Why Nonprofits Should spend 99.9% of their advertising dollars on Facebook Ads

As a nonprofit, you are stuck between the proverbial “rock and a hard place”. You need to gain visibility in order to attract more donors, volunteers, and participants. Yet, you get queasy with the idea of spending donor dollars on advertising.

So what do you do?

If you are on a very tight budget you should never throw your money at advertising ……. unless you can see if your ads are accurate.

In the “olden days” before the Internet, and even into the early days of Netscape, AOL and Google there were no effective ways for nonprofits to track their return on investment. You closed your eyes and hoped the newspaper ad, billboard, or banner ad you placed would be successful. Whatever that meant.

In today’s world, of course, everyone is focused on online advertising. Web banners, Google Adwords, Digital Ad Networks, Boosted Posts by Facebook all jockey for your ad dollars. If you are careful with your money you should use none of them. NONE OF THEM

What Advertising Should I Use?

The only advertising platform you should consider using is Facebook Ads. Why Facebook ads? Here are seven advantages of using Facebook Advertising

Facebook Ads Are:

1. Targetable

You can stop covering your eyes. Facebook advertising lets you target who you want to target. Facebook ads give you had a head-spinning amount of control on who you want to target.

Here are just a few of hundreds.

• Your email lists
• People who like your Facebook Page
• Past Donors
• Watched your videos on Facebook
• People in your zipcode
• People interested in similar organizations
• Age, Gender, and other demographics

This list could go on forever. You get the gist, there are plenty of targeting options.

2. Measurable

Facebook ads will tell you when an ad has converted a viewer into a donor, program registrant, lead or pretty much anything you want. This tells you exactly how much you are paying for each new donor or registrant. This is crucial for a non-profit as it helps them decide if your ad campaign is cost-effective.

3. No Graphic Designer Needed

What makes Facebook advertising even more enticing is that you don’t need to spend big bucks on a graphic designer. Newspaper ads and web banners all have the added burden of creating professional looking designs. The nature of Facebook makes it easy for you to create the ads by yourself using services like Canva.

4. Multiple Ad Types

Facebook gives many different ad options for you to choose from. If you choose to keep it simple you can just use a single image. Get a little fancy with video, slideshows, and carousels. If you want to go all out and harness your creativity you can create a beautiful canvas. Have products to sell? Use the collections ad type. There is something for everyone and every campaign.

5. Audience Builder

Aside from the main goal of getting conversions, Facebook tracks every visit, like, click, share and comment on your ad. You can then re-target all of those people who engaged with your ad. This gives you a bigger and more engaged audience for your to target for future campaigns.

6. Enhances Organic Facebook Content

Whether Facebook admits it or not, there is no question that placing ads also increase viewers to your organic content (organic posts are posts that you did not pay for). More people engaging with your paid ads means there will be an increase in eyeballs and likes, clicks and shares with your organic content as well.

7. Learn your audience

Facebook provides a wealth of information on how well your ads do. You can slice and dice your ad reports however you like. When analyzing your data you discover a wealth of information about the people who engage with your organization on Facebook. Knowing your audience will help you in all facets of your organization’s work.

8. ADS + FB Events + Fundraisers = Synergy

As Facebook continues it’s quest for social dominance it is providing more opportunities for Nonprofits to harness the tools Facebook provides. In addition to Events which many nonprofits already use, Facebook offers a fundraising platform directly on the page. You can use Facebook ads seamlessly to recruit people to events and donate directly on Facebook.

9. It’s Affordable!

There is no question about it. Advertising on Facebook is your most affordable option today. Perhaps more importantly for risk-averse nonprofits is that you can control how much you spend at every minute. Is the campaign going well? Ad more money to the budget. Not so much? Change your audience or spend less. You are in full control!

What is wrong with boosting a post?

Many of you may be aware of a feature that Facebook offers that lets you boost an organic post. In almost all situations I would not recommend using this feature for the following reason.

Why would you spend money with minimal targeting when you can have full control of who sees your ad? In short, it is a waste of money. Yes, you have some control of who sees your ad but nowhere close to full control.

Wrap Up

Having established that Facebook advertising is the most effective advertising platform currently available, we begin the next challenge of how to use it.

Understandably Facebook advertising can be overwhelming to use and can provide a steep learning curve to the uninitiated. For this reason, a future post will provide you with a list of tutorials and guides that can help you get started. Questions? Feel free to post in the comments below!