels you have and make some decisions even if they seem tough at the time.
2. Schedule in a meeting with your colleagues to agree on your charity’s focus, audience, and objectives for the year on social media. For example, do you want to increase visitors to your fundraising page from Facebook or raise awareness of a specific project you are delivering? Then…
3. Create some simple SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound). These will help you to monitor progress.
4. Share the workload. Agree on responsibilities with your colleagues and work together to create and deliver content that helps your organisation achieve these objectives.

These tips are for year-round rewards:

1. Be consistent with your postings and realistic. If you can only post three times a week, that’s fine, just be reliable. This can be more effective on social media than posting lots one week and not again, for two months.
2. Plan your core content ahead of time rather than as and when. We know several small charities who find it helps them to allocate a morning a month, for example, to write and create their posts in readiness for sharing.
3. Remember to share other people’s content too. Re-Tweet or share a post that you think your audience will enjoy and demonstrates your key values. This also helps provide variety to your followers and gives you a break too from coming up with the goods yourself.
4. Create some simple infographic templates including your organisation’s logo and brand colours. And use photographs or polls to keep your posts interesting (keep your eyes peeled for Part two of our Communications Toolkit for Small Charities when we’ll be talking free resources for creating infographics).
5. Spend up to one hour per month recording the engagements you are having in your posts to determine what is working. Logging your metrics on Excel or Google Sheets is sufficient for this and remember to use the channels’ in-built analytics to record specific metrics regularly.
6. Spend a similar amount of time interacting with your audience also. Engage with their posts and increase the number of organisations you are following to keep broadening your potential audience.
7. Be certain your organisation’s information, page links and contact information is up to date. Remember, your social media channel is also your shop front. If your shop’s website url for example, doesn’t work because it’s recently been updated, this doesn’t look good to your new casual, potential fundraiser.
8. Tag organisations and individuals involved with specific posts to help increase and broaden the followers to your pages.
9. If you are receiving funding from a donor, tag them on socials They are more likely to engage in a post of yours if they can see the content relates to something they have funded and shares their values.
10. Remind colleagues and partners of the role they play in sharing their organisation’s achievements on their socials. Sharing a link to one of your social posts on an active LinkedIn profile can reap lots of rewards. Your organisation doesn’t need to have a LinkedIn profile for this to happen.
11. And finally, remember to post when attending relevant events and trainings. Thank the event organisers by tagging them, and why not include a quote from what you learnt to share with your followers too?

These tips are:

• Available as a PDF (2mb) and as two videos –
• Video 1 Tips to consider implementing once a year
• Video 2 Year-round social media tips.

Look out for Part 2 of our Communications Toolkit for Small Charities featuring our top free communications resources.