How-to: Use Twitter to Fundraise

31 January 2017

How-to: Use Twitter to Fundraise

Social media is a great platform to help you fundraise, it can help you to reach a wider audience and help to create a personal connection with your supporters. The two main social media channels, Facebook and Twitter, are both easy for beginners and great for organisations to communicate their brand.

Twitter is the perfect tool to help you spread the message about your organisation and help readers to truly understand your cause will. The more people that know who you are, the more donations your likely to raise.

To get started using Twitter to fundraise, we have put together a quick guide and top tips for getting started on Twitter to help you to raise money for your organisation.

Mini Guide to using Twitter to Fundraise

1. To begin with, if you haven’t already, you need to create your organisation it’s own profile.  You’ll need all the basic information such as an email address, password, contact details and profile picture (this could simply be your logo).If you’re an individual wanting to raise money on behalf of a charity, Twitter is still a great platform to fundraise. You can use your own personal profile to link to your events or donations page to tell your followers about the cause.  You can also tag the charity in question and hope that they retweet your post to help up the views of your post.
2. The next stage is to personalise your account and start creating content. Add a cover photo and ‘about me’ information to give supporters a brief outline of what your about. Be sure to have a link to your website so people can find out more or donate.
3. Now that you have a presence on Twitter, all you need to do now is keep it up to date by posting relevant content that will engage your supporters. You can create one off posts or schedule them in advance (on Hootsuite or Tweetdeck), but be sure to keep the posts regular. Visual content is key for interacting with your audience so post photos, graphics or videos to keep your wall interesting. People love seeing behind-the-scenes, exclusive content. Use the platform to create a personality for your brand.You can include posts on your future plans, targets and achievements. Keep a countdown of how far you have to reach your target, include interesting facts and stats and include information on how donations will help your organisations.Twitter is used more as an information hub than a story telling platform like Facebook. This means that, especially because your tweets are capped at 140 characters, that your posts are shorter and snappier. They often are just a way to get you to follow through to a link. Non profit organisations often use a mix of facts and figures tweets and ‘ask’ tweets where they directly ask for donations. This can be done in a manner of ways to keep readers interested. Things to consider in your ‘ask’ tweets are:

   -What command words work bets for your supporters, Donate, Help, Give?
   -Include facts that could encourage people such as, ‘It costs just £2 a day to provide…’
   -Inform them of how previous donations have help, such as, ‘Our last months donations helped to provide…’
   -Give stats showing success, such as, ‘We just need another £86 to reach target, please help us to succeed….’
   -Don’t underestimate showing your appreciation, such as, ‘We are truly grateful for our existing supporters, join the team by…’

4. The use of hashtags (#) on Twitter is a great way to get involved in the news and events happening in the world. Often popular, big news event information becomes trending on Twitter, which means everyone is talking about that particular thing. If you can take advantage of what people are talking about because it relates to your organisation then include relevant hashtags in your tweets. This way, people looking at that particular hashtag may come across your tweet, helping you to spread your message to a wider audience.

5. Finding the best times of day to tweet is important to ensure your post isn;t swallowed up in the business of Twitter. So think about when likely your supporters will be browsing the platform. Also consider the frequent of you tweets. You don;t want to send to many ‘ask’ tweets and seem too pushy. Getting a good balance is key to the using Twitter to fundraise.

Top Tips for using Twitter to Fundraise

-Understand your audience, find out when they’ll be spending their most time on Twitter

-Link to your website or donation page every time you tweet, always giving your supporters the opportunity to action.

-Have a good mix of factual, fun and ‘ask’ tweets

-Always try to add an image to your tweets as they’re more likely to get read.