One Simple Way To Boost Your Nonprofit’s Visibility
Your nonprofit’s website is redesigned and up-to-date. You have a decent handle on your social media channels. You send out emails to your list regularly.
What else can you do to increase your nonprofit’s online visibility?
One easy, but important, step is to make sure everyone in leadership is visible online and on social media. By ensuring that your leaders are present on social platforms and on your website—and that they’re associated with your organization—you increase the likelihood that people will find you.
Boost your nonprofit’s visibility by:
Helping your leaders create LinkedIn pages.
Even if your CEO or programs director never use LinkedIn for themselves, encourage them to create a simple page so they can indicate their position with and connection to your organization. If they’re too busy, ask if they’d be open to a member of your staff creating one for them (with their approval on the final page, of course). If they’re interested in creating a professional page on another platform, such as Twitter, all the better.
Be sure to officially link their pages with your organization’s LinkedIn page. (You have one of those, right?)
Crafting engaging profiles
For both the website and for LinkedIn pages, craft engaging profiles for your leaders that emphasize their skills as well as the mission of your organization. Make sure leader profiles include:
Robust, active language. Banish the passive voice. (Replace “Julianna was hired as CEO by the board in 2013,” with “Julianna became CEO in 2013.”)
Include all the facts. A strong bio includes more than a title. It tells visitors who the person is, what they do, and who they serve.
Don’t over-emphasize qualifications. This isn’t a CV. Your leaders don’t need to list every last iota of information about their work history. The introduction should be warm and clear, with a nod to the values that led them to your organization in the first place.
Dig into the ‘why.’ Highlight the heart-centered part of your leader’s work to increase the connection between visitors to your page and your organization. Just because LinkedIn is a professional site doesn’t mean the language needs to be dry. Staff members can dedicate a full sentence or two to the values that led them to work with your organization.
Edit your profile to fit other platforms. Once your leaders have strong LinkedIn profiles, you can create profiles for other social media platforms. Be sure to look up current character limits and match the profile language to the tone of the platform—slightly more formal for LinkedIn, friendly for Facebook, casual for Instagram, clippy for Twitter.
Naming your leaders on your website.
Finally, make sure that every leader, including staff and board members, are named on your website. If at all possible, include a recent, high-quality photo of them, too. And make sure to keep this information updated whenever you have staff or board changes. You want your website and information on LinkedIn and other platforms to match.
Encouraging board members to include you in their profile.
When a board member includes your organization in the Volunteer Experience section of their LinkedIn profile, it automatically links them to current and past staff and volunteers. The more people are associated with you, the greater the likelihood that new people will find you.
Bonus: Board members can mention personal values in the About section of their page that align with your organization and add more details about how your organization fits with their personal philosophy or vision in the Volunteer Experience section. Linking appealing values with your organization highlights the quality of your volunteers and helps paint a picture of your organization.
