non-profit content - where do I start?
The biggest stress with building a content strategy can be seeing those blank dates, 20-25 weekdays, just waiting to be filled with your glorious content. What do you post? What do you show off? How do you accomplish that end goal of promoting your mission for all to see, understand, & connect with?
Step one, take a breath. You're the expert with your organization, start with what you know, why you're passionate about, & the basics of your organization. A great place to begin is showing off your mission statement and/or core values on a simple post & story for all to see. Add in a nice visual image that really shows the heart of your cause and voila, you have content! What's great about this kind of content is that your mission statement & values will rarely change, so you can post it again or update the images & you have nearly endless possibilities from one piece of content! This is called creating evergreen content. Plan to post your mission statement regularly so the community won't forget you or what you're all about.
Showing off your goals and what you're striving to achieve in the next year, quarter, month helps your audience & community see the big picture of what you're working towards. Talk about the great impacts & the results we all will see by working towards achieving them. Sharing what you're striving towards has the potential of exciting your audience so much so that members of your audience could start supporting you in accomplishing this goal with their time, talents, or even wallets. Here's the thing though, once these goals are public - they're public & you'll be held to them. Be strategic with what you share; under-promise, over-deliver.
To see where you're going, sometimes it's best to see where you've been. Show the impact you've already had. the goals & successes you've had recently, & what you've learned from the experiences. Brag about what you've accomplished, share where you want to grow but let your audience in on the conversations! Regularly showing off your previous impacts, events, activities, etc is a great way to keep sponsors & grant providers interested in your cause - you'll keep talking about how they helped! Stay connected with potentially viral trends like #onthisday #throwbackthursday #waybackwednesday #motivationmonday & more.
It can be a tough one to show, but your supporters (or not-so-supporters) can find out anyway, however, being transparent with your fundraising financials is a great way to promote your mission and show that you follow through- building trust. You don't have to go into depth if you choose to go in this direction but I've found it answers many questions ahead of time. If what you show is honest & true then it's an easy conversation but one you must be prepared for. I always found being one step ahead & starting the transparency conversation, the easier it always was. Use the same graphics and/or data from your fundraising materials as consistency is key when it comes to donor dollars. Like your mission statement & values content, this is great evergreen content.
Finally, when you're creating your content with the ideas above I always encourage using all of the mediums for content that you're provided, but especially Instagram stories. when it comes to this kind of content, especially with evergreen materials, I like to use stories for multiple reasons. 1. Stories is engaged with more than the actual feed in Instagram 2. It can be very easy & fun to make 3. Stories can be turned into highlights, which is what I want to focus on here. Highlights live in the top description of your Instagram profile and they are basically stories that don't expire until you tell them to, they just have to be actual stories first. This means you can create entire story campaigns & save them in your highlights so whoever visits your profile has quick access to your most important information like your mission, events, fundraising info, etc.
Sometimes showing off your mission is just finding the right inspiration & I hope that you found some here. Remember that your content can have many goals all in one simple post from promotion, to recruitment, to donor development, & more. I encourage you to start with what gets you excited about your mission, create some evergreen content, & fill in the blanks from there. Any questions? Reach out or comment below & I'm happy to help!
