The Lean Nonprofit’s Guide to Creating a 2024 Social Media Calendar
Learn how to make social media content creation easy throughout the year. Plus, customize a planning template for your organization.
Social media content creation is time-consuming. For nonprofit teams already stretched thin, social media is often the last thing on the to-do list.
And yet nonprofits can’t just ignore social media. Today, it’s a marketing baseline. It can be a powerful tool to raise awareness, generate donations, and connect with communities. A nonprofit with inconsistent posts and messaging does not reap any of the benefits that social media could bring.
With some dedicated planning time, a lean nonprofit team can map out its social media for the entire year. In this blog post, I’ll show you how. Feel free to use this post as a guide to follow during your team meeting.
Creating this social media calendar will help you plan what kind of content and messaging to post throughout the year. No matter what time of year, you’ll know the answer to the question: “What should we post about on social media?” During your planning session, you’ll also identify how frequently you want to post, what themes to hit on, when to collect content for posts, and more.
Just to be crystal clear, the point of this process is not to write every post ahead of time. It’s to have consistent inspiration and a clear messaging strategy so that you can quickly generate those posts when the time comes.
Ready to get started? Here’s a file that you can copy and customize for your organization. (Go to File > Make a Copy to save an editable version for yourself.) Use the rest of this blog post as a guide for your planning session.
Start With Strategy
What are your social media goals?
The first thing to discuss as a team is: What are your organization’s goals for social media? What would success look like? The answer to these questions will shape your social media approach for the year.
Here are some examples of goals you might set:
“We want to build awareness of our organization’s work.”
“We want to position ourselves as thought leaders in our domain.”
“We want to raise money through social media.”
“We want to get more people interested in our events.”
“We want to use social media to connect with one of the groups we serve.”
Optional: Once you have identified your goals, consider how you will know if you are meeting those goals. What can you evaluate on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis to decide if you were successful?
What are your priority social media channels?
Decide which social media channels you want to use. It’s better to have a strong presence on one or two channels than to try to be everywhere.
Here are some questions to consider when evaluating which channels to choose:
Where do your target audiences hang out?
Where do you have a strong following today?
Where have you had success in the past?
Which platforms would require additional work? (For example, you can share the same longer-caption content simultaneously on Facebook and LinkedIn, but you would likely have to shorten it for Twitter.)
By the end of this discussion, you may decide to sunset one of your social media accounts. You might also create an account on a new platform.
How frequently will you post?
There are best practices for how often to post on social media. But let’s be honest: unless you have a dedicated social media staff, few organizations can produce that amount of quality content. (4 Facebook posts per day? No, thank you.)
Assess your team’s availability and capacity to create social media content. Perhaps one team member handles social media and can spend 4 hours per week on it. Perhaps your team shares the responsibility, and together, you can spend 1 hour per week on it.
No matter what it is, establish the time commitment and block off that time in your calendars.
Use that to set a realistic goal for posting new content. Once a week on one channel? Two-three times per week on two channels?
Next Up: Populate Content
Look for starred dates on your organization’s calendar.
Go through your nonprofit’s calendar and identify key events, program dates, holidays, and more that you want to highlight on social media. Each of these events could generate its own mini-campaign (announcement, lead-up, day-of, and retrospective posts).
Think about:
Important dates in your organizational programming (eg, student graduations, performances, competitions)
Planned fundraising events
Giving Tuesday + end of year giving season
National holidays related to your mission
Design a messaging arc for your year.
A messaging arc is a series of messages that tells your organization’s story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
A year-long messaging arc for your social media posts will tell your audience a consistent story. It means that your audience won’t get mixed messages within a given week or month. This arc will help you brainstorm post topics while keeping your audience engaged with consistent themes.
You can develop a messaging theme over a month or over a quarter. After brainstorming potential themes, put them in an order that tells a cohesive story.
Here are some potential starting points for your messaging arc:
Use your organization’s mission, vision, or value statements. For example, if you have a 3-part mission and a single vision statement, you can dedicate one quarter to exploring each.
Use your organization’s programmatic offerings. For example, if you run 4 different programs, you can focus on one per quarter.
If you have a strategic roadmap, use the goals or pillars as inspiration for your arc.
Lastly, Get Tactical.
Identify which types of content you will want to share.
You have made a beautiful messaging plan for the coming year. But what will you actually post? Use this time to brainstorm possible content types:
Photos, written stories, or video stories of people your organization serves
Photos, written stories, or video stories of your organization’s activities
Look at your annual social media plan and use it to make a list:
How many photos will you need?
How many videos will you need?
How many impact stories will you need?
How many new articles will you need to write?
How many external articles will you need to source?
Figure out where you will get the collateral needed for the posts.
First up: What do you already have that you can reuse? You may already have a large photo library that will predominantly serve your needs.
Next, make a plan: Where will you get the remaining content that you need?
If you are counting on using photos from events, will there be a photographer? How will you get those photos?
If you want to make videos or reels, where will you get the footage? Do you have the capability to make those in-house, or do you need to find a vendor?
If you want to write blog content, who will do that?
You don’t need to have every piece of content ready at the beginning of the year. The objective here is to know what you need, how you will get it, and when you will get it.
Conclusion
Going through this exercise may take time up-front, but it will save you time throughout the year. Doing it as a team will get everyone on the same page and have everyone thinking about their role in your organization’s social media efforts.
One final thought: just because you map out your content for the year doesn’t mean it can’t change. Use your final document as a guide, and adjust as needed.
Once again, here’s a link to the template. (Go to File > Make a Copy to save an editable version for yourself.) And if you need a facilitator for your workshop session, send me a note!
Here are three ways I can help you:
Hire me as a facilitator for your social media planning workshop.
Serve as your nonprofit’s Fractional CMO.
Analyze and optimize your marketing strategy.
Interested? Send me a note.