The Nonprofit Social Media Toolkit Checklist

Is your social media toolkit filled with everything you need? This checklist has everything you need to excel on social media.

Effective nonprofit social media campaigns are built on a foundation of best practices and compelling storytelling. They include video, photos, stories, and influencers. Having a nonprofit social media toolkit is important for your in-house marketing efforts but it’s even more important when working with third parties, content creators, or influencers.

What’s In a Social Media Toolkit?

Your nonprofit’s social media toolkit will include resources from your traditional media toolkit as well as your branding guidelines. Your toolkit should be available to your supporters, partner organizations, and advocates. At its core, your toolkit ensures your messaging is consistent regardless of who is advocating for your organizations.

Purpose of the Toolkit

Your toolkit should be updated frequently based on your current campaigns. When creating and/or updating your toolkit, include the following information:

  • Campaign information, including dates and facts
  • Why the campaign is important to your cause and supporters, including data and statistics
  • Resources to provide additional context about your cause
  • Instructions on how the toolkit should be utilized by advocates and supporters
  • Points of contact

Telling a story about your campaign and your cause is the most critical component of your toolkit. This is the hook – the reason your supporters, advocates, and partner organizations engage with your organization.

Share your organization’s social media policy and make sure that your tone throughout the nonprofit social media toolkit is encouraging. It’s possible that some of your supporters and partner organizations may not have very much experience using a toolkit. Explaining the why behind the resources – the way social drives engagements and donations – can help make sure anyone using your toolkit fully buys into the campaign.

Consider creating a short video – 30 seconds to 1 minute – thanking your supporters and partners and expressing the best way to use the toolkit.

Assets: Brand and Imagery

These assets include high-resolution versions of your branded assets (like your logo) and campaign-approved photos and videos.

Branded Assets

Brand assets are the images, logos, taglines, and typeface that make it quick and easy for supporters to identify your organization. Branded assets are the core elements of your organization, such as:

  • Name
  • Logo
  • Tagline
  • Typography and typeface
  • Color palette (including HEX, CMYK, Pantone versions)
  • Slogans

High-Resolution Images and Video

Include a variety of videos and photos for your supporters to share – these are essential to a successful campaign and you want to ensure you’re setting everyone up for success. Providing the imagery ensures several things:

  • That any images associated with your campaign are owned by you or you have permission to use
  • Images and videos are of the highest quality
  • They are engaging, on-brand, and consistent

Don’t worry if you don’t have a graphic designer to create your campaign images. You can use a tool like Canva for Nonprofits to create branded, customized, and impactful images.

You’ll also want to include alternative text for each photo to make them accessible. Make sure you include multiple images that are sized appropriately for various platforms. While Canva makes it easy to create images that fit each platform, you may need to resize other images for each platform. No need to look it up though – just save this photo!

Social media image sizes vary across platforms. Each has its own dimensions.

For video, you want to ensure you are providing the native file and not just the link to the YouTube video. Videos uploaded directly to a platform get far better reach and engagement for one simple reason – social platforms prioritize posts that keep people on their site.

Your videos should always include captioning as well.

Stories and Testimonials

Storytelling should be at the heart of everything your nonprofit does and is a critical component of nonprofit social media toolkits. When crafting your story, you should consider visuals, brevity, using data, and evergreen content.

When crafting stories for a particular campaign, you should focus on one story. However, having shorter stories that support the main story creates additional social proof and allows your campaign to inject some variety into the campaign.

Blog Posts

This is a pretty simple one – provide a few suggestions for blog topics that your supporters can write about related to your campaign or your mission.

Pre-Written Social Posts

Write out any captions for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn ahead of time. Writing out tweets and captions for your supporters can help ensure that they don’t exceed the character limit, that accounts are tagged correctly, and hashtags are used appropriately.

The only exception to this rule is when you are working with influencers and content creators. While you still want to provide them with guidance and branding information, content creators and influencers have built their own communities based on their specific personality. If you have created a partnership with someone, allow their personality to shine through. This ensures content is authentic and perfectly crafted for their community!

Hashtags

Consider creating a campaign or organization specific hashtag for your supporters to use across social media. Hashtags can help posts be found, plus they quickly unify all campaign content! Be sure to search the intended hashtag ahead of time – you don’t want to use one that is already in use!

FAQ’s

Think about the questions your organization addresses over and over again and include the answers in your nonprofit social media toolkit. You should include broad questions about your organization and cause as well as specific questions related to this specific campaign.

Examples of Nonprofit Social Media Toolkits

Is Your Social Media Toolkit Ready?

A nonprofit social media toolkit is critical to ensure that your messaging is consistent across all platforms, regardless of who is championing your cause. Build out a template that you can update for individual campaigns quickly and easily and you’ll set each campaign up for success.

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