You have great content. You know which platforms you’ll post it to. You’ve got your hashtags ready and your team is ready to engage your followers. So now you need to answer:
When do I post?
There are a number of factors involved in making that decision. They include having a ready-made content calendar and knowing when peak engagement time is for your supporters.
I recently recorded a series of videos for AFP’s Microlearning Series entitled: The W’s of a Digital Storytelling Strategy. The goal of the series is to present you with the questions you need to be asking internally before you start posting and engaging. For the next 5 weeks I’m going to publish a new video from the series.
You can view the previous episodes: The Who of Nonprofit Digital Storytelling, The What and The Where.
The When
There are two major issues related to “the when” of your nonprofit digital storytelling strategy. You can watch the video or read the transcript just below it.
The When Of Nonprofit Digital Storytelling
Hi there. I’m Ephraim Gopin of 1832 Communications and I’m continuing my W’s of Digital Storytelling series for AFP’s Microlearning moments.
Content Calendar
In our last episode we dealt with “the where.” Today we’re going to deal with “the when” and the first part of the when is your overall strategy, your overall content and marketing strategy.
You need to build a content calendar now. What’s a content calendar? A content calendar sets out for your organization all the content you’re going to be posting on different channels over a given period of time. Ideally it should be daily, assuming you’re posting daily somewhere, the content calendar should be set up for daily interaction.
So that content calendar actually is all the W’s: It tells you who’s in charge of posting it, it tells you what you’re going to post, it says where you’re going to post it- so on what kind of platform and it’s also going to say when you’re going to post it, what’s the call to action that’s in there and because I’m a big believer in the hashtag #AlwaysBeTesting, the content calendar should also include some data regarding the engagement for each post, so you can look and see what’s working and what isn’t working and then you can decide another w, why isn’t it working and decide what needs to be tweaked for the next time you post a similar post on a similar platform.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
When To Post
So that’s the first part of “the when” is build that content calendar. The second thing is when to post. So now we know you have a calendar that’s going to tell you when on Tuesday I’m going to post this. The question is what time Tuesday?
Now there are lots of articles out there that will tell you the best time to post on Facebook is x and the best time to post on Twitter is y and the best to do on Instagram stories is… Okay, those are all averages. What works for them doesn’t necessarily work for your organization. What you need to do is hashtag #AlwaysBeTesting. You need to see at what times you’re getting the highest engagement from your audience, from your followers, from your supporters and those are the times you want to make sure to get content out. So you can use Insights and other data to tell you when you’re getting the most engagement.
You start writing it down, you start looking at the data and you decide, oh you know what? For us 7am is a great time. People are just waking up, they’re looking at their Twitter feed and Facebook. That’s when we get most engagement. For other people it could be around 12, 12:30 lunchtime. People want to stop work, they want to go look for something else fun or different to do that doesn’t involve their day job. So they’re going to be online looking.
When do they answer emails? Some emails… a lot of people… I send my daily newsletter at 6am Eastern time because I know that’s when it gets the most opens. But for other people they send in the afternoon. So you need to know when to post your stories, your articles, your posts. That’s the goal, is to test and then find the sweet spot for that.
Happy fundraising everyone. Have a great day.
Year-end fundraising campaign time approaches. Is your website content prepared? Email marketing strategy ready to be implemented? Social media posts planned out? If your nonprofit wants to strengthen relationships with donors and raise more money, then your website, email and social media need to be in sync and ready to go when your campaign commences.
Not sure how to pull it all together? Contact me and let’s plan a successful year-end campaign together!
