Free Tool Helps Nonprofits Draw More Social-Media Fans

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Last year, Boston public broadcaster WGBH hosted two Digital Pledge Days aimed at getting supporters to make gift commitments online. For the first event in June, digital-marketing employees broadcast from their office throughout the day on Facebook Live, talking about the value of WGBH’s programming.

After the event, the team pored over analytics derived in part from CrowdTangle. The web platform tracks the performance of all an organization’s social-media accounts — how many “likes,” shares, and so on are generated by each piece of content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. WGBH used the data to tweak its plan for its second Digital Pledge Day in December.

It enlisted more of the organization’s fundraisers, mixed in Facebook Live video shot on location around the station and the city, and posted some programming after 5 p.m., which it hadn’t done in June.

The result: a 190 percent increase in donations on December’s Digital Pledge Day compared with June’s, says Tory Starr, the station’s director of social media. While December usually outpaces June in overall fundraising, the increase was far bigger between the digital days than it was in 2015.

CrowdTangle launched in 2011. Facebook bought it last November and since January has offered it to users for free. Though journalism outlets have latched on to the platform, it was originally designed for nonprofits, says Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and CEO.

“CrowdTangle focuses on making social media easy,” Mr. Silverman says. “For nonprofits that often have small staffs with small budgets, it can streamline a lot of the work and help organizations use social media to tell their stories and connect with their audiences in powerful ways.”

‘Dark Social’

WGBH began using CrowdTangle in June 2014, and nearly 40 of its employees use it regularly, Ms. Starr says. The platform has helped add about 50,000 fans to the station’s social media, a 238 percent jump.

“It’s a really great tool for newsrooms and for nonprofits and for any business that wants to get a broad overview of how they’re performing and how they can learn from others,” Ms. Starr says.

CrowdTangle users at nonprofits say the platform offers an important advantage: It can help track how an organization is faring online compared with similar or competing groups.

It can also help track activity in “dark social,” says Ms. Starr, meaning traffic that comes from unknown sources online. The platform, she says, is unique in its ability to help organizations track “what’s outside our own ecosystem” in social media.

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The station tracks other public-media groups’ social-media activity through CrowdTangle. Each month, Ms. Starr and her colleagues consult a dashboard that shows what is catching fire online.

“We look at that and say, ‘Oh, it looks like short-form video is really striking a chord.’ Or, ‘Look at their engagement rate for some of these links.’ It gives us insight into similar organizations and what is doing well and what we should be focusing on, if we’re not already.”

At Greenpeace USA, CrowdTangle is largely used to find and share content on other social-media pages that cover topics its supporters care about, such as climate change, says Dario Parra, a social-media specialist at the organization. The platform helps Greenpeace set the pace online rather than play catch up.

“It’s allowed us to find content that’s already gone viral and to actively search for it rather than running into it passively,” he says. “It allows us to show that content sooner and get more reactions and more engagement and therefore show up in more people’s feeds.”

“It’s a huge asset,” he says. When you’re consistently one of the first social-media users to share compelling content, “it leads to people coming to you as a source.”

Peer Benchmarking

Greenpeace USA uses CrowdTangle to track social-media activity by other environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, and by other Greenpeace chapters around the globe.

A new CrowdTangle feature, Intelligence, allows users to generate a report comparing their performance with five other social-media pages. Mr. Parra finds it useful and says it could be particularly helpful for smaller nonprofits seeking to get a bird’s-eye view of the digital landscape and where they fit in.

From the platform’s data, he says, “we get a sense of our community’s overall health and size. And it gives us a sense of what types of benchmarks to set for our own social-media strategy.”