How to automate your social media for university fundraising

Managing your institution or non-profit’s social accounts can be time-consuming. This guide covers two handy tools you can use to automate your social media:

• CoSchedule, pre-schedule posts across all your social accounts
• Enrich, automate how you find prospective ambassadors, influential & major prospects

Tool 1, CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a brilliant tool for solo-marketers controlling multiple social media accounts in the build up to a campaign. It allows you to schedule posts seamlessly across multiple accounts (e.g Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and reschedule posts for future dates.

1. Reschedule content quickly in a drag & drop calendar

The calendar offers a clear overview of all your upcoming posts. You can easily drag and drop posts into different dates; ideal for making quick changes during a campaign.

2. Send posts simultaneously across social media channels

In CoSchedule you can add up to 10 social media accounts. When you share a post, you can schedule it to go out on multiple social accounts (e.g LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook all at once) which cuts out lots of manual work.

3. Schedule posts to be re-shared multiple times

When scheduling a post, you have the option to share it straight away on your social accounts and to then re-post on different dates in the future. The repost function is particularly useful if you’re running a fundraising campaign over a period of time.

Automation is a supplement to reactive, day-to-day tweeting but works best if you also manually tweet regularly to keep a personal connection with your followers.

Ideal for Giving Days or one day campaigns

If you are running a one day campaign that needs lots of pre-prepared content, such as a university Giving Day, pre-scheduled content can be particularly useful. On the day, you can focus on reactive tweets (thanking donors, support, tech issues).

4. Integrates with a WordPress plugin

If you have a WordPress blog you can also install the CoSchedule plugin. Within your WordPress draft post, you can set up how it will be shared on social media. Once you hit publish in WordPress, your social media schedule will be set in motion.

A few alternatives to CoSchedule

Edgar: Excellent for automation if you have lots of posts. You can save a bank of tweets & Edgar will continually shuffle and repost them over time.

Buffer: Useful for quickly adding nice images to posts if you have their Pablo extension.

Tool 2, Enrich

Enrich is a Hubbub tool that can quickly identify the most influential prospects on social media from an email database. This saves you having to manually and painstakingly trawl through email and Twitter lists.

Find key influencers across all social channels

If you’re running a campaign and are looking for new ambassadors, firstly upload a csv file containing your email database, such as an alumni base. Enrich will show all the social media accounts connected to each email, allowing you to see those with the most followers across social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc).

Identify ambassadors with the most followers

You can then export Enrich’s data into a .csv (compatible with Raiser’s Edge) to see which of your database have the most followers on each social media channel, so you don’t have to manually trawl through lists.

Contact potential ambassadors on social media

Once you’ve identified potential ambassadors, you can, for example, tag them in a tweet about your campaign with the aim that they reshare it to all their followers.

A good tip for tagging multiple people in a tweet is to add a photo. Adding a photo lets you tag up to 10 people without interfering with the 140 character limit.

Segment your email list to send targeted outreach on social media

Another feature of Enrich that fundraisers find useful is the ability to segment your email list into categories to help with targeted outreach on social media. This is achieved by Enrich pulling the social media bios for each person.

For example, you could type in terms such as ‘baseball’ and ‘football’ to segment all those that have an interest in sport. This means you can contact relevant people when you have a fundraising campaign connected to sport.

If you’re looking for speakers for an event, you could segment the list by the word ‘speaker’ to group all your database by those who have the word ‘speaker’ in their social media bios.

Email hello@hubbub.net if you would like a free trial of Enrich!

Key takeaways to automate your social media

Smart social media tools can save fundraisers a lot of time in campaigns if used wisely.

CoSchedule, pre-prepare content across all social media channels, reschedule in a drag & drop calendar, easily reshare multiple times. Pre-prepared content saves you time to focus on reactive tweeting.

Enrich, Upload an email list and discover which people on there are the most influential across all social media channels. Segments lists into categories so you can make targeted asks through social media. Takes out most of the manual work organising social media lists.

Ambassadors, Make recruitment, management and gamification easier. Supercharge the reach of your campaigns, stay informed of ambassador activity and save your team’s effort of manual recruitment and management.