Fundraising events and activations is an extensive occasion for nonprofit organizations.
It can involve a great deal of effort to gather resources for achieving a cause. However, in the world of today, when social media marketing influences most of our decisions, actions, and inclinations, leveraging upon a social community to attain fulfilment of your goal appears to be the most appropriate method of raising funds for nonprofits.
Nevertheless, to build a community, and create an engaging social media campaign can be an extensive task, itself.
Moreover, the knowledge of how to do it right by choosing the most appropriate elements for a campaign defines the success or failure of it. And, as somebody said so right, insight is the greatest vision.
An insightful understanding of what your audience seeks online can be extremely helpful to ascertain the appropriate campaign model.
The recent observations of consumer behaviours over the internet has revealed that about 55% of social media users who are engaging with a cause online are inspired to take progressive actions for it.
It is to note that most part of the engaged audience establishes donation as the next call to action for their engagement. Seems like engaging your audience is what needs to be done in order to attain a compelling fundraising campaign on social media platforms. Thus, what can be better than a hashtag campaign, these days, to fetch engagement on social media?
Also Read: How Corporates & NGOs Use Social Media to Fulfill CSR
Hashtag campaigns in this scenario can play a crucial role to spread a word about your cause, and it can make the idea of your purpose viral. So, let’s see how nonprofit organizations should appropriately use a hashtag campaign for the purpose of fundraising.
But, before making a headway, let us know about the 2 prerequisites that these organizations should consider before designing their hashtag campaign.
#Well-defined Goal
Having known that, work can never be accomplished with an undefined goal, these organizations should have a well-defined goal to create a successful hashtag campaign.
To avoid the uncertain results of hashtag campaigns, organizations need to determine their objectives and have a definite goal.
Be it raising awareness, generating funds, or getting engaged with the organization’s social cause, having a clear view of what’s required is a crucial step to design a hashtag campaign.
#Targeted audience
Knowing your audience, specifically, the ones who have the potential to help for the betterment of the organization is another important condition to consider before creating a successful hashtag campaign.
You need to analyze the gender, age, and location of your followers by determining the click-through rates on your social page and website. Using this data, you can successfully design a hashtag campaign that aligns with the goals and objectives of the organization to raise funds.
Once you have achieved the prerequisite condition, it becomes easy for the organization to raise funds with these well-designed hashtag campaigns.
Also Read – Social Media Marketing Strategies for Nonprofits
Some important ways to use a hashtag campaign to raise funds effectively
1. Your campaign shall aim to tell a story & to create one, as well!
Just pitching your nonprofit fundraising ideas has become an outdated way of influencing people’s action to support your cause. It just doesn’t work anymore. Nowadays, the things that engage more and more social media users is storytelling.
After all, nothing can be more intriguing and engaging than a well-told story. Therefore, your hashtag campaign should talk about the why-how-what of your mission to create an impact.
It will allow your audience to connect to your organization and feel like being a part of the cause. Hence, it will lead to their motivation to follow you and create an impact along.
2. Create an insightful campaign with a unique hashtag
An insightful hashtag campaign, well-versed in the communication it needs to drive its audience, turns out to be a successful campaign.
Thus, the creation of a recallable hashtag is the ultimate way to define success and engagement in your social media channels.
While working upon the hashtag, you must ensure that it entails the various elements of your purpose, impact, and cause of fundraising in a catchy way.
Thus, every time your target audience will come across the hashtag, it will create a recollection of your cause and idea in their heads. Hence, adding the effect to a greater fundraising effort.
In order to come up with the hashtag, go through a process of thorough research and brainstorming sessions to ensure that the hashtag uniquely defines your brand.
Here are the examples of some ideal hashtag campaigns which made a stand in the history of social media marketing.
A) Always #LikeAGirl
B) Ice Bucket Challenge
Also, Read – Best Hashtag Tracking Tools
3. Bring it across people, the right way and make your audience apart.
When the matter is of engaging your audience with your hashtag campaign, the choice of the right medium of communication can make a great difference.
Instinctively, Twitter and Instagram appear to be the prominent social media platforms to run a hashtag campaign. However, did you know that there is a greater & more impactful representation tool built on these two platforms, which in turn ensure to intrigue your audience?
We are talking about live hashtag feed curation and display tools, also known as Social media aggregators for Hashtag walls in accordance with their integration with the respective social platform.
These tools can allow you to aggregate all the posts occurring on a particular social media network with a designated hashtag.
Using social media aggregator tools, this content is then aggregated into a single feed called Social Media Walls which is then used in diverse ways to magnify audience engagement and drive the attention of the users.
- Displayed on a digital screen located centrally during an event to gather public attention.
- Embedded on the organization’s website to boost engagement and interaction with the audience.
Thence, you can use a hashtag wall to create an impactful and experiential campaign by displaying the user-generated content from all your supporters over a common – humongous platform. Sounds like a full-proof plan to raise awareness and gain support, right!
*We offer an additional discount to the Nonprofit organizations. Create your first hashtag wall.
4. Attract your audience with visuals
You might face uncertainty in your audience engagement without having attention seeking content on your social media. Eye-catching and captivating images are the best way to attract the audience to participate in the hashtag campaign and give it a boost.
Visuals like images, videos, gifs, or contemporary artwork drive your hashtag campaigns to the point where it becomes easy for the nonprofit organizations to enhance audience engagement and raise funds.
5. Analyze the past campaigns that worked
Before creating a fundraising hashtag campaign, you need to explore your aims and objectives both horizontally and vertically. You must analyze the factors that led to the failure of the past campaigns that were started by other organizations with the focus of raising funds for nonprofits.
Apart from this, you also need to analyze the success stories of the other nonprofits to get the inspiration for designing a hashtag campaign that will certainly solve the purpose of your organization.
Also, you should measure your past campaigns using analytics tools to track your audience impressions, performance graphs and insights. Using these analytics, you can refine your next hashtag campaign to make it successful.
Also Read – How To Run A Successful UGC Hashtag Contest
Example of Successful Hashtag Campaign For Fundraising
#Runforautism2020
It is a hashtag campaign, dedicated to the children suffering from Autism. In this campaign, people are asked to take part in the virtual running event where they can run at their own pace and can choose the most suitable time for them. This way, they can contribute by running one kilometre at a time.
This nonprofit organization created its live widget using Taggbox to enhance the engagement of the audiences towards the cause and raise funds.
Also Read – Best Examples of Successful Hashtag Campaign
Over to you
Hashtag campaigns are a perfect way to engage your audience towards your nonprofit organizations which helps them to connect with your social cause. To raise funds, you need to use these hashtag campaigns in an effective way, so that it can drive the attention of the audiences.
Also Read: 10 Examples of Successful Twitter Hashtag Campaigns
