Tips to increase your nonprofit’s organic reach on social media

With the enormous increase in demand for attention from both end-users and brands, social media algorithms have had to evolve to decide on what content to show over others. That, paired with social media companies’ intent of generating profits through brands, has led to a massive decline in organic (or unpaid) reach for organizations. The good news is that there a few tactics that can help your nonprofit overcome this. In this article, we list some strategies to help you boost your nonprofit’s organic social media reach.

Let’s start by understanding how these algorithms work. Social media algorithms show your content to a portion of your follower base depending on their interest and willingness to engage with content shared by you. While there is not much we can do about this reality, we can identify workarounds that will help reach more people. In this scenario, we can do 3 things. 

• Make people want to view and engage with your content 
• Tap into other people’s share of followers
• Increase your follower base

Making people want to engage with your content

1. Narrate beautiful stories – We’ve mentioned this before and we will remind you again — there’s nothing stronger than the power of storytelling. It only makes sense to justify this sentiment with great content. Learn about the power of storytelling and incorporate this into your content strategy.   
2. Give people a reason to engage with you – Show your followers that their voice and engagement matter to you. Post content that is interactive, like polls, questions, or trivia. Respond to their comments on your posts. Ask for their opinions and feedback! The more engagement your posts get, the more it expands your reach.  

Tap into other people’s share of followers

1. Work on getting user-generated content – User-generated content is content created by one or more of your followers.  
   1. Re-post pictures and testimonials – If you see a follower posted a photo of a recent campaign of yours that they participated in, ask if you can reshare it on your page. Reach out to supporters and volunteers and ask them to send you a personal testimonial about your nonprofit. When you feature their images and words on your social media, it’s more likely that they will reshare your posts on their own social media, which will automatically expand your reach to their followers. 
   2. Micro-influencer shoutouts – You can also incorporate micro-influencer strategies by reaching out to like-minded people with a follower base of 3,000 to 10,000 and asking to partner with them for a few posts. Essentially, this influencer acts as an ambassador, posting your content on their own channels, thus introducing you to their own followers. 

1. Create share-worthy content – The idea here is to roll out content that people would want to share. 
   1. Awareness content – Talk about the seriousness or impact of the issues your nonprofit focuses on and stress why people should care. Including stats and figures adds credibility and makes information more concise and sharable.  
   2. Stakeholders appreciation posts – Create an online ‘donor rewards’ or ‘volunteer rewards’ campaign where you thank all your donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders for their support of your organization. The post could use a simple format that highlights the name, image, and contribution of the person. Posting this and tagging the honoree will help increase reshares. 
2. Ask people to tag you – It may be the case that people who are associating with your nonprofit are already posting things relevant to your organization. To drive maximum mileage out of this, it helps to ask people to tag you in their posts, so their followers can easily access your social media profile.
3. Engage as an organization – While having people create content for you is one way to tap into the follower base of others, you can also achieve this by engaging with others from your NPO’s handle. For instance, if you see a topic trending on Twitter that’s relevant to your nonprofit, join in on the conversation. 

Increasing your follower base 

• Let people know you exist on social media – You can achieve this by including your social media handles on all your marketing collateral, such as business cards, website, emailers, newsletters, donation certifications/invoices, etc. The simple rule you can follow is: If you can add your logo, you can include your social media handles. 
• Try paid promotions – Try to promote content explicitly centered around increasing your followers. With good content, this should be an economical way of increasing your follower base. Once you have them, you can use effective content strategies mentioned earlier to keep them engaged. 

Social media is a fickle platform. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to success. Increasing reach and engagement will likely take a mixture of these strategies, and a lot of trial and error to figure out what works best for you.