By: Scott Kinser
Nonprofit organizations are always looking for ways to further market themselves. One of the easiest ways to do it may not be something nonprofit organizations would think of and that’s by using “Instagram”.
Sure, using “Instagram” for your nonprofit organization might seem like a skeptical idea on the surface but here are a few ways for why using ‘Instagram” for your nonprofit organization can be very useful.
1. Personalization
The most successful Instagram accounts offer a glimpse into the company and the behind-the-scenes experiences that are not revealed on other social networking sites. Think of ways that your nonprofit organization can use the service to provide a sneak peek into this, the daily lives of the people you impact and the community you serve. You can do this by posting photos of events, people you’ve helped and so forth.
2. Be Eye Catching
Use Instagram as a way to engage in storytelling by sharing images that pop. You want to make people feeling something like being inspired, outraged, motivated or delighted. Most pictures should tell a story about your work and contribute to the overall feel of your nonprofit organization.
3. Healthy Balance
Continuing off of Step 2, you don’t always want to be “Mr. Business”, you want to show you have a fun side as well. It’s important for a nonprofit organization to have a sense of humor as well as showing their professional side. When you’re too professional, this turns off your followers. Post fun photos or take part in fun community hashtags like #TBT which stands for “Throw Back Thursday”, this is when you post old photos from back in the day with the hashtag attached to the photo.
4. Use Hashtags
Hashtags are not just for “Twitter” or “Facebook”, you can use them for Instagram as well. Once you upload the photo you want to use, you can add some words in to explain the photo with proper hashtags that fits the photo and overall message you’re trying to convey.
This link shows you the most popular hashtags for different themes such as travel, entertainment, business and so forth http://www.tagsforlikes.com/.
5. Engage
Engaging with your Instagram followers is one of the best ways to increase your nonprofit organizations exposure. However, it should be noted that you should already be doing this on all formats of social media that you use.
Here are some ways you can increase engagement with your Instagram followers.
– Run simple contests and quizzes using the comment stream.
– Ask for input and reactions to your posts.
– Feature fill-in-the-blanks tied to other parts of your work
6. Connect All Social Media Accounts
Since photos get above-and-beyond the most interaction and engagement of all content on the internet, it only makes sense to connect your Instagram account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts as well. This saves you time from going to each of those sites to post your Instagram photos on. You can allow all social media accounts to connect in the “Account” section in each of those sites.
7. Feature Your Donors
Take a photo of your donors and write a special message for them on Instagram. Basically, you’re highlighting them with there great effort to help out nonprofit organizations. This will show your appreciation to your followers and show that you care about every bit of help that you get.
These are just some small steps that you can do to use Instagram for your nonprofit organization. Give it a try and don’t give up after a few weeks. It takes time to build a following just like on every other social media site. Hang in there and I’m confident you will start to see results.
