How to prove the value of social media within your charity

As someone who works in social media, you understand the importance of how it can help increase brand awareness, support for your cause, and even funds. More importantly, you understand how it can bring you closer to your supporters, volunteers and donors as well as help you find new ones. But now your manager, CEO or even your board want you to PROVE that all that time and resource is worth the investment.

Here’s four ways to prove the value of social media

1. Show how social media contributes to achieving organisational goals

As we outlined in our post on how to create a social media strategy, your social media goals should be aligned to your organisational goals. As long as you’ve got the metrics in place, it should be easy to show if you’re meeting them or not. Put together a monthly report – it could be a slide deck or even a one-pager – and share with senior management. Remember to include a glossary as not everyone knows what impressions, reach, engagement or conversion means.

2. Share insights into what people think about your charity or cause

Social media – and Twitter in particular – is a great listening tool. By searching the right hashtags, keywords and phrases, you can see what people are talking about, what information they need (or find useful), and any issues or concerns they may have. This can help your charity plan content or even help inform service delivery. Don’t forget to also search your charity’s name (and any misspellings) to see what people are saying about you.

3. Show how social media provides value for money (ROI)

As well as raising awareness and increasing engagement, social media can also lead to conversions. A ‘conversion’ is when people actually go on to take an action, such as make a donation or sign up to your newsletter.

Your social presence can help you:

• Find new supporters
• Find new donors
• Increase donations

If you’ve invested more time into social media over the last few months, you’ll want to prove that your efforts have helped increase donations (if that’s your goal).

For example, if you’ve set up Facebook Ads to attract new donors, you can measure the success of your efforts and how it compares to other channels. As it is a relatively cheap way to reach your target audience, you can showcase why it’s worth the time and the effort to invest in it even more. Just ensure that you have the correct tracking set up at the start.

When you create a Facebook advert for conversions, you’ll need to ensure that you have added the code (pixel) to your website. If you combine Google tracked links with Google Analytics, then you can better understand the performance of your campaigns.

In the image below, you can see that social media platforms drive 45% of our conversions.

4. Prove how social drives quality traffic to your website

An easy way to show the value of social media is to show how it drives traffic to your website. You can easily find this in Google Analytics in Acquisition>Social>Network Referrals. BUT, just driving traffic isn’t effective if it’s not the right audience. Go to Audience> Demographics> Overall and then filter the social media traffic from the overall traffic segment. This will tell you whether your social media efforts are driving the right audience to your website.

So there you have it – four ways to prove the value of social media!