Everybody knows it.
Running a non-profit is daunting.
Keeping your mission going with a small budget isn’t for the faint-hearted. It takes grit, tact, and superhuman stewardship to keep things afloat. You have to stretch every dollar to stay true to your mission and continue to make a difference.
Thankfully, social media can change all that.
Facebook, in particular, is a godsend for struggling non-profit-making organizations. Adverts on Facebook are cheap and effective so you can use them to spread the word about your cause and raise much-needed funds for your altruistic work.
This guide will show you how to advertise your non-profit organization on Facebook.
Why Facebook Ads To Promote Your NGO?
Facebook Ads are generally the same regardless of the industry.
There are many reasons nonprofit organizations should embrace Facebook ads as part of their digital marketing strategy.
The major highlight of Facebook as an online advertising tool is its targeting prowess. Using the platform's laser-precise targeting features, you can hone in on your target audience demographics and easily reach people who care enough about your cause to give to it.
Here’s the thing.
Most organizations are targeting the same audience and bombarding them with pleas for help. The result? The dreaded donor fatigue. With the Facebook targeting feature, you can target people by demographics, interests, industry, and more to discover new people eager to contribute to your mission.
Not only that. With over 3 billion Facebook users globally, the channel has a wide reach to ensure you won’t be short of donors or volunteers anytime soon.
Other Benefits Of FB Ads
The Initial Steps Of Starting A Marketing Campaign
In this section, we will cover everything you need have to do to start a marketing campaign.
Haven’t set up a Facebook Business account yet? No worries. I’ve got you covered, you can learn how to do it in this article.
Install The Facebook Pixel
As a modern NGO, I’m sure you already have a dedicated website for your organization. To successfully run Facebook ads for nonprofits, you must first install a Facebook Pixel on your site.
The Facebook platform has a pixel that connects your website and their channel. Its purpose is to share data about users between the two. This data includes:
How To Set Create A Facebook Pixel
You are done on the Facebook side. It’s time to head over to your website to complete the installation.
How To Install The Meta Pixel On Your Website
Congrats. You are now ready to run your first Facebook ad campaign.
Learn How The Ad Manager Works
FB Ad Manager has three tabs that form the base of your ad campaign. Here’s how the objectives section looks on the Facebook Donation Ads dashboard.
Let’s highlight the crucial aspects of the three Facebook ad campaign objectives:
Campaigns
Consider campaigns as the bedrock of your Facebook ad. Every ad set and ad you make springs from there. It’s here that you pick the strategic objective of your campaign. For instance, your objective could be to find new supporters, raise funds for a specific cause, lead generation, or drive traffic to your websites. Campaigns answer the question: what do you want to achieve with this advertising campaign?
Ad Sets
Then comes ad sets. An ad set deals with how you run your advertising campaign. Facebook offers superb targeting options for creating the right audience for your Facebook ads. You define your target audiences using factors like gender, location, and age. You’ll also choose where your ad will appear (ad placements), create a budget, and set a schedule for your Facebook ad. Remember, you can create many ad sets targeting many target audiences with varying budget options.
Ads
At the ad level, you create an ad that suits the objective you picked at the campaigns level and addresses the audience you defined at the ad set level. A Facebook ad has many elements, including headers, images, text, videos, and a call to action button to get people to act on the advertising message. You can create many ads in one ad set.
Choose Your Marketing Objective
Facebook ad campaigns start with the following objectives:
Awareness
For people to support your organization, they must know you exist. That’s what awareness objectives focus on—generating interest in your organization and its mission. To increase awareness, use Facebook ads to answer these four key questions your target audience has about your NGO:
Potential volunteers and donors want answers to all these questions and more. Awareness is spreading the word about your organization to as many people as possible.
Consideration
While awareness objectives make people aware you exist, consideration objectives make them brood over your organization. For them to do that and consider sending donations or attending your next fundraising event, they need more info about your nonprofit. What makes your NGO and what it does special? Facebook marketing tools at this stage help you create a campaign that encourages people to visit your website to learn more about you.
Conversion
Conversion is getting Facebook users to act and do exactly what you want them to do to drive your mission forward. Whether it’s sending donations, volunteering, attending your events, or signing up for your email marketing newsletters, Facebook tools and ads in this category help you clinch the deal.
Speaking of conversions, maybe you are wondering which Facebook ad types produce the best results.
Facebook Ad Campaigns For NGOs: Which Types Of Ads Work Best?
There are many types of Facebook ads, but two are proven winners for NGOs:
Promoting a NGO is all about getting people to act and get involved in your mission. This is why Facebook page post engagement ads are potent tools. It’s because they show how relevant your ads are to your target audiences.
Page post engagement ads increase:
You can use page post engagement ads to boost a particular post and generate excitement about your fundraising campaigns. Boosted posts get more volunteers and potential donors interested in your activities and visit your website.
Call to action ads drive action and get people to:
To drive all these actions, simply add a relevant call to action button to your ad.
When running Facebook ads for nonprofits, pay special attention to these two types.
5 Special Ad Categories For NGOs
A word of warning: Facebook needs to sort out certain ads from the rest. If your ad falls under these four Special Ad Categories:
I’ll explain briefly what they usually cover:
Credit Opportunities
Adverts that promote credit cards, offer personal or business loan services, auto loans, mortgage loans, and long-term financing. Brand ads for credit cards, irrespective of specific offers, also fall into the same hat as long as the ads promote or directly link to a credit opportunity.
Employment Opportunities
Facebook ads connected to an employment opportunity, it’s restricted. This includes anything tied to professional certification programs, internships, and part-time or full-time jobs. Job board promotion services, aggregation services, and company job perks ads, regardless of specific job offers also fall under this category.
Housing Opportunities
Ads that promote housing-related opportunities like appraisal services, home equity, housing repairs, mortgage loans, homeowners’ insurance, mortgage insurance, and home or apartment rental. This restriction excludes Facebook ads that educate people or housing providers about their rights and responsibilities under fair housing loans.
Social And Political Issues
Any ads made regarding or on behalf of political figures, public office candidates, political parties, or is related to election to public offices. Also, ads that include voting participation encouragements, referendums, or election campaigns will be deemed political advertising. For transparency and accountability, marketers who want to run campaigns related to politics and social issues must get permission from the countries where they want to run the ads.
If you create ads in the above categories, Facebook may disallow the ads in question or demand you insert a “Paid for by” disclaimer and agree to have the ads displayed in the Ad Library for seven years.
Facebook put these limitations on NGOs so that they don’t:
Most nonprofits do their best to toe the line so Facebook doesn’t disapprove of their ads.
Pick Your Demographic
Facebook allows advertisers to market based less on keywords but more on interests. This is more powerful as people with an interest in a topic are more likely to engage with your ads, which drives more conversions.
To set up your target demographic for your Facebook marketing campaign:
Go to the audiences tab where you will see three options:
Consider picking your audience based on adjacent interests. You can browse these interests or make suggestions in the search bar.
Split Test Your Creatives
No matter how good you think your Facebook ads are, they need to go through split tests, also known as A/B tests. A split test is a comparison between two elements of an ad to discover which one performs better than the other.
You can use split tests to:
To perform a split test, go to the Ads Manager Toolbar. It has all current ad campaigns or ad sets you can base your tests on.
Here’s how you go about it:
Bear in mind that you can duplicate tests by selecting Custom. This allows you to duplicate an existing campaign or ad set and edit its variables in the new test Facebook ad campaign.
Split tests help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their tactics and keep improving their ads to get more engagement and donations.
Prepare Your Adverts For The Public
After deciding on your Ad Set and naming your campaign, it’s time to work on preparing your ads for public display.
To do this, go to Conversion Event Location and select Facebook Donation.
At this point, can select your ad placements, delivery, audience, budget/schedule, bid strategy, and optimization.
For ad placement, these are all the available options:
Source: Causevox
No idea about the best place for your ad? No problem. Facebook can do ad placement automatically using its proven and highly effective machine learning algorithm.
Then there’s the budget and schedule section.
For budget, you have two options: daily budget and lifetime budget.
With a daily budget, you choose how much you want to spend per on your campaigns for 7 days. This keeps a tight leash on your scanty advertising financial resources. As for a lifetime budget, you tell Facebook about how much you want to spend for the entire campaign and they take advantage of bidding opportunities without daily restrictions.
Have little experience running Facebook ads? Then we recommend you opt for a lifetime budget, so Facebook takes care of everything for you.
5 Tips For Maintaining A Great NGO Ad Campaign
In this section, we will cover the best strategies for advertising a NGO and what it does. Use the following tips to reach and engage users so they donate money towards your mission and partner with you in your activities.
Keep A Healthy Post Schedule
For your organization to be visible, get your message across to your audience, and court potential supporters, you must post regularly.
Post up to 2-3 times per week.
Keep a buffer of posts using Facebook's Ad Scheduling feature.
Not only should you post consistently, but also vary the ad formats.
Alternate between carousel, single image, single video, and slideshow ads so you appeal to everyone in your target audience.
Boost Your Posts On Facebook
A boosted post is a post that’s already in your Facebook timeline that you want to boost through paid ads to increase its impact on your audience
Boosting a post:
You can boost a Facebook post for only $1 per day.
To find out the posts that you can boost, check your Meta Business Suite to identify high-performing posts since Facebook Analytics is no longer available.
Stay Engaged With Your Audience
To boost conversions, stay engaged with your audience.
You can respond to the comments under a post as soon as it's boosted or promoted on the Facebook Newsfeed. This makes the audience warm up to you and be more likely to click on your Facebook ads.
Stay alert and grab every opportunity to interact with your audience.
Be nice. Be warm. Be interesting.
And, whatever you do, don’t be rude, otherwise, you will offend people.
Be Timely With Your Facebook Ads
A Facebook ad that’s released at the perfect moment gets maximum engagement and hikes conversion rates, which ensures you get the best value from your small budget.
To be timely, start creating Facebook ads during holiday seasons that your audience cares about, e.g. Women's Day, Christmas, and Human Rights Day. Your ads will get more attention and clicks.
Also, when there is a significant incident around your topic, get your sponsored posts out there for more exposure.
Use The Call To Action Button Whenever You Can
A call-to-action ad focuses on one goal—urge people to take a specific pre-defined action that’s important to your business.
For example, you may want people to donate money, sign up for your email marketing newsletter or register for an event.
A short, memorable and punchy bit of text should precede the CTA button that gives extra appeal to the whole ad. Most of all, the button text itself must be clear and direct so users know exactly what you want them to do.
Here’s an effective CTA button from Cats Protection.
The call to action is exceptional because it’s:
Another example of an effective CTA is from Ronald McDonald House Charities Of Richmond.
Two things stand out.
There is minimal text on the advert. All the attention goes to the images showing the families that need help. This touches the users to take action.
Also, the text around the CTA urges action ‘secure everyone now’. This supports the ‘donate now’ button. More users will click it.
Facebook Ads For Nonprofits: A Vital Part Of Nonprofits Digital Marketing Strategy
Advertising your nonprofit on Facebook can pay dividends.
To sum up, to stand a chance of getting a huge payoff from your advertising efforts, have a simple goal for every campaign you run. Align the goal with the needs of a clearly defined audience with specific demographics. Finally, get creative with the advert itself.
Leverage Facebook advertising today to get the money (and volunteers) you need to continue making a lasting impact in people’s lives.
