Has your nonprofit added Instagram to your social media platform mix yet? If so, congratulations! You’ve just increased your awareness potential and engagement reach to 500 million daily active users and 1 billion monthly active users by simply joining the network and setting up a business account for your nonprofit. Now comes the tricky part—creating compelling Instagram stories.

This on-demand world we live in has allowed us immediate access to a whole host of needs and wants—food, clothing, music, books, and groceries—via digital applications literally at our fingertips. Live stream video is yet another one of our cravings for all things immediate. And as a result of its increased demand over the last two years, brands like Target, Starbucks, Buzzfeed, Dunkin’ Donuts, and J. Crew are using live stream video as a marketing tool to promote their brands and their products. But live stream video isn’t just for big brands.

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool for nonprofits. With 330 million users, it offers the potential to increase brand awareness across a vast audience. But Twitter is a unique animal among the species of social media platforms out there. Brands — including nonprofits — must learn and practice some unwritten ground rules to ensure their tweets garner goodwill rather than lose favor. Just as there are a multitude of ways to find and engage loyal champions of a nonprofit’s mission, there are also some worst practices marketers should avoid.

How are your 2018 nonprofit marketing plans shaping up so far? If you’re anything like me, you probably view each New Year as an opportunity to learn and improve from the prior year in ALL areas – including your marketing strategy. Last year I implemented a couple of new ideas into my own marketing mix. Some things worked well, and I plan to continue using them in 2018. However others didn’t quite pan out the way I’d hoped, so I left those behind. My motto: Fail fast and learn from it.

Regardless of industry, online audiences are constantly in search of meaningful content—content that’s deemed relevant, engaging, educational, entertaining, and inspiring. And while it’s perfectly acceptable for nonprofits to serve up useful content from secondary sources, let’s also recognize that no content will impact your community more than fresh, original content that speaks directly to your cause and the needs of your constituents.

As a nonprofit marketer, by now you’re fully aware that a blog can be a valuable tool to support your nonprofit’s growth in a variety of ways. But just in case you need a reminder: A nonprofit blog has the capacity to create value for your current audiences while supporting a strategy that can improve cause awareness, cultivate supporter generation, and increase fundraising. 

Over the last five years, you’ve likely read (perhaps literally) hundreds of blog posts and articles extolling the many virtues of content marketing—each one praising its potential to help you raise your brand visibility, build awareness for your cause, develop trusting relationships with your community, increase your thought leadership, and boost your fundraising efforts.

In a world where “social good” is now becoming synonymous with marketing strategy, nonprofits are not only finding themselves having to compete for funds with other nonprofits, they're also forced to compete with for-profits seeking to expand their market share through social missions.

As a general rule, nonprofit marketers should always be thinking of new and meaningful ways to recognize donors, but Valentine’s Day offers the perfect excuse to reach out and connect with them just because. Consider these 6 simple ways nonprofits can show donors love on social media.

Live streaming video absolutely dominated in 2016. So much that it outpaced the growth of other types of online video with a 113 percent increase in ad growth yearly. Over the last two years, nonprofits have cautiously dipped a proverbial toe in the live video waters as social video platforms like Periscope and Facebook Live have made it easier and more affordable to create and deliver live video content.