Social Media for Nonprofits

Does your nonprofit offer a service that you want people to know about? In the past you may have relied on an expensive advertisement in the Yellow Pages to get your message out. Now, fewer and fewer people rely on the phone book, so what can you do to reach your target audience? This is important, especially if they don’t know what you do.

In today’s economy, when people want to look for things, they use search engines like Google. Social media can give your organization a bigger footprint online and make it easier for you to be found. This is a major perk of social networking. Part of this is done through something called, tags. These are words that you can add to places like a blog post or a YouTube video. There’s usually a small box where you can enter these words. You want to think about words that describe what you do as well as phrases that people might search for.

Let’s say your nonprofit at offers child care services, including after school art programs. You’d want, in a YouTube video about a display of your student’s artwork, to use tags like: child care, safe place for kids, after school programs, art, artwork for kids. You would also want to include information like  your city and your organization’s name.  Now if someone, Googles, something like, “art program for kids in Miami,” then you’ll appear in the search results.

You may already be doing this through your website but having additional platforms to help promote your services will likely increase your search rankings.  You may also want to see who comes up ahead of you in a search. What is your competition doing, in terms of social media marketing, that you’re not?

Additional Resources:

• Do You Need Blog Ideas?
• Easy Blog Template
• Convincing a Non-Believer About Social Media