Changes are coming to Facebook. According to a recent announcement, in the near future, Facebook will favor posts from friends and family and individuals over posts from business pages and non-profit pages. I think these changes are actually a good thing for the non-profit organizations and here’s why:

1. Employees will have to embrace social media. Executive Directors, Board Chairs, Volunteer Coordinators, Development Directors – everyone will have to become a spokesperson for the organization. And this is a good thing! Every non-profit should train their staff in social media usage, encourage sharing, and be creating content for staff and volunteers to share. Leadership should consider themselves public figures and use their pages as such.
2. We’ll rely more on our core supporters. We will have to have volunteers, donors, and board members talking about our organizations, our impact, and our need for support. We will need to give them content to share and use our pages to tag them, highlight their good work, and communicate with them.
3. We will have to WOW our donors and volunteers. We are going to have to think harder about how to get people talking about us beyond just asking people to participate in fundraisers. How can we make thank yous, volunteer experiences, and events “share-worthy?”
4. We can stop the constant stream of announcements. These changes will force us to think before we post. Rather than getting our reach up by posting frequently, we can think more about engagement. These changes will force non-profits to be more interactive, more conversational, and talk more about and to individuals.
5. More boosted posts. These changes will make non-profits very strategic about buying ads and very focused on the return on investment of these ads. I’ve seen too many non-profits post content with no call-to-action because social media is “free.” If we need to pay to reach people, we will get very clear on what we want people to do.
6. We’ll move more people to our email lists. Since social media is becoming an unreliable way to reach people, non-profits will have to find creative ways to get people to sign up for email lists. This is a good thing because email is still the best place to ask for a donation. This will also force non-profits to create better regular communication (ie get rid of that newsletter!).

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