If you're not a LinkedIn pro, maximizing the site for your nonprofit can feel daunting. What's the best way to grow your audience and increase awareness about your cause? In this article, we'll cover some tips and tricks to help you become a LinkedIn expert. Keep reading!
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. But you knew that, didn’t you?
Did you know that 56% of LinkedIn users are more likely to donate to charities compared to other internet users?
This makes LinkedIn a goldmine for any nonprofit that wants to increase awareness. But how do you use LinkedIn to promote your nonprofit and arouse the interest of all those users?
Let’s take a look at how you can use LinkedIn to grow your nonprofit.
Your first step to success on LinkedIn is to set up a company page.
Your page helps you gain visibility since it will appear on LinkedIn searches. You can also use it to post volunteering opportunities or promote your mission or allow advocates to engage with your brand easily. But merely establishing a company page and leaving it at that is a job that is half done.
To attract the interest of more followers, optimize your page. Take note that potential donors will occasionally visit your page to learn more about what you do, so every information needs to be up-to-date and easily understood by them.
Secondly, LinkedIn is constantly rolling out extra features that make the social media platform easy to use—you need to make the most of these.
Here are the tips to help your page stand out:
VolunteerMatch below is an excellent example of how your LinkedIn nonprofit page should look like.
There are two ways to use LinkedIn groups to raise awareness of your nonprofit. You may create a group for your nonprofit or take part in other relevant groups.
When using groups, aim to build relationships and a stronger network. This can be done by taking part in discussions relating to your cause. You may also start conversations or call your supporters to help publicize your cause.
Groups are a great place to start a dialogue around your mission and get volunteers and support of advocates when raising funds or recruiting people. LinkedIn groups are also ideal for building credibility and authority around your nonprofit.
You can achieve this by providing valuable info about your organization or answering members’ questions more honestly. Here are some of the high-engagement LinkedIn nonprofit groups:
An important factor to note is your group must have all the important information about your nonprofit to stand out. This includes group name, description, company logo, link to your website, or other relevant content, such as group rules.
The sad truth is that only 1% of LinkedIn users share content weekly. This means that so many nonprofits don’t see the importance of posting content frequently and consistently to increase awareness. We get it: generating content ideas is not easy.
The type of content you can share on LinkedIn includes testimonials, behind-the-scenes, press releases, stats and insights, research papers, and calls for volunteers.
Save the Children International, for example, has done a wonderful job in showing visitors the kind of content it shares with its audience.
The advantage of LinkedIn is that it displays content it believes is relevant to a person, so the more valuable content you put in front of the right audience, the more people you can reach. Other content types to share with your audience include long-form posts, videos, and infographics.
Your long-form content can be published on LinkedIn Publishing with the call to action to promote your mission or link to check your activities on your site. You can also share success stories, thought leadership content, and leading voices championing your cause.
The strength of a nonprofit lies in numbers. And to get these numbers, it starts by turning employees, volunteers, and donors into brand advocates.
When employees share updates about your company with their network, it unlocks new opportunities to build stronger relationships and expand your network.
There are two ways to get your employees and volunteers involved in your LinkedIn activities: by engaging in your groups or polishing their profile with elements relating to your brand.
With the latter, staff members can use the experience or volunteer section of their profile to link to your company page.
Additionally, they can add how they are involved in your organization in the summary section or cause section. Make sure you help them complete this information to match your organization’s initiative.
For groups, encourage employees to join nonprofit related groups. While in these groups, teach them to promote content from your nonprofit within the group and their profile to help you reach potential supporters and increase your digital footprint.
Besides, encourage them to publish content relating to your nonprofit on LinkedIn Publishing to educate people or encourage them to participate in your mission.
In most cases, building strategic partnerships is aimed at boosting your fundraising efforts. Even so, you can use such an initiative to increase brand awareness. For example, you may encourage your partners to share their roles or impact on your cause with the LinkedIn community.
For example, the video below is from the International Water Association in partnership with The Nature Conservancy showing the role of the former in nature conservation.
Alternatively, in your LinkedIn post or ads, give a shoutout to all the partners involved in your projects and let them chime in in the comment section. When other well-wishers see the inputs from other partners, they would be more inclined to enter a relationship with you.
To build strategic partnerships, first, create personas of potential partners and identify what you may need from them. Next, you may use the LinkedIn search bar to find these partners. Start with people in your network, then move to those within your geographical location, interest, or industry. Once you have a list of those who are a good fit, send a connection request to generate an action.
While organic content is great to increase brand awareness on LinkedIn, if you have the budget, you should also consider advertising on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn ads help expose your brand to an audience not in your immediate network. A few noteworthy LinkedIn ads you can use for brand promotion include
To find out if your hard work with organic and sponsored content is paying off, leverage analytics. Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn analytics will hold data that is crucial to your marketing campaigns. These include total page views, audience demographic, number of followers, unique visitors to your page, post click-through, impressions, comments, and shares.
You can also use other free social media monitoring tools to get these analytics that you can use to inform or correct your marketing strategy. For example, if more people prefer to engage with your videos and not text, you can revamp video production instead of text.
There is no social media platform that beats LinkedIn in helping nonprofits increase brand awareness. This is because of its love for professionalism, an abundance of volunteers and donors, and showing users content related to their interests.
Should you choose to boost brand awareness among professionals ready to champion your cause, use the above steps together with LinkedIn for nonprofits.
Check out Donorbox fundraising tools and features on our website. If you’re looking for more fundraising or nonprofit management tips and resources, here’s our blog.
Adela Belin is a content marketer and blogger at Writers Per Hour. She is passionate about sharing stories with the hope to make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their personal and professional growth. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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