Apr 07, 2015 By Jill Mersereau

in Foundation, Marketing, Social

#Winning at Social: 5 Tips for Non-Profit Events

A few years ago, a friend asked me, “How can someone ‘win’ at social media?” This sparked an interesting conversation around what it takes to be a leader on social and what those key performance metric indicators are.

Fast forward a couple of years and I had become the social media manager for a local non-profit which hosts a large yearly event. The big question in front of me was, “How can I make this organization win at social?” Our competitors had been around for much longer, had bigger budgets, and huge social followings. We were the underdog, virtually unknown by many in our own community. It would take a lot of effort to build a social following.

We created a social strategy that would eventually help us “win” at social, as evidenced by our high social media post volume, successful campaigns, and a well-attended event. What follows are some of the steps we took to ensure that our non-profit’s event would be successful:

1. Hashtag Creation

By creating a unique hashtag for our brand, using it on all promotional materials, and encouraging sponsors, partners, and volunteers to do the same, we were able to generate brand awareness across our community. Ensure your hashtag is not too confusing or lengthy, in order to fit within the 140 Twitter character limit.

2. Social Platform Enablement

We ensured that our social team was trained in the Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio, a platform for engaging, publishing, and analyzing social posts. We encouraged team members to schedule social posts on our calendar each Sunday for the remainder of the week. This freed up time throughout the week to focus on engaging with responses to our posts and also allowed for each team member to see at a glance our scheduled content when needed. The local radio station was one of our key sponsors, and by having a well-organized social calendar, we could share with the radio station the key messages for the week, which they in turn shared with their social followers. The analyze feature in the platform allowed us to inform our internal stakeholders how we were performing compared to our competitors week over week, and to view the types of posts our competitors were publishing.

3. Promotion of Facebook Contests

We were fortunate to have a budget for social media giveaways (Like & Share contests, photo contests, etc.) and advertising, so by targeting the surrounding communities through boosted like and share contests we were able to share pertinent information about our event and gain followers who became strong advocates for our organization. As a result, our Facebook social media engagement rivaled and even surpassed that of our top competitors week after week.

4. Advertise through Twitter

Twitter ads proved to be useful in helping our non-profit share important information about our event in the weeks leading up to it. If you have the budget, it is a useful way to increase your following, as your posts may be shared with Twitter users otherwise not familiar with your organization.

5. Host a Twitter Party

A Twitter Party is a fun way to generate excitement, educate the public, receive suggestions, increase your following, and reward participants with prizes such as tickets to your event. Our team used the Radian6 Social Media Analysis Dashboard to determine who our influential bloggers were from the previous years, then reached out to these bloggers as well as our partners and sponsors to ask them to participate in our Twitter Party. These individuals shared news of the Party with their followers, helping to generate excitement before the event began. Be sure to share tips on attending a Twitter Party with your followers before it begins so everyone is in the know before it begins.

Entering the social space for the first time can be daunting for any non-profit. Regardless of your budget, by following these tips, as well as creating engaging, useful content, you can get your message across, spread awareness about your event, and increase your chances of ‘winning’ at social, all while having fun along the way.