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.

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.

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.

(Editor's note: This post was originally published in November 2015 and has been modified in November 2016 for timeliness and relevance.)

Months of planning + weeks of promotion = a single day of giving. That’s what a #GivingTuesday campaign equates to for nonprofit marketers. As you prepare for your campaign launch and everything else leading up to the big day, don’t forget to say “thank you” when it’s all over.

Whenever I do research for the Contentuity360 Blog, I’m always looking out for the latest and greatest digital marketing trends to share with my nonprofit and higher ed audiences. Over the past year, one of the most popular strategies I see showing up in search results for the long tail keyword ‘next big thing in marketing’ is (wait for it)…

Coming up with a diverse content mix for social media can sometimes be a challenge. Just ask any marketer with day-to-day responsibility for content planning and generation. Granted, a content calendar is a tremendous help with planning content themes and visualizing how your content will be distributed throughout the week, month, or even year. But can we have a moment of truth and admit to ourselves that our content calendars don’t always take into account the creativity or resourcefulness required to keep our audiences fully engaged?

It’s hard to recall how we ever functioned in a world without social media. Imagine executing your role as a nonprofit marketer in 2016 without the ease and access social media offers for greater cause awareness, increased website traffic, higher levels of community engagement, and extended campaign reach.

Maybe cause affinity and brand awareness were enough to attract loyal supporters to nonprofits a decade ago, but the rules have now changed. Like their for-profit peers, nonprofit marketers are being forced to rethink marketing strategies and maximize their digital presence in order to compete for attention in a crowded online space.

Check out this excerpt from our latest resource, A Nonprofit's Guide To Social Prospecting.

In the spirit of the holiday season, we decided to ask our clients and nonprofit marketing peers to share what’s on their marketing wish list for 2016. Here are the top responses we received.