If you’ve scrolled through Facebook lately, you know nonprofits are increasingly active on the social-media site. How active?
The Chronicle recently spoke with Carie Lewis Carlson, senior director of digital marketing for the Humane Society of the United States, who says the other social-media sites barely register. It’s all about Facebook.
What percentage of your development budget is used for advertising on Facebook versus other social-media sites?
It is about 90 percent Facebook. It’s a lot. That’s new. That’s shifted from last year just because of its increase in effectiveness.
How much is your development budget growing annually for advertising on Facebook versus other social-media platforms?
We’ve had the same online-advertising budget for a couple of years, but the money has shifted away from trying other things. Before, it was 50 percent Facebook; now it’s about 90 percent.
We’ve also been successful in fundraising on Facebook without the fundraising tools and without paid advertising. We just recently started to separate those out.
So Facebook is the key player in receiving online donations compared with other social-media sites?
In terms of online paid advertising, absolutely. We track lifetime value, though, so it’s not always about the initial gift. It’s more of their lifetime spending to see how effective it is. But there’s no other platform that offers the targeting that Facebook does for us. It’s the right message to the right person at the right time. People offer so much about themselves on Facebook that that becomes the platform that’s most effective.
What percentage of your donations come through Facebook?
Last year, 10 percent of all online donations were from Facebook. That includes paid advertising, organic traffic, and the Facebook donate tool.
What kinds of messages work best on Facebook?
What works organically is, of course, tied to our existing audience. The stuff that works with them the most is celebrating victories, communicating impact, and what I like to call “fluff” — every now and then we’ll do a quick fact or something.
Also, because we’ve built this community of people who want to actually do something to help animals, anything we do advocacy-related is always a big deal on our Facebook page.
For paid advertising, Facebook ads are much more general. They’re targeted much more to attract new donors to the site. They coincide with our TV campaigns, and so they have a different goal in mind.
The carousel ads tend to do pretty well with us, especially with the animal-testing campaign that we’re working on now. Those ads are more geared toward explaining certain issues.
Are you raising money through Facebook using video? How does that fit into your overall strategy, and is it working?
Yes. We’re very fortunate to have a video team in-house that produces our videos and also animated GIFs and what we call cinemagraphs, where just one element moves. It’s a video but it looks like an animated GIF.
Anything that has video in it, whether it’s paid or organic, is performing better for us from a return-on-investment standpoint than plain text or a static image. That’s the way people consume content now, and more and more people are watching videos on their devices without sound. It’s really important for us to keep up with the trends and how people are actually consuming things.
We try to make sure that we capture their attention in the first three seconds of the videos and that it has subtitles. There’s a whole myriad of the best practices in that arena for us.
Q. If Facebook is Number 1 in charitable giving, what would you consider Number 2 and Number 3 in social media?
I would say Number 2 is Instagram, Number 3 is Twitter. I want to say Twitter is Number 2 because organically that is our second-most-used platform, but in terms of advertising, it has not produced really anything for us.
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
