How to Succeed on Social Media During Year-End Fundraising

Social media is a lot like a major city: it never sleeps, and it certainly doesn’t take any days off. The same logic should apply to your year-end fundraising strategy.

Year-end fundraising is a hectic time between events, Giving Tuesday, and donors going on vacation for the holidays. Just because they’re on vacation doesn’t mean that they aren’t checking their social feeds. The holidays invoke a sense of generosity – now isn’t the time to go quiet on your social channels.

Here are 3 simple ways you can use social media to boost year-end giving efforts.

Promote Your Content

If you haven’t been paying to promote or boost any campaigns or articles throughout the year on Facebook or X, you could be missing out. Doing so towards the end of the year will increase the number of eyes on your posts. The more visibility a post has, the better the chance that it will be shared.

Social sharing is such a valuable tool. Think of social media as a community. Your online community wants to support you and likely wants to be involved in your campaigns. In a past article, I discussed how sharing posts equals engagement, not the number of likes. A post could have 300 likes, but that doesn’t mean they were engaged with the content provided. Boost your call-to-action and meet all the year-end fundraising goals!

Stand out from the crowd. As other organizations are trying to achieve their year-end fundraising goals, you’ve got to make sure your content is relevant! It seems obvious to say, but don’t promote anything and everything just to increase visibility. Do you have success stories to share from funds received through the year? Post them. Any updates that involve meeting your fundraising goal? Share it. Success stories tug at heartstrings, and play-by-plays of fundraising goals gets people excited. This is often why we see a spike of donations towards the end of the year.

112 shares on Children’s Home Society of Florida’s post is impressive. What they also did correctly is link back to their website in their post. Make sure your CTAs and social posts link to your website as often as possible.

Go Live

Staying active on social gives you the ability to engage with your supporters in real time. What’s neat about the “Go Live” feature on Facebook is that it will send a notification to followers to let them know you’re live. The video and conversations stay on your organization’s page for those who missed the live broadcast. New to using this feature? Check out John Haydon’s article here about getting started.

There are so many ways to take advantage of going live. Build anticipation for an event, (take the audience behind-the-scenes) make exciting announcements, or host a Q&A session. Supporters will appreciate you taking the time to answer any questions they may have. This is also a great way to show off your staff’s personalities. Adding a human element to social channels is super important. Try it out!

kidsPACK did an amazing job utilizing this feature. Just look at how many views they got on this live feed!

 Increase Visuals

We say this a lot, but pictures really do grab viewers’ attention. Most people scroll past a wall of text. Stop them in their tracks with eye-catching images. Instead of a lengthy caption, place text within an image. Post more images towards the end of the year. Social media is a huge focal point for many nonprofits. Take advantage of this with images that tell a story, make an appeal, or update donors about your fundraising progress.

Another pro tip: if you’re running a year-end campaign, create visuals for it. Place them as your profile and cover photos until the campaign is over. If you have a hashtag created for the campaign, place it on the image. Not only does this keep your audience in the loop but it keeps your branding consistent.

Brother Wolf Animal Rescue made an awfully adorable appeal with this image! Eye catching colors, a cute pup, and all the information you’d need compacted into one picture.

Have fun!

The best part about social media is the ability to be creative. It’s a constantly changing medium, so experiment with what works for your nonprofit. Whatever methods you decide to use, we know you’ll crush your year-end fundraising goals. Qgiv is here to help you every step of the way.