Social media is an essential aspect of any digital strategy, even for charities and foundations. At Rokir, social media strategy forms one of our core services for this very reason. As a marketing tool, social media can help you access new donors and ensure your message is spread far and wide.
But how do you get a social media presence as a charity in the first place? What steps should you take after setting up a profile to ensure followers continue to grow and your charity gets the attention it deserves?
We’ve looked at the role of storytelling in social media and how you can use this and other strategies to improve your social media as a charitable organisation. Take a look below to learn more.
Storytelling, Social Media, and Charity Marketing
Storytelling plays an important role in marketing, particularly for charities and foundations. As a social media marketing tool it has the following benefits.
- Attention-grabbing: Compelling stories are great for grabbing and holding followers’ attention. As a charity, you likely have a story to tell that will ensure followers engage with your work.
- Emotional connection: Storytelling helps followers to feel connected to your charity’s story, especially when they evoke emotions like empathy, joy, or inspiration.
- Humanising the cause: Often, the struggles that a charity is trying to highlight can feel very separated from your followers, so creating a story and humanizing the cause will make it easier for people to connect with them.
- Encouraging actions: Stories inspire action and action means more donors, more advocacy on your charity’s behalf, and more volunteerism.
- Brand identity: If your cause is a big one, you might find many other charities are doing what you are. Storytelling, using authentic and unique stories, will help separate you from the crowds.
6 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Presence as a Charity
So, how do you use storytelling to improve your social media presence as a charity or foundation? What actions can you take to ensure that the stories you tell get shared, engaged with, and seen by more than just a few followers?
We’ve explored six ways you can improve your social media presence below.
1. Get to Know Your Audience
If you don’t know who you are marketing to then your marketing is not going to have the direction and focus it needs to be successful. One of the most common issues with any kind of marketing strategy, be it content marketing, social media marketing, or traditional marketing, is when the brand isn’t sure who they’re talking to.
As a charity trying to improve your social media presence, you need to know your audience. Who are your followers? What are the demographics? Why are they following your charity? What times are they online?
You can often answer these questions via your social media profile, provided you have a business account. But while these facts are going to be beneficial, you need to also consider the other side; who do you want to market to? Who is your ideal audience?
It may help you to create a few follower personas. They are used by marketers around the world to create a fictional representation of the ideal follower/donor/audience segment for your charity. The persona is based on the real data you have gained from your social media audience insights as well as who you are as a brand.
The persona includes demographics as well as interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, pain points, and more. This practice is even more useful if you have multiple marketing streams; i.e. you want to attract donors as well as volunteers and advocates. These different groups require different marketing, and so having a persona that represents each will help you to focus your social media content towards them.
2. Define the Story
Who are you as a charity? Why do you do what you do? Do your founders have a particular link to the cause? All of these answers are key to defining the narrative of your social media.
To craft a compelling story, you need to have a clearly defined mission as a charity and a powerful ‘why.’ Both of these will make it easier to incorporate your story into your social media content and will ensure that the content evokes emotion in your followers.
Key ways to define your narrative are to have a compelling founding story, highlight the impact of the work you do, and explore success stories within the cause.
3. Boost Interactions With Followers
Boosting your interactions with followers means engaging with them in the comments, encouraging participation through likes and shares, and ensuring you respond to inquiries and feedback quickly. But why is this important?
- Increased engagement: Followers interacting with your content signals to the algorithm that your content is valuable. This means your content will be shown to more people and could even attract new followers.
- Building community: Interacting with people helps to foster a sense of community and make your followers feel seen and heard.
- Feedback and insights: Interactions can help you to gather important information on your followers and feedback from them. This information can then be fed back into your social media strategies and other work to improve output.
4. Use Consistent Charity Brand Messaging
Consistency is key to building a social media presence. The reason: so that people recognise your brand. While a cohesive experience and establishing authority and trust are great by-products of consistency, the biggest outcome is that people know you and recognise you on their feed.
If you want to build a presence, then that requires engagement, interaction, and people generally being interested in your content. If they can’t tell who your content is from, then it makes it more difficult to be interested in it.
Consistency means consistent messaging, tone of voice, colours, logo, and more. Make sure that when you look at your grid, there is cohesion across the whole thing.
5. Harness the Power of User-generated Content
User-generated content isn’t just for clothes and beauty brands anymore. It has so many benefits, including authenticity and trust, increased engagement, and extended reach, that everyone should incorporate it into their social media strategy.
For charities, user-generated content can include:
- Personal stories and experiences with the charity and how it has impacted their lives.
- Volunteer experiences with the charity.
- Fundraising initiatives, like events, products, and more
- Thank you messages from staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries.
6. Monitor Your Performance
At Rokir, we’ll never give you marketing advice of any kind without highlighting the importance of tracking and monitoring. This is because it’s the only way possible to know what is working and what isn’t.
Thankfully, many social media platforms now include methods of tracking your metrics and gaining insights based on real data from your profiles. This information needs to inform how you proceed with new campaigns. You can see what content performs well and what doesn’t, what reaches more accounts and what doesn’t, and all of this can dictate what you create next.
Final Thoughts
As a charity, a social media presence is essential for gaining followers, donors, advocates, and more. Improving your social media presence is a balance between compelling storytelling and campaigns that boost engagement and reach.
If you’re struggling with your social media strategy as a charity, then you’ve come to the right place. Rokir is a full-service digital agency with outstanding social media strategy services. Our solutions can be tailored to your specific needs, so if you need support building a social media presence, then we’re here to help.
Contact the team at Rokir today for more information on how our social media services can help your charity today.
Hi I’m Alex, Blog and PR Copywriter