How to use social media for fundraising

Social media is where your community already spends its idle moments, which makes it one of the most tempting channels in fundraising and one of the most misunderstood. Used well, it builds awareness, gives your cause a personality, and warms people up so that when you ask, they are ready to say yes. Used badly, it becomes a stream of "come and donate" posts that the algorithm buries and your followers scroll past. This guide explains the difference between the two, and the realistic job social media does inside a fundraising campaign.

Start with one honest point: social media rarely drives the donations on its own. On a Giving Day or any time-bound appeal, email is still the engine. As Kat Carter, a consultant at Hubbub, puts it: "Email is the number one component of getting donors kind of through the door for a giving day." Social media's role is different but genuine. It raises awareness, it reaches people your email file never will, and it converts interest into action when you make the ask specific. The two work best in step, not in competition.

This guide draws on best practice from Hubbub's consultants, and on the experience of the marketing team at Hever Castle in Kent, whose "Gen Z writes the marketing script" video reached twelve million views on Instagram. Their organisation is a museum rather than a charity, but the lessons travel directly to fundraising teams.

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Why social media matters, and what it actually does

To post well, start with why people are on these platforms at all. The top reason is keeping in touch with friends and family. The second, as Kat Carter found in the data, is to fill spare time and be entertained. "This is here to kill people's time, and to be entertaining," she says, "and take a quick break, or get lost in a doom scroll." People arrive to relax, not to be sold to. A sizeable share actively dislike accounts that "just keep going on and on about yourself".

That has a direct consequence for fundraisers. If your social media is a noticeboard of appeals, it works against the grain of the platform and the algorithm both. The accounts that do well lean into what Kat Carter calls "infotainment": content that entertains while it informs, "entertainment, but it's also information about the brand that we want to represent". For a fundraising team that means stories, faces, behind-the-scenes glimpses and a bit of humour, woven through with the occasional clear ask, not the other way round.

So set your expectations accordingly. Social media's job in a campaign is to build the audience, keep your cause visible, and convert interest at the decisive moments. It will not replace your email schedule, and you should not measure it as if it were trying to. The donations that pour in on the day will mostly arrive through the inbox, and that is fine.

Setting a simple strategy and clear goals

A social media strategy does not need to be a fifty-page document. It needs to answer a few questions honestly: who is your audience, what do you want them to feel and do, how often will you post, and how will you know whether it is working.

Start with the audience, because everything else follows from it. The Hever Castle team built their picture not from guesswork but from the analytics already sitting inside each platform. "The best way is just to get in the back end, look on the analytics, and you'll be able to see who is following you, the locations of them, the age, the gender." Do this for each channel you run, because the audiences differ. In their case the same organisation drew a younger crowd on TikTok, an older and UK-heavy following on Facebook, and a roughly even US and UK split on Instagram.

Then decide what you are trying to achieve, and keep the list short. Sensible goals for a fundraising team are growth in followers, a target level of engagement, reach beyond your existing followers, and a number of donations or click-throughs you can credibly link to social during a campaign. Lead with awareness and engagement, and treat direct income as a secondary measure, because honest attribution is hard.

The other half of strategy is rhythm. The platforms reward accounts that show up. "Social media algorithms, they favour the accounts that are active and consistent," the Hever Castle team explain. They keep a posting schedule across the month so they know what is going out and when, and crucially it "helps us establish a bit of a balance between the sales content and the fun content". A content calendar is the single most useful planning tool you can build. Our social media content calendar gives you a month-at-a-glance template to balance fun and asks, and our social post templates give you copy to adapt.

Choosing the right channels for your audience

You do not have to be everywhere, and you should not try to be. Run the channels where your audience actually is and where you can post consistently, and be willing to close the ones that are not earning their keep. The Hever Castle team did exactly that, closing a long-running Twitter presence "just from a lack of engagement" so they could "focus our efforts elsewhere". Spreading thin across six platforms you cannot maintain is worse than doing two well.

Each platform also rewards different behaviour. The Hever Castle team's working understanding ran like this: Facebook engagement "gets boosted by having sort of lengthy comments and discussions on your posts"; Instagram wants people "to share the posts and save the posts to increase your visibility"; LinkedIn, like Facebook, rewards "lengthy comments and interactions"; and TikTok rewards "reposts and how much time people spend watching your videos". None of this is fixed. "It does change over time," they warn. The lesson is less to memorise the rules than to keep watching them.

One channel insight matters especially for fundraisers: the platform that wins the most engagement is not always the one that drives the most action. For Hever Castle, "Facebook's always been the biggest referral" onto the website, even though the team pour more creative energy into other platforms. When your goal is to send people to a donation page, track which channel actually delivers the clicks, not just the likes.

Creating engaging, authentic content

Content is the heart of it, and the good news is that authenticity beats polish almost every time. The Hever Castle team are emphatic on this point: "People don't tend to like over polished content. Our most successful content is just what we filmed on an iPhone and edited in the app." Their kit is deliberately modest: an iPhone, a tripod, lapel mics and the editing tools built into the apps. The barrier to good content is not equipment. It is willingness to show personality. A few principles carry most of the weight.

Lead with people, not logos. The turning point in Hever Castle's engagement came when they started putting staff on camera. "When I started, we didn't really film with any staff. And that's something that I've worked into our strategy over the last few years. And that has been a real turning point for our engagement." Over time, individual team members became recognisable characters with "their own persona", a head gardener for the planting tips, a costumed steward for the history, each giving the audience a face to follow and return for. For a school, university or charity, your equivalents are everywhere: an archivist, a beneficiary, a member of staff, a student. As Kat Carter put it, "Do you have somebody, an archivist who can talk to your audience about the different things at the college?"

Tell stories and use short, vertical video. Attention is brutally short. "You have to grab people's attention in the first two seconds or less, otherwise they'll just scroll past," the Hever Castle team explain, which is why they put "text on the screen as like a hook" and keep videos fast-paced and shot vertically for the phone. Short video is now the dominant format even on once photo-led platforms: the team saw Instagram shift from "pretty pictures" to wanting "that kind of reels and video content that you get on TikTok".

Ride trends, but only the ones that fit. A trend is borrowed attention, and jumping on the right one quickly is the single biggest lever for reach. Hever Castle's viral video worked because it rode the "Gen Z writes the marketing script" trend; on its own, "it doesn't really make any sense", but riding the trend "is how it gathered so much interest". The discipline is selectivity: "Not every trend is going to work for your university or school. If it's not going to work with the castle or the brand, don't do it." And speed matters, because "the best way to kind of get the engagement with a trending video is just to act as quickly as you can."

Listen to your audience and repost what works. The comments are a content brief. When viewers kept asking "Where's Peter?" after the team's breakout video, they made more of him. Treat your analytics the same way: "When something does work, then just sort of capitalise on that and then keep doing that sort of video." And do not assume a good post is spent after one outing. "If you have evergreen content that you filmed, just repost it. If they've worked well the first time, there's a very good chance they're going to work well again." Each new wave of followers has not seen your older posts, so your back catalogue is fresh to most of them.

Above all, give yourself permission to enjoy it. The team's closing advice was simply: "Have fun with your social media. As long as it reflects your brand, people like to see your personality as a company. It doesn't have to be so serious all the time." Our social graphics pack gives you on-brand templates so the visuals stay consistent while the content stays human.

Working with ambassadors to extend your reach

Your own channels can only reach so far. The fastest way to extend that reach is to mobilise other people to post on your behalf, which is exactly what an ambassador programme is for. Ambassadors are supporters, students, alumni, staff or volunteers who share your content and make their own authentic appeals to networks you could never reach directly. In a campaign they are the difference between talking to your existing audience and reaching a new one.

The same authenticity rule applies. An ambassador's post works precisely because it does not look like an institutional broadcast: it is a real person telling their own connections why this matters to them. Kat Carter describes the wider opportunity as finding "user-generated content, perhaps through ambassadors or influencers connected to our brand". Give ambassadors ready-made assets so the ask is easy, suggested captions, graphics and a clear link, but encourage them to put it in their own words. The post that converts is the personal one, not the polished one.

Recruit ambassadors well before a campaign, brief them on what to post and when, and make it as simple as forwarding a link or sharing a story. Our companion guide on running an ambassador programme covers the recruitment and stewardship in full.

Running social through the phases of a campaign

During a campaign, social media should move in lockstep with your email schedule, each post reinforcing the message the inbox is carrying that day. It helps to think in four phases: build-up, launch, live and afterwards.

In the build-up, the job is awareness and anticipation. Tease what is coming, share the stories and the people behind the cause, and start warming your ambassadors so they are ready to post from day one. This is where your infotainment content builds an engaged audience before you ever ask them for anything.

At launch, go loud and go clear. Announce that you are live across every channel, and make sure your ambassadors post in the same window your launch email lands. Consistency across inbox and feed on day one is what creates momentum.

Through the live campaign, social media earns its place by making the asks specific and urgent, and this is the single most important technique in the whole guide. A vague post does nothing. Kat Carter's advice could not be plainer: "If you want your audience to do something, be specific about what you want them to do." Her worked example, drawn from Giving Day challenges, is worth following to the letter: "I usually recommend doing a kind of stories, kind of reel where you can say, we are 10 donors away from hitting our 200 donor challenge. If you can make your gift of 10 in the next 10 minutes, we will hit our target." That is a specific ask, a specific amount, visible progress and a deadline, all in one post. By contrast, "if you're just vague about it and say, donate to our next challenge", you leave people unsure what their role is. Pair every ask with the impact, so people understand what their gift does.

The challenge mechanics of a Giving Day are tailor-made for this, because each milestone gives you a fresh, time-bound reason to post: a countdown to the next unlock, a leaderboard update, a final-hour push. Stories and reels are well suited to these urgent, expiring moments.

Afterwards, close the loop. Thank your community publicly, share the result, and tell the story of what the money will do. The thank-you is also the start of your next campaign's audience-building, so do not let the energy drain away the moment the total is in.

Plan all of this before the campaign begins. Writing your posts in advance, mapped against your email schedule, is what makes delivery calm rather than frantic, and our social media content calendar lays the phases out day by day.

Measuring what works

Measurement on social media is genuinely hard, and it is better to be honest about that than to invent a precise number. The Hever Castle team are candid: tying social activity to bookings or income is "very difficult to know which individual part of the marketing plan did the best", because so many streams run at once. Kat Carter framed the same truth more broadly: "With marketing, there's not like one silver bullet. It's a collection of everything that you do that's gonna make people interested. And it might also take time. Marketing is a slow burn."

So measure what you can measure well, and use proxies for the rest. Check your platform analytics regularly, weekly during normal periods and daily during a campaign, and watch the metrics each platform actually rewards: comments and shares, saves, watch time, reposts. Watch your follower growth and, just as importantly, your retention, because a viral spike that does not stick is worth less than steady growth. After Hever Castle's twelve-million-view video the team gained twenty thousand followers in a fortnight, but the figure they cared about was whether those people stayed. A useful headline metric for fundraisers is reach beyond your existing followers: on that breakout video, 99.4 per cent of the people reached were not yet followers, which is precisely how a single post opens a cause to a new audience.

For attribution, build in the small mechanisms that let you trace impact: ask new supporters how they heard about you, use referral data to see which channel sends traffic to your donation page, and give ambassadors trackable links or codes when you can. None of this gives you a perfect figure. Judge social media on the awareness it builds, the audience it grows and the moments it converts, and let email carry the credit for the donations it closes. Done together, both channels lift the result.

Frequently asked questions

Does social media actually raise money, or is it just awareness? It does both, but mostly the second. In a time-bound campaign, email drives the great majority of donations, while social media builds the audience, keeps your cause visible and converts interest at decisive moments. The two work best together. Judge social on reach, engagement and audience growth, and let email take the credit for closing gifts.

How many platforms should we be on? Only as many as you can run consistently and where your audience actually is. It is far better to do two channels well than six badly. Be willing to close a channel that is not earning its keep, as the Hever Castle team did with Twitter, so you can focus your effort where it works.

Do we need professional video and expensive kit? No, and it may even hold you back. The Hever Castle team's most successful content is filmed on an iPhone and edited in the app, and they found "over polished, professionally shot videos don't tend to do as well". A phone, a tripod, a clip-on microphone and a willingness to show real people are enough.

How do we get more reach without a big budget? Ride relevant trends quickly, put recognisable people on camera, lead with short vertical video, listen to what your comments ask for, and repost your evergreen winners. Mobilising ambassadors to share to their own networks extends your reach far beyond your own followers, all of it organic.

How do we use social media to actually drive donations during a campaign? Be specific. Instead of "donate to our next challenge", post the kind of time-bound ask Kat Carter recommends: how many donors away you are from a target, the exact gift that helps, a short deadline and the impact of giving. Specific asks with a number and a clock take the guesswork out and convert far better than vague ones.

How do we know if any of it is working? Imperfectly, and that is normal. Track each platform's own engagement metrics, follower growth and retention, and reach beyond your existing followers. For attribution, ask supporters how they found you, watch referral traffic to your donation page, and use trackable links or codes for ambassadors. Treat the result as a slow burn, not a single attributable transaction.

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Members' resource pack

Sign in with your email to unlock these editable templates:

• Social media content calendar
• Social post templates
• Social graphics pack

Tools

• Hubbub's Giving Day Simulator: model likely results before you commit to a target
• Fundraising Copy Checker: sharpen your appeal and email copy
• QR Code Generator: link in-person moments straight to a donation page

Further reading

• Webinar: creating engaging social media content
• Related guides: How to write fundraising emails that work and How to run a fundraising ambassador programme
• Sector body: CASE

See the full links directory for more.