Year-End Social Publishing – 5 Step Guide for Nonprofits

Here we go again: another year’s end on the horizon and a bit of anxiety as we realize how much more we have yet to accomplish. A recent webinar by a notable nonprofit marketing strategist, John Haydon, gave us some insightful tips and tricks on how to stay on top of your goals. Specifically he pointed to ways to manage your social media outlets and end on a strong year-end social publishing note.

Read the following five steps as you consider your own approach to your year-end social publishing schedule. Then, follow the links for some helpful tools Haydon pointed out to us.

1. Plan

Think about your nonprofit’s target audiences and what actions they would ideally take before year’s end. Through the following steps, you’ll create blogs and social media posts that could eventually lead them to that action. To start, find an app or system that will map out the next couple months – both to assign members of your team to tasks / blogs, and to get what Haydon calls a “bird’s eye view” of your strategy.

-Set up a publishing calendar: Trello

-Generate / Track progress: manage your Google Analytics Goals. Read a post on how to do so here, Google Analytics Google Analytics Setup and Best Practices

2. Research

Understand what other causes your audiences care about (especially at this time of year) so you can participate in the conversation. Hopefully, with properly done SEO, you’ll even show up in results when they search for information on those topics.

-Find out what people are searching: Facebook Search

-Get an overview of trending topics: BuzzSumo

3. Tell your story

The holidays are a wonderful time to tell your story and draw people in to your nonprofit. Haydon emphasizes how social media is all about connecting with people, not selling services. Make your stories “visual / emotional / relatable / actionable / shareable.” Take a look at his favorite examples below:

4. Monitor

If you’re amping up your content, you’ll also want to have it all well-managed. Consider some of the following apps in order to stay on top of both the news and your social interactions more easily. They are also mobile apps, so you can even receive updates when you’re away from your computer.

– Marketing / Nonprofit news: Feedly, Flipboard and Reeder

– Social publishing monitoring: Hootsuite or Pages Monitor

5. Recycle

Look through your previous year’s best posts – what received the most attention on social platforms or drove the most traffic to your site? With the top performers, promote them again or repurpose their content. Notice which images worked for high click-through rates and attach those to future events and content.

– Study your content: Buffer

– Repurpose your images: Canva

For the full webinar, you can visit Haydon’s site and download his slides on Nonprofithub.org. For extra year-end help, contact ArcStone.