Ep 283 | Creating your Social Media Team

So if you've decided that social media is a strategy for your organization in reaching your 2025 goals, then it can't happen in a bubble. You can't have one person who's responsible for social media. You can have one person who's responsible for executing but for coming up with the content and creating all of the things that you're sharing. It needs to be a team effort. So today I'm going to share with you some ways to make that

easier and make it happen a lot more smoothly. So if you are the one that was responsible for social media, or if you are an executive director or development director or a program person who just really wants to increase your social media presence, but you don't know how to do it with your limited resources, this is the episode for you. I'm going to walk you through just some quick ideas for how you can come up with your content and how you can make sure that it gets

pulled together. So before we get to that, if you also want some help with your social media planning, download our 2025 social media holiday calendar. It's going to give you a ton of ideas and things that are just happening in the world that will give you great, fun content, things to think about. And you can get that at thefirstclick.net/resources, there's tons of other freebies that are there. But if you really want to knock social media out of the park in 2025

grab this calendar. It's 12 months of amazing ideas for you that everyone's going to be talking about, which helps grow your visibility, because everybody wants to see those cute puppies and those cute, you know, things that you guys are doing in your organization. So thefirstclick.net/resources, let's get into the episode.

You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast, I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern, each month, we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts nonprofits and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

So here's the tough love, right? When it comes to marketing for a nonprofit organization, the thing that I hear the most, no matter what the strategy is, is, well, that's not my responsibility. I am responsible for executing the thing. I'm fundraising. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. It's not my responsibility to come up with the marketing stuff. Now, yes, that is true. Whoever is responsible for your marketing should be guiding you a little bit in how you're going to pull

this together. However, when it comes to social media, those of us that are in marketing are out in the field. We're not talking to people on a regular basis, and so we don't necessarily have all of the information and the gold that you have when you're out there working. So we want to think about our social media plan a little bit differently and really coming up with

specific things that we need from people. And the biggest thing, if you are responsible for social media, for your organization, is getting out ahead of things, because the last thing we need is, oh, hey, yeah, we've got this thing tomorrow. I need some pictures. Can you give me that post like that doesn't work. What else does it work? Is we need more content. Have you heard that before? I used to hear that all

the time at a previous job. It is not the responsibility of people in programs and services in development to come up with the ideas or the concepts. They are not marketers, but it is the responsibility to help you with the stories, to help share the information and what they're seeing, the questions they're getting, so we can help each other out by just really cleaning up the communication and getting super specific.

So when it comes to your social media plan for 2025 we also want to make sure that we know exactly how the social media plan fits into that. Are we trying to get new people to register for events? Are we trying to just get more brand awareness? Are we trying to highlight some partnerships? Are we trying to build new partnerships? It might be a combination and more. So let's really be intentional about our

plan and our plan of attack. And so that's where the marketing, the marketing side of your arm comes in, is really kind of putting that plan into place. Now I love doing that in a good Google Spreadsheet, but you can also do it in your project management tool, but it all comes down to the core categories that you are going to be discussing for the year. And so I love kind of coming up with core months so saying, like, Okay, well, each month we're going to talk more in depth

about something that we do within our organization. So if I'm a child after school program. You know, we might figure out based off of the different social holidays that are happening, or awareness month. We might pick and choose what those categories are, right? Like we might say this month, we're going to focus solely on how we support the Asian Pacific, the API community. This month we might talk about mental health care and how we provide mental health

care services. This month we might talk about, I'm losing all of the ideas, but you get what I'm saying really kind of thinking about themes and how we want to talk about stuff can make it super easy to come up with content and help you plan in advance for the people that are helping build content for

you, right? Might have a Back to School Month, you might have a holiday craft month, you might there's the ideas are endless, but when you start to think about it that way, becomes easier to kind of put some thoughts into motion, and then we're going to think about the core content that we want to be creating then within that month.

So video is the thing. We want to make sure we're doing a lot of video. So it might be okay. We know that we want at least two reels a week, and we want to have some pre recorded things we can use for Facebook and Instagram stories and YouTube, right? So that might look like we need four videos a week. Okay, so that means we need 12 videos a month. Great. That doesn't mean they're coming to you, edited and ready to go. It means that they're coming to you ready for you to be able to put

together and publish. So now it's okay, well, of the two reels a week that we're doing, we want one to be programmatic. We want one to be answering a question about what we do or how

we serve, or donations or whatever. So then you can kind of divide it up between the staff and the team and the volunteers, and you can say, Okay, listen, I need Jill to give me a video 30 seconds once a month talking about how we support teens, and I need bill to give me a 32nd vertical on his phone once a month about a testimonial from a family that we've served. I need you so you can really build it out. We can get super specific and say, Hey, Bill, it's mental health

awareness month. So could you go talk to a family that we've served in this capacity, excuse me, and ask them to either write out that you read or give us an audio or something that is about how mental health care has impacted their life. Done? He knows I only have to do that one thing this month, right? And then you're utilizing everybody on your team very specifically to get you the content that you need, but you're giving them one or two specific things. Hey, could you give me two videos.

You can record them this week and we'll use them next month. On I want a big dog and I want a small dog, and I want you just to showcase their personalities and talk about who they are, how they got here, yada yada, yada. But if I give that specificity to a person and ask them to record that, I'm much more likely to get that information back. Then, if I just say, Hey, we are content. So while you're working today, could you just record some content that doesn't work. It doesn't get people

going. They're not marketers. They're not they're thinking about, okay, these are the things that I have to get done today in order to serve and build impact for this organization.

They're not thinking about, hmm, I wonder how I can promote what I'm doing today. That's just not how their brains work. So it's up to us as marketers to be specific and ask for what we need. Now, going back to we said, well, we decided that this was going to be the plan that we wanted to do. So then, as the executive director, as the head of the development team, as the

head of the programs team. It's up to you to kind of reinforce that, to say, I know that this is kind of an added thing as far as what you're supposed to do in your day to day, but this is going to help us get to this, to get to this, to to reach this goal. So by the team really getting on board and understanding the strategy behind it, and then sharing the load amongst a lot of people to create that content. It makes

things easier, and this isn't just with video posts. So you might have people that are not comfortable being on video, but they want to help. They've got great stories, they've got great information. So at staff meetings or in your regular emails, however, you're communicating with your core volunteers and stakeholders and team having something in there that's regularly saying, Okay, what's a cool story that you heard, what's a quick win, what's a question that you got

asked multiple times this week that we can answer? All of that stuff is goal for social media. But again, the people that are creating that content typically aren't involved in those conversations. What's a great win, what's a donor that we want to highlight, having some core questions that you're regularly asking throughout the week that people just know, like, okay, when I show up to staff meeting, I'm going to come with these stories or these photos. Can be really, really, really helpful.

It just creates that culture of supporting. Social media. Now, when I sit in on meetings with clients, I'm typically like, oh, you said that. Oh, my like, my brain is spinning.

So even things that you think are minute or not a big deal, if you have the right people on your team that are kind of helping you with your marketing and your social media, they'll be able to pull those and ask additional questions and say, oh, yeah, that's great. We can use that here. We can use that there. Who do I talk to to kind of flush this out and remember, the big thing with social media is it doesn't have to be posted immediately. We live in this kind of like fast paced,

immediate gratification world. But that doesn't mean that you can't use something that happened today, six months from now, if it fits in better with the strategy that you're talking about at that time. So that's why it's important to always be generating, always be having con content, questions conversations, always be taking photos and videos. Just just because you don't use them right now doesn't mean that you won't

be able to use them at some point in the future. So I hope that this is helpful, and how you can kind of create a culture around creating social media content for your team that's going to help you in the long run, really build out a plan and ask for things in advance. Give people time to pull things together so that they're not scrambling. Because this isn't part of their main gig, their main job. It's important for them to do it as a part of supporting the overall

organization. So let's help them, help us by being specific, being clear, being ahead of schedule, and then as the program services development, the rest of the support team goes, support your support your marketing team by giving them ideas, giving them the conversations that are happening, be open with what you've experienced, and share the amazing transformations that you're seeing from the work that your organization is doing. So this is a short episode because I want you to get to

work and it's more about mindset. Remember that your marketing team is here to support your organization, but they cannot do it in a silo. Support them by sharing the important things that you're experiencing. And I know that you're going to have an amazing time in 2025 creating social media content with ease. You can check out some more resources and additional episodes in the show notes at the first

click.net/ 283. I hope that you will subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss out on a single episode we're almost done with this year, which is super crazy, but 2025 is going to be incredible, and I know your year end giving season is going to be incredible as well. Thank you so much for listening and make sure you subscribe. I will see you in the next you.