Using Facebook To Promote Your Non-Profit Effectively

4 Ways To Successfully Promote Your Non-profit On Facebook

September 14th, 2009 · No Comments

Do you run a non-profit organization? Do you have a website for your non-profit?

Five years ago, a website would have been enough to attract potential donors and interact with them online. With the current social media environment, if you’re only using your web site to promote your cause, you’re missing out on a channel where most people go to, these days.

Every year, more and more people are flocking to the social media sites – there are now 250 million Facebook users worldwide, with over 69 million users coming from the United States. People are now congregating in places like Facebook, Twitter, and Ning to interact and exchange news and ideas with family and friends.

Are you using Facebook to market your organization? Why not? Clearly, to find your friends and would-be supporters, you need to be engaged in Facebook:

How do you use Facebook to effectively promote your non-profit? Here are a few suggestions on the best practices:

1. Build a personal profile. Add your family, co-workers, close friends, relatives, former classmates, etc. – people that you have directly interacted with in the past, as Facebook friends. Networking is not a numbers game, you don’t need to add total strangers with whom you share nothing in common with, just because you feel that you have to, in the name of marketing.

2. Build a Facebook page for your non-profit. This is where you conduct your promotion activities, separate from your personal profile. You can invite friends and other people to become fans of your page. You and your “fans” can interact and exchange information here – notes, links, videos, blog posts, audio podcasts, etc. You can also add “Causes” applications to your page and directly ask for donations or endorsements from fans or supporters using these apps.

3. Integrate. If you’re using Wordpress on your site, there’s actually a plugin that can add Facebook Connect to your website. Facebook Connect is a fantastic way to integrate Facebook into your site – your visitors can login on your site using their Facebook credentials, see other friends and fans, interact with each other, share your articles to their Facebook friends, update their status right from your web page.

4. Use Facebook search. The search capability in Facebook is quite sophisticated, you can search in everyone’s update using your own keywords (”diabetes,” “cancer,” “street children,” etc.) and find people who are sympathetic or are supportive of your cause.

Right now, these are the methods being employed by non-profit organizations who have turned to Facebook to find supporters. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person team collecting old cell phones for charity or an established organization helping to find cure against cancer. You need to be in the middle of it – to find your online audience.

Good luck.

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