Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits

Matt Stockman (00:00)
Social media for most nonprofit leaders can seem like a giant billboard and a giant scoreboard both. Here's what I mean. If you're leading a small nonprofit, things like follower accounts and views and likes and shares can all feel like your nonprofit scoreboard. And when you compare your organization to larger nonprofits with big marketing teams and budgets and polished content, it can feel like you're falling behind. Social media also feels like it can be a digital billboard.

In which you'll somehow be able to tell the story of your nonprofit to huge numbers of people all at once, and somehow the money will just flow right in. But here's the truth: much of what you believe you need to have and do on social media is wrong. In other words, having tons of followers who never interact with your mission doesn't matter. But a smaller group of connected, engaged supporters, those are the people.

Who volunteer and give and advocate and stay. And those are the people that matter.

Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for startup small and growing nonprofits. This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong, sustainable foundation by providing clear frameworks and practical tools and real world guidance that you can actually put into practice. I'm your host, Matt Stockman. I'm a nonprofit growth coach, and here at Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every successful nonprofit has got to be operating at peak performance across six key areas. Those areas are leadership.

Fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations, and finances. So on every episode, we focus on one of these core areas to help you create lasting impact through your nonprofit without all the complexity. Now, before we dive into today's episode, if you like the kinds of things you're learning and picking up from listening to the podcast, there is more of it each week in my free weekly email called the Nonprofit Launch Briefing.

Every week I send out one meaningful email about something different than what we're talking about that week in the podcast. Strategies, practical tools, fundraising insight, real-world guidance for startups, small and growing nonprofits. So if you're serious about building a healthy nonprofit with real impact, I'd love to have you on the email list. Just shoot me a quick email with a simple sign me up in the subject line.

I'll take care of the rest. My email is matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com, A T T at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Now, in this episode, we're talking about social media for small nonprofits because in my work with nonprofit leaders, I often see a lot of emphasis and energy directed towards attempting to create something on social media that requires a lot of effort for no or little actual return.

And that somehow the belief of getting a huge following on social media will number one be easy. And then once you achieve that, leveraging that audience to fund your work and volunteer and spread the word about your work will be the secret to your nonprofit accomplishing all of the dreams of impact that you have for it. When the reality is this: social media is a grind. The growth, the monetization,

And the eventual extraction of resources from a social media audience, if it ever happens at all, is a very, very laborious process. And more than anything, it just indicates a general lack of understanding about what the role of social media is in a nonprofit organization like yours and how it can and more often can't help you grow. The win in social media is far more about engagement.

Than it is about growing your follower counts. And we're gonna talk about that in this episode. One of the biggest traps that small nonprofits fall into is not having a very clear understanding about what social media is best used for and what success on social media looks like for your nonprofit. A lot of times I find nonprofit leaders that believe that social media success is primarily about growing big follower numbers. More followers, more impressions, more views.

And that somehow all of that is going to turn into more dollars and don in donations. And the growth is not bad. The visibility does matter, being ⁓ having high awareness, super important. But for startup and growing nonprofits, especially, social media is not primarily about building an audience to scale. It's about building trust with the audience that you already have, no matter how big or small that audience is today. Because the reality is this.

A nonprofit with a couple of hundred deeply engaged followers will often outperform a nonprofit that's got fifteen thousand plus passive followers. Why? It's because engaged people, they're the ones that actually do things. They volunteer, they donate, they share your mission with other people, they come to your events, they respond to your emails, they invite other people into the work. And people who are just passively scrolling, they just scroll right past you most of the time.

And I think a lot of nonprofit leaders are exhausting themselves chasing numbers on social media or trying to be on all of the platforms when ultimately none of it translates into meaningfully moving your mission forward. And if you've listened to this podcast at at all, you know that at Nonprofit Launch Plan, we talk a lot about sustainable systems and healthy foundations. And social media is no different.

A healthy social media strategy for a small nonprofit is not supposed to leave your staff burned out or overwhelmed, or you burned out or overwhelmed, or spending hours and hours a day creating content and doing so on and so forth on all these different platforms, constantly trying to feed the content machine. But instead, you should have a strategy, especially early on, that creates consistency, builds trust.

Makes a connection with the people who already know about you and really helps you to bring clarity to your message and your mission. So today on the podcast, I want to give you five priorities that I would focus on as you lead your nonprofit with the limited time that you have, limited budget, and limited staff capacity as it relates to social media. So priority number one is just consistency matters more.

Than volume. One of the biggest misconceptions in nonprofit marketing is that you have to post constantly, like three or four times a day, in order to stay relevant. You actually don't. You would be dramatically better off posting two or three thoughtful, mission-aligned pieces of content every week consistently, instead of posting three times a day for a couple of weeks, and then you get busy doing other things and more mission critical stuff, and then you disappear from social media for weeks or a month or something like that.

Finding a consistent rhythm that works for you is actually the most important thing you can do. And if you stopped listening right now, this would be enough to call it a good podcast. If you can find a consistent rhythm of doing something on social media, whether it's once a week or twice a week or once every two weeks, the consistency is the thing that matters the most. No matter what it actually looks like on the daily, that's what over time.

Builds familiarity, and of course, familiarity is what leads to trust eventually. Your supporters are looking for regular reminders, consistent reminders that you're out doing things, your mission is active, your work matters, and people are actually being impacted. This is especially important for donors. A donor who who hears from you consistently feels connected to the momentum in your organization. That doesn't mean that every post needs to be super polished or professional.

Because some of the highest performing nonprofit content is really simple and authentic, just a quick story or a quick photo, a behind-the-scenes moment, a spotlight on a volunteer, those things often outperform these really highly produced things because they feel more human, they're more one-to-one, they're more interest-based. They accomplish the simple goal of saying to the people who are following you and who are already passionate about what you do, it's saying we're here.

And there's stuff happening here, which is really, really important. Human connection, engagement is what social media is actually best at. So that's number one. Social media priority number two that I would focus on if I was leading a nonprofit with limited time and budget and staff is to stop broadcasting and start talking to people one-to-one. A lot of nonprofits.

accidentally sort of use social media like a digital bulletin board. It's just announcement after announcement after announcement. We've got this event coming up. Here's how you register. we've got a fundraiser happening on this day. Don't forget about it. Here's another statistic about it. Here's another update. Here's more marketing. Basically just treating it like free advertising to push out whatever message you feel like needs to get pushed out. Your social media channels are not a free marketing tool.

And if you treat them like that, you won't see the return that you hoped for. People use social media platforms today more as interest media. Let me say that again. People use most social media platforms today more as interest media, meaning they're following topics and people that they're interested in. So if they're interested in your organization.

And all you ever do is tell them about your upcoming gala and your next golf tournament and how their support is needed for this project or that initiative and click this button, so on and so forth. Eventually they will tune out. Even in interest media, it is best when it feels relational instead of one-way communication where you're just pushing stuff out. So instead of constantly asking, what do we need to tell people? What if you asked?

How do we keep their interest and invite people into the conversation with us? That might look like maybe just a post with a simple question about what it is that you do and people's interest in it, or inviting people to share their experiences, or responding thoughtfully to when somebody puts a comment in one of your posts, thanking your supporters publicly on your social media platform, highlighting somebody from your community, a benefactor or a volunteer.

And then setting kind of a daily rhythm of responding to people's comments, liking their comments, asking more questions in the comments, keeping the dialogue going, that's how you create the engagement that is so meaningful and so powerful for a small nonprofit. Engagement is about helping people feel emotionally connected to the mission. Because when people feel seen and included, they become invested.

And here's the good thing. This is not supposed to become a distraction or something that consumes more than even just five minutes of your time every day. And it's something that you can also easily hand off to a passionate volunteer who could potentially manage them, manage it for you. So social media is often being treated like a megaphone, just bullhorning messages out when it should be treated like a telephone, rather. Remember those? Where we create two-way communication.

And the third thing I would focus on if I was leading a nonprofit with limited time, budget, and staff related to social media, tell the stories of your nonprofit frequently. Many nonprofits make the mistake of waiting for the big story. And what I'm saying is think small, because small stories build emotional connection over time. A small story can be just one about a volunteer who shows up faithfully.

A family that got help this week, a child who entered a program after a long wait, a behind-the-scenes challenge that your team overcame. Those moments matter, and honestly, those moments often feel a whole lot more authentic than the super highly polished storytelling campaigns that we sometimes dream about and would love to have as part of our nonprofit social media campaign. One thing I often tell nonprofit leaders is this.

People connect emotionally to specifics. Real stories about real people create emotional resonance. And social media should be one of the primary places where your community sees those stories unfolding in real time. Couple of side notes, too. One is in storytelling, avoid you overusing numbers or statistics in your social media posting because people see numbers and they automatically think.

Math. If it's like, hey, we serve 5,000 meals this week, or we were able to connect with this many hundreds of people at this weekend event or whatever, people see numbers and they automatically think math. And there just aren't many great stories that have a whole lot of math in them. So just keep that in mind. If you use numbers or statistics, typically it's just best to focus on one that's easy for people to get their

Head around in your social media posting. The other thing is don't use AI to generate images or captions or copy for your posts. We're all getting pretty good at spotting something that was AI generated, even text. And in a world we're building community and real connection, human-to-human connection is going to continue to increase in importance and value.

Over time, it's always been important, but it's just going to become more and more important. You doing that in your social media rather than relying on AI to create a bunch of stuff is really important. Okay, so the fourth thing related to social media presence that I would prioritize if I was leading a nonprofit with a small budget and limited time and a small staff is I would use social media as a bridge to a destination, not the destination.

This is a big mindset shift. Your nonprofit's deepest relationship shouldn't live entirely on social media. Let me say that again. Your nonprofits' deepest relationships should not live entirely on social media. Social media, on the other hand, should move people toward deeper engagement on platforms that you own, towards your email list, towards volunteering at your events.

Towards attending your events, towards reading impact stories on a blog or an email that you send out weekly, towards eventually becoming donors, of course, and you having direct conversations with your people. One of the biggest mistakes I think that nonprofits can make is building entirely on what we call rented land. That's what social media platforms are. On Facebook,

You are at 100% at the mercy of what Meta decides to show your followers and what they choose not to show. And you know they change the algorithms all the time. They don't want to tell you, they don't have to tell you. Your reach changes, platforms are gonna rise and fall. But your email list, your donor relationships, your volunteer community, those are things assets ⁓

If you will, that you actually own. So your social content should regularly include invitations and next steps to be able to engage more and to feel more a part of the mission. Not super aggressive asks all the time, but clear pathways deeper into what it is that you do on tools or platforms.

Or in places where you own rather than your renting. So leveraging social media to point back to your website or get somebody's email address and get them on your email database, that is the secondary goal of social media behind engagement. Okay, so last priority if I was leading a nonprofit related to using social media for how it can help, build around trust, not trying to go viral.

I think social media has created some pretty unrealistic expectations for a lot of nonprofit leaders. Everybody feels pressure to somehow get one post to go viral or to grow their social media rapidly or to be able to create this really beautiful cinematic content and somehow compete with organizations that have entire communications departments and big budgets, but small nonprofits.

You actually have a really unique advantage. It's your authenticity, it's your closeness, it's your human connection. It's that you're right in front of the people that you are working with and the donors and supporters. Like we're all in this together. People support organizations that they trust, and that trust is built slowly over time through things like consistency and being honest, being responsive to

comments and likes and shares, so on and so forth on your social media accounts and repeated mission clarity. You don't need millions of views to be able to build a healthy nonprofit. You need the right people paying attention consistently. And honestly, if your nonprofit can become really deeply trusted by a few hundred people, you can build something really incredibly sustainable over time. Another question, sort of as a bonus, that I get a lot from nonprofit leaders is

What platforms should I be on? I think a couple of important factors go into the answer to that. First, if you're the person who's doing the majority of the social media creation, what one platform are you most comfortable on? Answer that question first. The second, equally important question to ask and answer is: where are the majority of your supporters and potential supporters? Are they on Facebook?

Are they on TikTok, IG, whatever, I always counsel leaders and small nonprofit teams to first concentrate on just one platform. Even though there's dozens, concentrate on getting good on one platform, getting good at showing up consistently with relevant content in one location. Whatever platform feels the most comfortable for you, and also where the most number of supporters and potential supporters.

Are so that's the answer to the question of what platforms should I be on? It depends, but smaller and a singular platform that you get to be good at and do well is much more valuable in the long run than trying to manage all of the platforms and do content for all of the platforms, especially when you're beginning. So if I could simplify social media strategy for small nonprofits into one sentence.

As we kind of wrap this up, it would be this: stop trying to impress the internet and start trying to consistently connect with your people. Stop trying to impress the internet and start trying to consistently connect with your people because engagement is what creates what it is that you need as you're launching your nonprofit. Engagement creates trust. Trust brings involvement, and involvement is what

Brings long-term impact. And that involvement could be volunteering, it could be giving, it could be all kinds of different things. So listen, here's a quick recap of the five priorities that I would focus on as you lead your nonprofit with limited time, limited budget, limited staff capacity related to how you show up and are present on social media. Priority number one: your consistency on one platform matters more than the volume of content that you push out. Number two.

Stop broadcasting and start talking to people one to one. The third thing that I would focus on tell the stories of your nonprofit frequently. Number four, use social media as a bridge to a destination, not the destination. And then the last thing I would focus on if I was leading a nonprofit related to your social media and how it can help you is build around creating trust, not trying to go viral.

Remember, as we land the plan, if you like what you're learning in the podcast, you can get more of it in your inbox each week. Just sign up for my free weekly email. It's called the Nonprofit Launch Briefing. Each week I send you one meaningful email with something you need to be considering, thinking about, or working on as a nonprofit leader. It's different content than what you hear in the podcast. So if you're listening to this, it's not like I send out a thing about five priorities for your social media. I send you something else each week.

It's really valuable, important for you to have, designed to help you lead smarter and grow stronger and avoid common mistakes as you're trying to launch your nonprofit. So if you're serious about building a healthy nonprofit with real impact, I'd love to have you on the list. Just shoot me a quick email with a simple sign me up in the subject line. And again, my email is Matt A T T at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Matt at nonprofitlaunchplan dot com.

Thanks so much for listening. That's it for this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for startup small and growing nonprofits. If this podcast is helpful at all, would you consider doing all the podcast things, like, share, comments, and maybe consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader who's just getting started. Until next time, thanks so much. Keep building wisely, keep making a difference.