6 Dos and Don’ts When Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

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Early this year, Des Moines Performing Arts ran a Facebook ad campaign hoping to raise $5,000 to buy 2,000 copies of The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, for a children’s arts-education program. Participants would read the book in school and then attend a performance of the play.

The ads caught the eye of a major donor, who contacted the Iowa group and made a $2,500 gift.

Her contribution brought the campaign to its goal, but that’s not all. As the group’s development director, Cherian Koshy wrote in an email, “Most importantly, she’s committed to substantially funding similar projects. That was the real win for us.”

Since Facebook changed the algorithms last year that determine which updates appear in its News Feed and Instagram app, making it less likely that a nonprofit’s posts will appear, some groups are instead using ads to get donors’ attention.

Now less than 4 percent of a nonprofit’s Facebook followers see unpaid posts, according to Ali Glazer, a digital advertising strategist at Whole Whale, a marketing agency. So the days when nonprofits could reach a sizable group of their followers on Facebook at no cost are over. And Instagram also now prioritizes content that it determines to be of personal interest to users.

As Glazer puts it, “The whole pay-to-play thing just isn’t really optional anymore.”

We asked fundraising experts how nonprofits can make the most of an investment in social-media advertising. Here’s what they recommend.

Focus on new donors.

By uploading data profiles of current supporters to Facebook and other social-media sites, charities can target ads to potential supporters who have characteristics similar to their known audience.. “Technology has come such a long way in the past two years that it’s becoming a more and more cost-effective way for organizations to really scale up their programs and find new sources of donors,” said Liz Ertner, senior vice president at M+R, a nonprofit communications consulting firm.

Use online ads to complement mailings.

Social-media ads can complement direct mail by planting a seed in recipients’ minds before a fundraising appeal arrives in the mail.

Des Moines Performing Arts targets donors who are due for renewals with Facebook and Instagram ads about upcoming productions, and an event calendar follows in the mail. The ads serve as a “subtle trigger” to remind people that a charity that relies on membership fees is bringing these cultural offerings to the community.

Koshy said these social-media ad campaigns have resulted in “a sizable increase” in the number of donors who renew their membership at a higher gift value.

Cancer Research Institute

Don’t just ask for money.

Koshy and other fundraisers stress the importance of using ads to raise awareness of your work before you ask for money.

For example, Des Moines Performing Arts spends about two months targeting potential donors with Facebook and Instagram ads that highlight the charity’s results before showing them an ad that seeks donations. A key to success is to use ads not just to raise money but also to raise awareness of your work., says Alice Northover, senior marketing manager at the Cancer Research Institute.

Tailor ads to your audiences.

The Cancer Research Institute uses Facebook ads for three reasons: to raise awareness of its research and build name recognition; attract new donors; and prompt people who haven’t given in a while to contribute again. Each of these audiences tends to respond to a different type of ad.

For example, potential donors, who often make their first gift after a friend or relative dies from the disease, might receive a message about the charity’s goal to “improve the lives of people with cancer.”

Inactive donors, on the other hand, are likely to see “a video or an interesting article or something that would show that we are still doing great work and still worthy of their interest,” Northover said. Ads seeking donations come later, she says.

Don’t pester people.

Most fundraisers understand they can’t win over every potential donor. That principle holds true for social-media ads, too. The digital advertising team at the Sierra Club follows the axiom, “We don’t have the right to disrupt, but we do have the right to earn attention.”

“Retargeting tools,” such as Facebook Pixel, allow organizations to track those who click on an ad or visit a website. You can easily use that data to continue showing those people your ads in hopes they will sign up for emails or give.

But use those tools judiciously, cautions Andre Sternberg, associate director of digital advertising at the Sierra Club. “Retargeting is something that creeps people out. People find it annoying.” So don’t overdo it.

Remember, Sternberg says, to measure the success of an ad by the number of newsletter sign-ups, donations, or video views it yields — not the number of times a user sees it and does nothing.

Commit to a multi-month campaign.

Analyze data on your supporters to understand how they use social-media platforms and then place ads on the networks where they spend time. Commit to a longer campaign so you can amass enough data to analyze the performance of the ads. An advertising campaign should run at least three months to encourage testing and innovation, says Ertner at M+R.

“If you’re only running something for a week, you’re not really giving much time for the algorithm to ‘learn’ and benefit from that data,” she said. In other words, more interactions with an ad fine-tune the performance of the algorithm so that fundraising appeal reaches more people who are likely to donate.

For example, after a few months of one campaign, Des Moines Performing Arts noticed that Instagram and Twitter users weren’t clicking on ads featuring arts-education stories, but Facebook users were, says Koshy.

The charity reviewed its demographic data and realized its supporters on Facebook were generally older than those on Instagram and Twitter.

In response, the group highlighted children’s arts-education programs on Facebook, where supporters are more likely to be parents or grandparents. On Instagram and Twitter, the ads highlighted “the arts as an opportunity for social change,” which appeals to young supporters.

More nonprofits are realizing that as the social-media landscape shifts toward advertising and away from basic communication, they’ll have to work harder — and pay more — to reach their audience.