121 – Simple Social Wins for Non-Profits with Sarah Suarez

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you feeling stuck with your non-profit social media strategy? Sarah Suarez is back on the podcast to share how small shifts in your approach can spark huge engagement, grow your online community, and actually turn followers into donors. So stick around. This episode might just change how you show up online.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, Sarah Suarez and I are going to be talking about all things social media strategy, digital communities, and overcoming platform fatigue. Sarah has nearly a decade of experience working with both small and large non-profits, including the Houston Humane Society and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She’s the founder of The Social Puzzle, a boutique social media agency dedicated to helping non-profits and charities build and engage digital audiences, allowing them to focus on increasing their impact.

Sarah, welcome back to the show. This is your second episode, which is super awesome. So glad you’re able to be here. Looking forward to the real talk, the real tactics to help the people listening organize their social media game.

Sarah Suarez: Thank you. I’m happy to be back.

David Pisarek: Fantastic. Let’s jump right in.

A lot of non-profits feel social media isn’t “working” for them, what signs should they look for to know if it’s time to take a step back, rethink strategy, create a strategy? Maybe they never had one because, maybe, you’re just told you got to be on social, you got to be on something, right? And so there’s a lot with that. So what are your thoughts?

Sarah Suarez: Yeah, so that’s a really great question. I get that question a lot when I have consulting calls. I’ll have a non-profit team member say to me, “We spend all this time on social media, but it’s really not working for us. We don’t see that it’s a success.” And so,

I’ll ask them, at that point, to take a step back and let me know: How do you define success? What would success look like for your organization? And, a lot of times, they don’t know yet. Maybe they haven’t set a clear definition of success. And in that case, they’re never going to know if they’ve been successful, because they don’t know what it looks like.

So, I would say, look at your organizational goals and translate them into social media goals, and then build a strategy around that. And then, anytime you sit down to create content, you should be looking at that strategy. And each piece of content should reflect one of your goals. It should aim to achieve one of your goals. So, if you haven’t built a strategy, as you said, you have to have a strategy; or else, what are you doing? You don’t know.

I would say, do an audit of your content. Are you speaking to the right audience? Do you know your audience? That’s crucial. Otherwise, you’re speaking to everyone and no one at the same time.

I would say, focus on engagement. I’m always telling people that engagement is at least as important as posting. If you have to choose between posting more and engaging more, I’d suggest sacrificing a couple of posts a week to focus on engagement during that time. And then, think of what consistency can look like with your capacity. So, it’s important to be consistent. It’s important to show up, but it’s also important not to burn out and disappear. I would recommend posting twice a week, and seeing how that goes, before I would ever recommend posting every day and then burning out and disappearing for a few months.

And then finally, I would say, don’t be afraid of a failed post. It’s so important to experiment, and not every post is going to be successful. But if you don’t try new things, you’ll never know if you’re missing some type of content or a different type of post that would really hit the mark with your audience.

David Pisarek: That’s awesome. There’s so much… We could probably end the episode right here. There was so much really great content, Sarah, and what you put out there.

I think it’s important for people to also think about who is your audience, and that’s one of the things that you asked. Identifying, creating the personas, the avatars, and understanding the psychographics of these people. In Episode 16, I talk about psychographics, everybody. But understanding where they’re spending their time.

Years ago, I’m talking 15 years ago, you needed to be on every platform, everywhere, because you never knew, blah, blah, blah. And you needed to measure your followers against similar organizations, that’s easy to get numbers, and you can throw that into a spreadsheet. But,

identifying the goal, the reason, the rationale behind putting the effort into social and understanding who you want to target will help you identify the one, maybe two social channels that you should be using, and then targeting your customer, your client, your donor, your volunteer, your participant, your whoever it is that you’re trying to go after. It’ll become really clear where you should post and what you should post about.

Sarah Suarez: Yes, 100%.

Sometimes, it’s as simple as, Is your organization volunteer-run? And then what do your volunteers look like? Or is your organization… I had a client that was actually really difficult to nail down their avatar because they helped so many different aspects of their community. They offered so many services. So, there were times when we had to be a little more vague when speaking to people. But, in general, I think most organizations should be able to nail down what their donor audience looks like, what their volunteer audience looks like. And then outside of that, maybe if they’re trying to reach out to some of the potential program participants, what that audience looks like. Then, each content, maybe you have posts that speak to different audiences, but it’s important to know who they are speaking to.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Otherwise, you’re just putting stuff out into the ether, and you’re not getting any results.

I love the idea of posting once or twice a week. That’s awesome. I think everybody should consider doing some A/B testing around that. Which days do you get more engagement than others or more likes, more views? You have access to all that analytical information and the insight there. Then, once you figure out, ‘Okay, Wednesday and Friday are the best days,’ start playing with the time of day.

Sarah Suarez: Yes.

David Pisarek: Then go, ‘Oh, you know what? If we post at 10:00 in the morning, we get more engagement, or if we post at 6:00 in the evening or 3:00 in the morning,’ I don’t know. It depends on who your audience is and where they’re located on the planet. There are time zones. I think it’s important to do that.

But, also, one of the things that we’ve realized is that you have different types of content that you push out. Some of it is educational, some of it is informative, and some of it is asking for something like a donation or to sign up for a program or service or something like that. Keep your eye on those. I’m going to call them buckets of content because different days, different times might work better based on the type of content you’re posting.

Do you have any strategies for anybody who’s trying to think about how they could organize their posts in those ways?

Sarah Suarez: How can they know which post to schedule when, or just how they can create content per bucket?

David Pisarek: Either or both.

Sarah Suarez: Oh, okay.

David Pisarek: Both, why not?

Sarah Suarez: Oh, okay.

Well, I think it’s really important to determine what your buckets are. My buckets for my clients are usually pretty similar. Most of my non-profits are trying to spread awareness and offer educational content about their work and their cause. And then they’re also trying to,

I call it, inspire action. So, that can mean you’re trying to drive in donations, or you’re trying to drive people to your YouTube channel to learn about your mission, or even sign up for newsletters. All of that is like you’re driving your audience to take action. So I consider that a bucket. And then you can obviously measure if that content was successful by how well they responded to your call to action.

And then they also… I have clients who are trying to use their content to increase awareness. So then, in that case, sometimes, that’s when I like to do a collaboration post, because if there’s a similar organization that maybe has an audience that’s already receptive to your content, that would be great to get in front of them. So, I think there are different ways to categorize things into different buckets, and then look at each bucket and determine what success looks like for that bucket, even within that bucket, for that post.

So when you create a post, you should already know what you’re looking to achieve from that post.

David Pisarek: I love it. We’ve got these posts going up and’ve nailed down the couple of days a week and the channels they should go on. We’re posting it, we’re getting some engagement, maybe it’s a like, a comment, a share, a repost, whatever that happens to be. I find that non-profits sometimes struggle to turn likes into actual lasting support.

Do you have any thoughts around how folks listening to this could help nurture followers in terms of becoming donors or volunteers or advocates or taking what I’m going to call a more active role?

Sarah Suarez: Yes. My background is in donor stewardship and engagement. My favourite thing about social media is really just the opportunity to sort of, not only bring people into your work, but also keep them updated on all the things that are happening with your organization, keep them interested and wanting more and passionate about what you’re doing.

I would suggest, obviously, building this into your strategy, but you need to share things like your mission, the difference your organization makes in the community. I would share quantifiable data, and you can share it in different ways, but maybe some of the information from your annual report. But most importantly, stories. I think if you share a video story or a photo with a story and you help them to see the human aspect of the difference you’re making, that can help them to really build a connection. And then, you just keep updating them, you engage them, you offer them opportunities to get involved in multiple different ways, because everybody gets involved in a different way.

Not everybody can make a donation or has the time to volunteer, but everyone can become what I like to call an advocate, which means they engage with your content, they share your content, they’re just out there like your hype man.

So, I think that when you’re trying to build someone into a long-term supporter, it’s like that everyday grind of just keeping them updated, making them feel valued, and helping them understand your mission and become as passionate about it as you are.

David Pisarek: You mentioned video. For everybody listening, when I started doing social stuff for the agency, I was really nervous. I would ‘hum’ and ‘ha’ over everything, every tiny little thing in the video. It took me a long time to get over that. I would record something. I wouldn’t look at it anymore. The one time, edit, post done, and I just… There’s something to be said for taking quick action and immediate action and just getting it done.

One of the things that I did that I tell all of our clients about, I’m going to tell all of you as well, is to do that first video five times. Delete them all, don’t use it, don’t ever use it, and then use the sixth one. The next time you make a video, do two or three. Wipe them, use the fourth one. You will get more comfortable with it.

But I think a lot of non-profit people wear 30, 40 different hats. All right, maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe it’s two or three. But there are small budgets. Everybody should have access to, or at least one person in their team, a phone. They have pretty good cameras, whatever they are. Nobody’s expecting Hollywood-level quality from a non-profit for a social media post.

In terms of video content, what have you seen that works really well for non-profits?

Sarah Suarez: Well, first, I’m going to tell you that I’m stealing that tip you just gave them because if I have a 30-second reel, I spent 30 minutes making it. I needed that tip as well.

Kind of, to what you were saying, I think that less polished content. Use your phone, encourage your volunteers or your team members if they see something really cool or even just something regular that maybe your social media followers would love, because it would make them feel like they see behind the scenes. Capture it.

And then, I think you create a share drive, and you invite them to upload the content. If there are people in it who need to sign a waiver, upload the PDF of the waiver as well. And then your person who handles your social media has this incredible bank of videos. That would make any social media person’s day, week, or year just have this bank of video content. But I really think it’s sharing videos of the people behind the scenes, maybe your program participants, if they’re willing.

Honestly, mundane stuff. For your stories, if you’re in an all-team meeting, take your phone and just scan around the room, have everybody wave. And that, in your stories, lets people feel connected. And it’s a behind-the-scenes look.

For events, obviously, there’s before and after and all this really cool stuff. But I don’t think it has to be very polished, and I don’t think it has to be something that is so groundbreaking that they feel like they’ve never seen it before. I just think it’s consistent video content, and it makes them feel a connection to your mission, which is really the foundation for all success on social media for a non-profit.

David Pisarek: What’s the saying? A picture is worth a thousand words, right? I say a video is worth a million words, right? A 10-second clip can get so much more insight and value for the person that’s watching it into the audience. It could be weird, random things.

There’s this TikTok channel that I follow of a car dealership. I don’t remember where they are. There’s a guy walking with a microphone, he’s got his phone like this and a microphone. All you see is his hand and mic, and he starts singing a song and then walks up to every employee to see if they know the song. It has nothing to do with what they do, but it’s about creating some rapport and some interest and showing some of that back-end. Here’s what happens. Here’s how we have a little bit of fun.

Not everything is always serious. I think that will shed a lot of light for anybody that’s interested in either you or your organization.

Sarah Suarez: Yeah. Authenticity goes a long way. And simple videos from your phone, they feel authentic to your audience.

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

Non-profits, so they figured out what day of the week. They figured out the time of day. They figured out, here’s the audience, here’s what we’re going to talk about, here’s the buckets of content. We’ve got this content calendar. They figured out who, what, and where, and then they went to shoot the video.

But realistically, there’s a time component to all of this, right? How can people repurpose content across platforms in a way that might save them time? Do they need to create new content for every platform?

Sarah Suarez: No. Well, I think… So I think repurposing content is not just a huge time saver. I think it’s really important if you’re trying to reach your entire audience.

As you know, different people like to consume content in different ways on different channels. When you think about repurposing content, I think we think about that in two ways:

Number one being, if I write this e-newsletter, can I then create a blog post off of that content for my website and then maybe four social media posts? And that way, yes, that’s great for me. I have all this content from one original piece, and your entire audience has the opportunity to engage, even if many of your social media followers aren’t newsletter subscribers. So it’s important to share it across multiple channels so that everyone has the ability to see it. And then, number two, in terms of social media content, I think we have to remember that on average, 10% of your followers will see any post you share. So, if you’re only sharing content one time and then it’s done, a lot of your followers have never seen your content.

There are certain pieces of content I would continue to redo and reshare over and over: your mission, your impact, and how to get involved.

But then, you can also look back on your analytics, maybe six months ago or even further back and what has done really well. If you had a post that was a carousel that did really well and resonated with your audience, maybe take the exact same idea and tweak it into a reel, and most of the hard work is already done for you, or vice versa. I do think repurposing content gets a bad rap because I think it is really important not only for the efficiency of your team, but so that your entire audience has the opportunity to see what you’re putting out there.

David Pisarek: I love that idea, right?

Social media is very fickle. Post something, and it ends up in the feed; seconds later, it’s just gone. If somebody is following two organizations or three friends, and that’s it, they’ll see it. Otherwise, you have to really be in the account on social around the time that it’s posted to really see it.

And I know Facebook is doing some weird things in their feed where it’ll show more popular content instead of more recent content. So, if you can work on building more engagement, if you’re posting to Facebook, you’ll end up being seen by more people just organically because of that. And I think most of the social channels work that way. They want to promote content that people are interested in. So when somebody is posting a comment to yours, reply back, even if it’s a thank you so much or a heart emoji or a thumbs up, like anything, because that’s more engagement on the post, and that should lead into the algorithm to get more views on your content.

Sarah Suarez: Exactly, yeah.

David Pisarek: Earlier, you mentioned collabs. I think it’s awesome for non-profit to collab with other non-profit, whether they’re in the same sector or not, because more voices is better for everybody always. But there’s also collaborations with A-lister, B-lister, C-lister, or people like me on the Z-list, right? Nobody knows who I am, right? Where you can interact with other people to help move mountains in that way. Do you have any thoughts on how to approach collaborations?

Sarah Suarez: Yeah. Well, it’s all relationship building. There’s more than one way to build relationships.

For example, I had a client who was… They were a regional organization, so they had sites in eight counties, and when they came to me, they had incredible offline partners and relationships with their mayor, city council members, and other organizations. And it just worked out so well that a lot of those people and organizations had a really great social media presence. So once I realized that they had a connection, I would reach out and support their content, and they would support our content. It became this really symbiotic relationship. It was so effective. There were times when the mayor would tag them in a collaboration post, and it would be a surprise to them, as they were just at the same event.

It’s so helpful for your organization, especially if you pick an organization that is similar to yours or local to yours, like the same community. Because then, like I’ve said in the past, you get this very targeted reach. All reach is good, but targeted reach is the best. So that’s really neat.

But I have had clients that are smaller that have offline partnerships that don’t necessarily translate online because maybe the other non-profit has no social media presence or something like that. In that case, you really have to build this into your engagement strategy.

You have to be thinking, when you go online to engage, that you’re seeking out potential collaboration partners, strategic partners. And what you want to do is support their content over time, build a relationship with them in the DMs, let them know that, with your actions, that you’re interested in a long-term relationship with them. And if things go well, it can turn into a collaboration post, or it can turn into you each just sharing great things about the other one or help amplifying each other’s posts or your stories.

There is a lot of power in working with other organizations or thought leaders in your space or community leaders, and it can really increase awareness about your work.

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

It’s important to let people know what you do. Not everything is always about monetary exchange. Not everybody should always have a post that asks for donations. We need to tell the story. We need to build emotion. We need to connect with people intellectually and emotionally to get them to care about the cause to the point where they want to engage in some way. The couch surfers, the thumb controllers on their phones. That’s solid advice there.

When we look at the last several months of what’s happened in the US and globally because of the political climate, shall we say, there are risks, and there are opportunities. What do you think non-profits should consider when they’re adjusting their social media strategy, or should they even adjust their social media strategy?

Sarah Suarez: Well, I don’t necessarily think it has to be a complete shift in strategy, but I do think we need to start rethinking maybe how we look at social media.

I’ve always looked at it from the perspective of building this wonderful, engaged, and supportive community for the organization, but maybe it’s time that we also need to look at it as an extension of our offline work, and especially for the organizations that serve marginalized communities, especially for the organizations serving immigrant communities, they might be getting an increase in comments and DMs that are asking for support or resources. So for those organizations, I would say it’s time to look at social media as another avenue to help our communities.

So, maybe, if you haven’t already, you can create a cheat sheet with resources so that when you get these questions, you can answer them. You can even use your frequently asked questions tool in Instagram or your saved reply. So that way, you can help more people more efficiently and more quickly. I would just say that if you get a lot of the same questions, maybe it’s time to share a post with that information. Obviously, your audience needs it.

So a shift from building this incredible audience that is a community of support for your organization to also needing to support that community and taking care of them.

Another thing that happened recently that I thought was really neat. I have a client who is in adult literacy. Adult education in the US stands to lose all of its federal funding with the current budget, and I was so impressed. They have one of the leaders in that space, the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, which shared information about the legislation and what it meant, and they included some incredible CTAs. Share this so that your audience can contact their reps. Here’s how to contact your reps and what to say, and they really activated their audience, and their followers took it and ran. Now I see that content everywhere. I see it shared, and new content is created from what I know to be their original content.

So it might be time to think about our communities differently in terms of how we can support them. But then, if necessary, if we’d spend all this time investing in community and building this wonderful community, maybe lean on them when you need this support, like adult education does right now.

David Pisarek: It’s important to have activism, I think, part of everybody’s cause. I believe that’s really one of the founding reasons that a lot of people start a non-profit, is because they see a problem, they want to fix the problem, and they’re trying to activate.

If you’ve got some community, even if it’s 10 people following you, it’s not always about the numbers; it’s about the voices, because who they’re connected to will lead to bigger things. Activate your audience when you need to. Not everything is alarmist, so pick and choose as well, but use them in that way. That sounds bad, use them, but they’re loyal to you. They care about your cause. They want to do something to help. So activate.

I think that’s something that a lot of organizations need to be thinking about as budgets are cut, at least for now.

Sarah Suarez: Yeah. Usually, they’re your followers because they want an opportunity to support you. You need to think about it as you’re giving them this opportunity to support a cause they probably love, and they’d be happy to do this.

David Pisarek: Out of all the organizations that you’ve worked with and the ones that you’ve met with that haven’t hired you and the ones that you’ve gone and done audits for and what you’re seeing online, what’s the one thing that you would tell everybody listening to this that they need to absolutely stop doing?

Sarah Suarez: So it’s an all-encompassing stop being spammy, especially on Facebook.

It started a couple of years ago, and I thought it would stop, but it hasn’t with the tagging of everyone or followers. And it’s a great way to lose followers because if they’re constant, every post is urgent for them to see. No post is important for them. Then it junks up their notifications. I have unfollowed organizations on behalf of clients because, as the person running their social media, I can’t get to the notifications I need to see. So I would stop doing that.

And then if you do tag, like even in Instagram, no one should ever be surprised by a tag. If it’s something they weren’t expecting, they should look at it and think, ‘Oh, I’m so glad I saw this,’ and it has to do with me or my organization. I would never tag a bunch of people just to get eyeballs on your post, which I understand it comes from a good place. You love your mission. You want everyone to know what you’re doing, but it can be off-putting. So I would just tag with restraint.

David Pisarek: Love that. Sarah, amazing insights into strategy, maximizing community, and navigating social platforms.

I hope that everybody listening has been able to get at least one or two really solid gold nuggets. I know there’s probably seven or eight. I’ve been making some notes as we’ve been talking, that I’m going to take back for me, my team and our clients as well. So thank you so much. Awesome pointers from you today.

I’m going to put you on the spot. So if you were to issue anybody listening to this or watching this. We’re on YouTube, by the way, everybody, and Spotify, I think, has video now also. So everybody listening and watching, if you were to give them a challenge, something you want them to do in the next 24 hours of listening to this episode, what should they do?

Sarah Suarez: Get on video. Make a video. I think that content generally outperforms, and, like we discussed, it helps your audience build a connection to you. So create a video. That’s something you can do right now.

David Pisarek: Okay, everybody make a video, tag Non-profit Digital Success Podcast on it. We’re here to help you, give you more insight. Sarah, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Sarah Suarez: They can follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn. They can also go to my website. I believe you are going to put in the show notes an engagement cheat sheet I have for them, so that if they’re trying to figure out the best way to go about engagement for their organization, hopefully that will give them the tips they’re looking for.

David Pisarek: Fantastic. We’ve got your free engagement cheat sheet. We’re going to have it on the show notes. We’ll have a link for The Social Puzzle, which should be easy enough. You go on and search for a Social Puzzle on Instagram. Sarah Suarez on LinkedIn.

Sarah, thank you so much for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast again. And to everybody listening, if you want any of the links, resources that Sarah provided, head over to our show notes page. Like I mentioned moments ago, go to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all of the awesome details.

So until next time, keep on being successful!