Lessons from the Trenches - How NGOs Win on Facebook

Posted by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo

Facebook is an important “heartbeat” activity for many NGOs. Because we help not-for-profits improve their heartbeats and better engage online audiences with meaningful content, we spend a lot of time thinking about why some organizations get more likes, comments and shares on Facebook than others. So, we decided to put our experience and long-held assumptions to the test and back them up with some real data.

Last year, we embarked on a research project to answer this question: What types of content gets liked, commented upon and shared on NGO Facebook pages?

First, we identified 20 Facebook pages run by large and well-known environmental not-for-profit organizations across North America. On average, each organization had approximately 160,000 fans. While we only researched environmental NGOs, we’re confident our results apply to any charity or not-for-profit organization. For-profit companies will be interested in the results, too.

We evaluated the 50 most recent Facebook posts by each organization, which gave us 1,000 posts to work with. After doing a deep data dive, we compiled the results into five lessons on how NGOs can better succeed on Facebook.

The NGOs that do best on Facebook share links to others

Organizations that apply an open, networked approach to social media channels will engage their audience more successfully than those that only talk about themselves. In our study, the NGOs that performed poorly published lots of links to their own sites, and few to anybody else’s. 37% of all posts we looked at linked back to home pages and website pages while the top performing organizations regularly linked to other sites - mostly mainstream news articles about their causes - as often as they linked to their own websites.

2. Don’t Overwhelm Your Audience

NGOs shouldn't post too many links per day

You may think you post the perfect content for your online community but if you post too often, you risk alienating your supporters. Something that surprised us in our research was how little the top tier organizations posted to Facebook. They only needed to post once a day (including weekends). We also noticed that Thursdays had the highest average engagement, followed by Saturday and Sunday. So, if you haven’t been posting content on the weekend, that’s a tactic worth considering.

3. You’re Probably Not Sharing Enough Photos and Videos

How NGOs share content on Facebook

Of all the types of content we looked at - photos, videos, photo galleries, status updates and links - fans were likeliest to like, share or comment on a photo. We were interested to discover 18 of the top 20 most engaging Facebook posts were photos. In particular, our study showed climate change campaigners 350.org performed well, sharing professionally produced and thoughtful photos, infographics and videos. Videos also performed well but still only accounted for 11% of all the posts we looked at while photos accounted for 26%.

4. Emulate the Superstars

Surfrider does a great job sharing content on Facebook

Two organizations that stood out for producing engaging content were Earthjustice and the Surfrider Foundation. We highly recommend taking a look at these two organizations and paying close attention to their Facebook posts and social media channels as models to emulate. These two organizations do excellent work offline. It’s great to see that their real-world success extends to their digital channels, too.

5. Overlay Powerful Text on Evocative Photos

The best Facebook posts are photos

Of the one thousand posts we looked at, the top 10 were all photos with some characteristics in common:

  • All of the photos featured emotional or provocative subject matter
  • Most included a simple, powerful message in overlying text.
  • Most seemed to be taken, or touched up, by professionals.
  • Only one of the photos’ captions included an “ask” that users like or share the photo.
  • There was one infographic among these popular images, and it was very simple.

Jodi Stark, Healthy Oceans campaigner for the David Suzuki Foundation, took our research to heart and produced an image of oily seawater, and overlaid it with a powerful message about oil spills. Jodi writes:

“We posted this on Saturday (David Suzuki’s page had roughly 200,000 likes at the time) and in short order, we got 1,000 shares, 180 comments and 342 likes. The page was also liked by 1,000 more people this weekend. We can’t attribute this to the image, but we do know that with 1,000 shares, we got huge exposure to lots of new Facebook friends. We also got 3050 visits to the blog from Facebook (out of 4500 total visits) and 560 people who followed up and signed our action. In Facebook Insights, the post is currently second (out of 158) post for ‘engaged users’ and ‘most talked about for 2012.”

Using the web to extend the ways in which you communicate with your constituency and call them to action sounds like a great idea. It can be! But, only if you put a strategic framework and best practices in place that will support what may be a time consuming—though rewarding—heartbeats program.

Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo are partners at Capulet Communications, a Vancouver-based digital strategy agency specializing in web marketing and movement building. This post is excerpted from The Noble Arsonist: Stoking Fires and Igniting Movements for NGOs, Darren and Julie’s free e-book full of web marketing tips for non-profits and charities. They are also authors of Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook published by No Starch Press.