by Luke Telander
Major national non-profits have had a tremendous impact through social campaigns.
Whether it be the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge or Human Rights Campaign’s red equal sign, millions of people across the country participate in these campaigns.
Most of us in the non-profit world, though, can only dream about the amount of engagement that these massive campaigns delivered. For those of us that work at smaller nonprofits (My nonprofit, while national, has only 17 staff members), it can be easy to be discouraged and think of trendy social campaigns as out of our reach. I think, however, that with the right planning, many smaller nonprofits can run successful social campaigns.
My organization, the Center for Community Progress, is a national nonprofit that helps communities transform their vacant properties into community assets. This year we decided to run a social campaign for Valentine’s Day. We asked people, via email and on social media, to use #LoveThatLot on Facebook and Twitter to share photos of their favorite vacant lot that’s been revitalized into something “downright lovable.”
I was hoping for a handful of photos, but over the course the week and a half we saw an outpouring of photos on our social channels. Through this campaign, I learned a few tips that I think would be helpful to someone else at a smaller non-profit thinking about running a similar campaign.
1. Be creative
It’s not always easy to make vacant property revitalization fun. A lot of our content can be really wonky and complex, but by keeping it simple and by tying it to an upcoming holiday, we were able to come up with a campaign that was fresh and fun.
2. Make it visual
It doesn’t matter if you are on Twitter or Instagram, photos are important. Photos are eye catching and help drive stronger engagement. I read recently that tweets with photos are twice as likely to be retweeted. By designing your social campaign around sharing photos, you are ensuring that the content produced will be engaged with more, making your campaign more successful.
3. Be direct
Don’t just send your messages out into the ether. Send messages directly targeting people, places, or specific interest areas. Take advantage of your partners & friends that have a larger reach than you. We only have 2,300 followers, but by appealing specifically to placemakers in a tweet, I was able to engage with the Project for Public Spaces, which tweeted a photo to its 44,000 followers, driving over 30 retweets.
4. Recognize your supporters
After your audience goes to the trouble of engaging with your campaign, it’s important to recognize their work. We decided to publish a blog post thanking participants and highlighting a number of tweets/posts using Storify. Also be sure to thank supporters directly after they share if possible.
5. Measure your impact
You can’t prove worth or effectiveness without analytics! Also, since this was our first social campaign of this kind, it was really important to me that we look at as much data as we could so we could have base line analytics to improve upon in future campaigns. I used free analytics from Hashtracker and a paid account through Sprout Social for reporting.