In the Internet ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ (I just made that up), there are three main tools that you need to communicate with donors and reach new supporters – they are your website, your email list, and your social media platform(s).
Having an engaged and active email list is so much more powerful and beneficial for your nonprofit than having 10,000 Facebook followers or 500 Twitter followers. With all the recently announed changes coming to Facebook, and with the unpredictable nature of social media in general, nonprofits need to do more to ensure that they’re actively growing their email lists every single day. Thankfully, social media can be a great way to do this.
Here are 10 of my favorite ways that nonprofits can start using today to grow their email lists.
1. Encourage sharing right after sign-up
People are most engaged after they sign-up or make a donation. Ask them to share their participation immediately.
Our Health California encourages their new email subscribers to share a pre-written tweet or a Facebook graphic to their networks:
Facebook contests are a great way to build your email list, if you mandate that users give you their email address to be entered to win.
There’s no free software option (that I know of) to do this without a ton of manual work on your end. The Facebook contest platforms that I recommend are Wishpond, Agorapulse, and Heyo.
Road Scholar used Agorapulse to grow their email list with their #AgeAdventurously photo contest:
Green Planet, meanwhile, uses Wishpond to host their contests and capture emails from participants:
3. Use Twitter cards
A free way to get the most visual impact from your tweets is to create Twitter cards. You can attach these great looking Twitter Cards to any of your Tweets – completely free.
These tweets have to be sent from the Twitter Ads admin area – you don’t have to spend money on ads, these are completely free and you can gain more visibility by pinning a tweet with your Twitter Card to your profile page.
If you’re a MailChimp user, there’s a great tutorial on how to integrate the two platforms together.
World Vision USA use Twitter cards to make signing up for their email list from Twitter a snap.
4. Use YouTube Link Anywhere Cards
If you’re into video, you can use YouTube to build your list.
When you sign up for YouTube’s free nonprofit program, you can add “Link Anywhere Cards” to your videos.
Cards can point viewers to a specific URL (from a list of eligible sites) and show customized images, titles, and calls to action, depending on the card type. This means you can encourage people to sign up for your email list while they’re watching your videos.
You will need to create a YouTube channel for your nonprofit to add these cards to your videos.
The ASPCA uses YouTube cards to solicit donations, but you can use them to go to any URL you like:
5. Use YouTube video captions
You should also actively ask for email sign-ups in your video captions:
6. Use LinkedIn
Solicit email sign-ups directly from your company page description.
I recommend using your nonprofit company page posts to ask for email sign-ups a few times per month. You can also use LinkedIn to promote your Facebook contest and encourage even more sign-ups.
Read LinkedIn’s Nonprofit Starter Guide for help setting up and using your Company Page.
7. Use Instagram
Use the link in your bio to entice people to sign-up and stay in touch.
The Catskill Animal Sanctuary does this, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor:
8. Use Pinterest
Add a link in your nonprofit Pinterest bio asking people to sign up for your list – like P.ink does:
The ASPCA uses Pinterest to encourage supporters to take specific actions to fight against animal cruelty:
9. Create graphics
Create graphics encouraging people to sign-up for your email updates, using a free online graphic design tool like Canva or Crello.
For example, vertical images work best on Pinterest, and square images work best on Instagram.
10. Analyze efforts and improve with Google Analytics
Set up the free website traffic tool Google Analytics on your website, and find out which of your social media platforms are delivering the most email sign-ups.
You can track simple traffic to the email sign-up page, but taking it a step further, you can track the exact number of people who came from which platform and actually signed up.
To do this, you’ll need to learn how to create a goal in Google Analytics – Vertical Response has a step-by-step guide, How to Set Up Google Analytics Goals to Track Email Sign-ups.
Hopefully these tips will give you some additional considerations to help boost sign-ups for your organization in 2018.