How many of you are tired of wearing the Social Media Manager hat? I wish I could get a show of hands right now…. I know I’m not alone in this. As an ED of a small shop, there’s always so much pressure to create new content, show up consistently, and have active social media accounts.

It can be so exhausting to keep up with it all. And I’m here to tell you: it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right templates and processes in place, you can get ahead. Or—at the very least—take things more than one day at a time.

Here are my 4 favorite content planning tips to get you started.

Planning social media content for your nonprofit

Before we dive in, let’s level set. Why are we spending so much time and effort on social media? To acquire new donors? Make the Board happy? Think about it: what is your organization’s motivation for being on social media?
If you don’t know the answer to that question—or you’re tempted to say something overly ambitious like “acquire 100 new donors this month”—it’s time to take a step back. Take out a pen and paper and ask yourself:

What are our goals for being on social media?
Who do we want to connect with on social media?
What’s the next step a follower might take from our social account? (Hint: it’s usually not to donate)
What kind of content will lead them to subscribe to our email list or sign up to volunteer?

Make sure you have your content strategy in place before you get to creating your content. Understand your goals first. Then, you can make sure you’re really sharing relevant content for your audience.

Tip #1: Start with a template

I don’t know about you, but when I went to create my social media posts for the first time, I was SO intimidated. It’s a lot to think through! The text, the design, the scheduling. What should I share? How often should I share?

No need to open a blank document and carve a brand new path. Someone else has already been in your shoes and figured it out. Here are some ways to figure out your templates:

1. Look at what other organizations are doing.

What kind of content are they sharing?
Do they share a tip every Tuesday? FAQ Fridays?
Are they sharing 2 volunteer spotlights a week?

Now ask yourself: what can you implement for your organization? Are there any theme days you want to use? Take inspiration from the accounts you love following (instead of trying to make things up as you go_.

2. Grab my 30-day content calendar.

Here are 30 solid post ideas you can steal and accommodate to what makes sense for your organization and your content strategy. Skip the leg work; your future self with thank you.

3. Set a process.

Every single post goes through the same stage: drafting, editing, selecting images or designing graphics, and scheduling. We never want to take a minute to plan for these things, but the time you put into setting a process is time you’ll save later. Like author Herbert Lui shared at Fast Company:

“With each hour we spend working on our work — working on our personal infrastructure, we’re potentially saving dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours on future labor.”

We ALL fall into this trap of thinking we have to start from scratch on social every single day, but we really don’t. Create a process or infrastructure and use templates to save yourself time.

Tip #2: Pick content categories

Picking content categories is one of my favorite tips because it’s all about really SERVING your audience and getting creative about what to share. Promoting over and over again is NOT how you gain traction on social media. Social media is all about educating, starting conversations, and inspiring your audience. Here’s what that might look like for a nonprofit:

Education might mean sharing articles and spreading awareness about an issue related to your work
Engagement could mean sharing some behind the scenes photos and starting a conversation with a fun question
Inspiration could be spotlighting volunteers or sharing an impact story

Let’s walk through an example. Let’s say you’re a nonprofit that runs an urban farming and youth development program. Off the top of your head, you might think your topics would be those two things - urban farming and youth development. But there’s so much more you can serve your audience with!

If your audience is interested in these two topics, chances are they’re interested in other similar topics. Like sustainability, mentorship...maybe food insecurity in the city. So think about some topics your audience might find value in.... What are some topics that:

Add color to the work you do
Demonstrate the importance of what you do
Align with your mission and values

Instead of saying you’re committed to sustainability and youth mentorship, SHOW IT. Share studies, recent news articles, and podcasts about those topics.

Tip #3: Keep track of inspiration

How many times have you seen something you loved online, then when you got back to find it you have NO CLUE where you saw it.

Here’s the situation: you come across a carousel you LOVE on Instagram — and you know something like it would be PERFECT for your End of Year campaign. But after you scroll on, the thought or idea completely disappears. It happens all the time; we feel inspired by what we see, but the content slips through our fingers.

Start to gather inspiration while you scroll.

You need a method for collecting and keeping track of ideas and inspiration. Whether it’s Trello, Asana, your notes app, an album of screenshots on your phone... Do SOMETHING to keep track of the content you’re inspired by.

You don’t have to do anything with the ideas you’re gathering anytime soon. But, this way, you’ll have the inspiration to draw from the next time you’re feeling stuck or planning a campaign.

Snag 100 captions to make content planning easy.

Tip #4: Repurpose your content.

How many social posts do you read all the way through? How many emails do you read word-for-word? Your audience skims as much as you do, and repurposing is a way to serve your audience with the information they NEED. Without your message, they’re not going to take action. They need you to keep sharing BEFORE they decide to subscribe, attend an event, or donate.
I’m not saying you share the same 5 posts every day and call it engagement. Instead, be strategic about how you space things out. As an example, let’s say you go to my content planning workshop and now have 3 months’ worth of content ready to go. Great. Solid.

Now, what happens at the end of those 3 months? Start a whole new batch of 3 months? NOPE. More or less, you can then plop those posts into your schedule and recycle those three months again.

And repurposing goes for different types of content too. Say you have a blog post. You can turn that one blog post into a dozen social posts, a handful of emails, and more!

Content planning builds on itself

Every piece of content you create will become a part of your growing library of captions to use in the future. Don’t worry too much about the content repurposing machine you’re building. Start from where you are.

My 4 favorite content planning tips