03 Jun 2010 No Comments
This week's Best Practice in Action- June 3: Use Your Facebook Page
Many nonprofits are unclear about how to use social media tools such as Facebook to promote their cause. Ironically, the free and easy to use tools are the ones where you can benefit the most from when combining social media outlets and FirstGiving fundraising pages.
That is not the case with our friends at Horace Mann Educational Associates (HMEA). HMEA uses their Twitter and Facebook accounts to promote their 9th Annual Independence 5K Walk/Run. As HMEA shows, free tools like Facebook are a great way to get people involved in your event, highlight top fundraisers, and spread fundraising ideas and announcements.
HMEA uses its Facebook page to link directly to their FirstGiving start page, providing walk participants with quick access to regularly updated event information as well as instructions on how to start their own FirsteGiving page. HMEA also uses Facebook to promote top fundraisers by posting direct links to their personal FirstGiving fundraising pages and regularly solicit people to “Like” their page. The more people that ”Like” the HMEA Facebook page, the more attention the cause and the event will generate.
Also, Facebook is indexed by several major search engines. By adjusting Facebook’s settings to allow the page to be detected by search engines, users can effectively receive free search placement for personal and event pages. Generally, the more interconnected the page (i.e., the more a page links to and is linked from other pages), the more visits it receives. The more visits, or “page views” the higher its search ranking. By interconnecting free, online social networking sites with organization homepages, personal web pages and FirstGiving fundraising pages, you can quickly generate enough buzz to justify using this year’s favorite tech buzzword without feeling like a poseur. Just say, “social networking”.
So to recap…
- Use Facebook to announce your event and highlight top fundraisers
- Get your supporters talking about your nonprofit on Facebook; each time the event name or nonprofit name is mentioned you are creating more buzz around your nonprofit
Learn more about how you can utilize Facebook and FirstGiving
