You Ask, I Answer: Followers as a Non-Profit Goal?

Today's episode, Sophia asks if a brand new nonprofit approached you and said, I want 5,000 Facebook likes, 1,000 followers on Instagram, and a thousand followers on Twitter all by the end of the year. What would you quote them or tell them? I would have to refrain from smacking them upside the head. Um, in all seriousness, uh, I'd ask them what their actual business goal is. What is it that they're trying to do?

Those metrics, those numbers are top of funnel metrics. They are uh a good indicator that you've got an audience, uh that you've briefly briefly earned somebody's attention, but that's it. There's there's nothing else you can do with those. Um a few years ago, my um my oldest child uh was setting up a a small online business experiment and had a social media profile or two that went with it. And at one point, uh it put up a uh piece of content, and they had fifty likes uh on that content.

They were so excited, like, look at all the the you know, the number of people who like this thing. Like, yeah, that's that's good. Um congratulated them. And they said, uh, how many likes should I be getting? I said, Well, no bank in the world accepts likes as a currency.

It's it they're good. More is better than less, generally speaking, but that's not the end game here. The end game is not acquiring likes on content. The end game is is having money, earning money that you can then use for other purposes. Every bank in the world accepts like accepts money, but no bank accepts likes.

And they got the point. But that's something that apparently this business person is unclear about. The goal of social media marketing is the goal of all marketing, and it's to drive business forward. It is to get uh customers in the door. So better questions for this person would be like, okay, so after you get, you know, however many likes on Twitter, then what?

What what happens next? What do you want people to do? Do you want you know website traffic? Do you want the phone to ring? Do you want people walking in the front door somewhere?

What is the the business impact that you're looking for? Yes, you're a nonprofit, which means you know you may not be focused on uh profit as a as a key operating metric, but what is? Is it volunteers? You know, people who are gonna to support your organization that way? Is it awareness of the cause that you're marketing?

Is it donations? Uh is it political lobbying? Uh depending on the nonprofit. A lot of folks, particularly in the nonprofit world, get um get not distracted, but they get focused on non-business metrics, non-impact metrics, because of the belief that the organization is not for profit. Uh all that means is that that's not the primary KPI.

You still do need to make money to do things like pay rent, pay salaries, uh, pay volunteers, uh, all the things that you you would normally use money for in a business. It's just that that's not your key operating metric. It still is important, and that's still gonna be one of the the primary ways you measure impact. So for this business, the question is what is the the key operating metric that they are based on and basing their business plans on, and then how do you work backwards from that back to the eventually social media metrics. So for example, if donors and and donations is a key metric because I used to work at a nonprofit years ago and you know their big thing was trying to land some big fish donors.

Okay, how do you do that? Well um you need to have uh a few that you can talk to in your Rolodex and then how do you do that? Well you need to have uh some relationships in the community well how do you do that? You need to have an audience within the community and so on and so forth until you get back to this was wow twenty years ago um until you get back to how about a website how about a website that people can go to and sign up for a newsletter and be aware of what the company's mission and goals were and how it was achieving those goals and how it benefited the community and being able to do so allowed the company to to achieve meaningful digital marketing metrics that eventually turned into business that eventually turned into yes getting that two or three big fish donors that could help fund operations for a fair amount of time what was interesting was that um I left the organization and then shortly thereafter they changed their operating metrics to be something much less business focused and uh unfortunately that did the company did not do well about four or five years later it it uh it went under because they took their eyes off the key operating metrics that let them operate. So with this company that Sophia's asking about, what do they actually want to achieve?

It's fine to have a top of funnel metric. You should, so that you know that you're getting attention. You need a middle of funnel metrics of some kind, some kind of intent measure. Even if it's something like newsletter subscribers, um or uh returning visitors to the website. And then you need that bottom metric.

Is it donations? Is it volunteers? Is it awareness of the cause? Whatever the outcome is that you are getting funding for, you need to be able to demonstrate. So that's that's why I tell this company.

They're not clear about their actual goals. And when you're not clear about your actual goals and you're trying to run marketing without that clarity, you're doomed. You're not gonna do well. Um so that's the solution here. Get clarity from them on their goals and then map backwards from those goals to the upper funnel metrics.

Good question, good luck, because there's a a mindset to be changed here that's gonna be a little little bit of education. Uh if you have follow-up questions, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.