How to use Instagram at nonprofits

More than most other businesses, your audience wants to know who you are. They want to see your personality and meet the people behind the doors of your nonprofit. Your biggest strength is the passionate community you already have. Take advantage of it.



Instagram is a fantastic place for you to show your audience who you are and what you do. Take pictures of your staff doing what they do every day. Take pictures of your volunteers working hard for the cause. Go behind the scenes to show your personality and what you stand for.

As a nonprofit, you probably hold more events and fundraisers than other businesses. This is a great opportunity to show your supporters what they can expect from your events. It’s also a simple way to promote your next event.

Taking pictures of your event is great, taking pictures of people at your event is terrific, but taking pictures of volunteers in action is powerful. Have your event attendees take pictures and use a designated hashtag to group all of these images together or use your handle when publishing the image. That’s right…Instagram allows you to use hashtags! If you’re not familiar with hashtags, they’re basically a fancy term for the actual # symbol used in front of a word or phrase on Instagram. Hashtags help categorize photos so that they can be easily found.

Should your nonprofit host a Twitter chat?

Did you know there are 400 million tweets generated every day and 50% of all Americans see, read or hear about a tweet daily? As you can Twitter has become a very popular and powerful social medium and can become a great marketing tool for a nonprofit. It can be used for customer service, public relations and a quick way to share key knowledge.

Another way your nonprofit can utilize Twitter is by holding a Twitter chat. By definition a Twitter chat is simply an interactive conversation ran on Twitter, held at a specific time on a specific topic.

To host a Twitter chat, you simply need a Twitter handle (eg. @yournonprofit), a hashtag, which is simply a dedicated hyperlinked keyword with the “#” in front of it (eg. #yournonprofit) and a pre-determined date and time. Aside from the time invested in planning and promoting them, Twitter chats are free on Twitter to do.

Twitter chats are a great way to have an organized conversation between a nonprofit and constituents on Twitter. They can be a great way to engage with donors and ask about their needs and wants and to announce a new service your nonprofit maybe offering.

For example, Apple may use the hashtag #iphone in a 30 minute Twitter chat to discuss with the Twitter community about new features on their newest smartphone and a way to have an open, transparent forum to discuss customer concerns and wants.

Twitter chats can be very affective in building loyalty on your mission or services but they need to be marketed ahead of time on other mediums such as in email blasts and on other social media channels. A spur of the moment Twitter chat probably won’t get the biggest following.