How to Use Social Media to Raise Awareness of Local Charitable Causes

The internet has quickly grown to be one of the best modern resources of the 21st century. From online video hosting, to online banking, to social media. The internet helps to simplify our ever-growing lives, and helps to easily build strong communities. The internet, especially the various popular social media platforms, also helps to make advertising and awareness much easier. But how do you go about utilizing this connectivity to raise awareness for local charities?
Look no further than this comprehensive guide, as we explore the many ways that we can leverage the benefits of social media to help raise awareness for local charitable causes!

Get Posting To Raise Awareness:

Right away, one of the easiest things you can do, to help shine a spotlight on local charitable causes, is to post about them frequently, and wherever you can! Make a Facebook post where you highlight a recent donation you have made, and influence others to do the same, using Facebook’s built-in ‘Raise Money’ function. 

Maybe you could make a photo post on your Instagram account, where you share your recent experiences with a charity, alongside enticing and joyful photos of you interacting with them, perhaps at a local festival or another event, or perhaps a time that you have sponsored them at a sports event!

On Twitter, you can share short experiences that you have had in interacting with a local charity. Make them short and enticing to draw the eyes of other users, and increase your chances of being shared around. Adding photos can also be good to draw users’ eyes. And don’t forget to leverage hashtags and location data in your favor! Add numerous relevant hashtags to your post. If the charity has its own social media channels, make sure to tag them directly, and make sure to add location data to your post, so that people within your local area will be more likely to see it! This can be done on Instagram too.

Write With Purpose To Raise Awareness:

One of the best things that you can do on social media to help out a local charitable cause, is to entice other users into interacting with these causes directly. Cater your social media posts accordingly. When writing about a local charity, or your recent experiences with them, make sure to use carefully selected wording that will entice the reader to click on links. These are generally referred to as a ‘call to action’. A call to action can lead to more people being led to assist with a charitable cause, without properly realizing it. 

You might also want to make use of the key tenets of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google will utilize algorithms that seek out the most relevant online content based on the search query. If you cater your social media posts according to SEO rules, which make your content more likely to be picked up, and promoted by, social media platforms, then you will be more likely to help a charity out. Aim to draw people that are searching for such things as ‘local charities’. Search engines are particularly drawn to promoting tweets, due to their short and concise form.

Get Sharing To Promote Awareness Of Local Charities:

One of the absolute easiest things that you can do today to help out your local charities is to share as much content as you can! Use Facebook’s built-in share function to share local news stories, or posts from local charities, to get such content promoted directly to your online friends. On Twitter, share local charity posts, infographics, and local stories, to help promote awareness. And even on Instagram, you can help out in little ways, by sharing charity content via your story, either call to action to donate, or posts that highlight modern problems that local charities seek to provide aid with. 

Social media platforms thrive off of constant sharing and clicks. Posts that generate a lot of clicks, shares, or comments will, usually, be far more likely to be promoted to others, such as showing up earlier on Facebook timelines, or Instagram and Twitter posts showing up to users that don’t even follow you! Make sure to share local charity posts as much as you can, so that they can generate interaction, and thus will be more likely to be favored by social media algorithms. 

How Can Charities Use Social Media Themselves?

Many charities, especially those located entirely within a local area, are likely to run their own social media pages to help their efforts. These pages are great for these charities, as they can increase their own awareness, and develop a positive rapport with the people that follow them, through sharing photographs, videos, and text posts highlighting the work that they do, and the impact that it has. 

How Can Charities Increase Their Social Media Donations?

Social media platforms thrive off of interaction between their various users and pages. The more interactions that a person or page has with other users, the more likely they are to be pushed toward the top of user feeds. Charities can leverage this by enticing people to interact with their content, such as by asking for responses in comments, sharing other content, and even hosting giveaways, which positively ramps up interaction, and thus a charity’s awareness. 

What To Say When Asking For Donations?

A sad fact of life is that getting people to part with their hard-earned money is highly difficult. Unless we use the right words when advertising a product or service, or even asking for charitable donations, getting people to actually part with their cash is quite a challenge. As a result, if you want to help raise awareness for a charity, then you need to make sure that your wording encourages donations. Some charities suggest using the word ‘Support’, instead of ‘Donation’ to further drive home the impact that their donations will have, without presenting the idea of parting with money.