Why should a serious organization be "on the Internet"?
by Vitalii Kryshchuk
In today's world, developing high-quality communication with clients without setting up social networks is impossible. And it is even more important for non-profit organizations, where communication with people willing to fund it is vital. It is very important to show people outside the organization so-called "reports" in photos, videos, and slides using social media so that they understand the importance of the organization and its need for development and funding.
Given my little experience in the United States, I have only come across a few non-profit organizations. But most of all I had contact with Dorcas International. They help refugees from many countries to start a new life in the United States. So, given that they not only receive funding from donors but also work directly with people, their social networks must be well developed to reach new people who have arrived in the country and have not yet adapted to life here. Moreover, this does not require paying a large amount of money, as social networks are free.
I will start analyzing social networks in the order in which they are covered on the Dorcas website. The first is Facebook. Here they have 6.2k followers. It is also immediately apparent that they are actively maintaining the page, because at the time of writing this blog (on Saturday), the last news was on Friday, and in general, the frequency of posts is 1 in 1-2 days. This is very good because subscribers mustn’t forget about the organization and always see that it is "alive". But for such many subscribers, the latest posts get only 14-15 likes each. This means that few people respond to the information provided by Dorcas. Or the information is not very interesting for readers. And this is not surprising, because all their posts are just photos of the work they have done. I didn't even find a link for donations or quick information for clients right away.
I would recommend working a little more on strategizing and planning your social media activity. There is a good article on Hootsuite about "What should I post on social media for nonprofits". I'm not going to rewrite everything, but I would add some posts that should give feedback to the followers. It can be a poll or a question about some statistics, and in the end, you can write a response with statistics that are impressive or have unusual numbers. I know that from time-to-time Dorcas conducts surveys about the life of refugees in the United States and their adaptation, but I don't see anything like that on their social media. If they want to collect some statistics, social media is the first and easiest way to do it. They should also use video in their posts more often because video generates 1200% more shares than a static image. Just imagine the reach of the video. It is also important to monitor their conversion reach, (advanced metric), their percentage of visits, (behavioral metric), and their action button (channel metric). Because I don't see any response on their posts. Most likely, their strategy for maintaining a Facebook page is to publish reports on their work and events, which is not enough for this level of organization and this number of followers.
As for Instagram, it has 2041 followers. And 1232 posts. A quick look at the page shows that they don't separate each social network, but only publish the same thing without considering the audience or the capabilities of the social network. I agree that social networks are currently losing their identity and it is possible to prepare information of the same size and style for all social networks at once, but then what is the need to keep them all? I think that you could make some unique information for each social network and thus keep the audience interested in subscribing to several different social networks.
It's the same story with X (Twitter) and LinkedIn. It's good that they run these pages, but there's no point in describing them here because they are identical.
In general, each social network still has its specific functionality and features that can be used to warm up the audience. And if you want more, you can even follow the trends of TikTok and Instagram Reels and shoot unusual content for this kind of organization, as Lotus Cars on TikTok does. They use trends to become popular and the kind of videos people expect. When content became more desirable than a product.
So, there are many strategies and options for developing a page on a social network. It's important to see the importance of developing your brand and take your social media development seriously. This will give an appropriate response and result.