Celebrating is such a great way to have content on social media that isn't asking, educating or growing your audience. It's just about shouting out those surrounding you that are doing cool things that you want to call out.

This could be people in your organization, volunteers, board members, or even your own community. It could also be wins from the work you're doing, milestones, anniversaries, etc. 

Never miss an opportunity to celebrate on social media. And since it just happens to be my birthday – this is the topic of this week's Digital Marketing Therapy podcast.

What you'll learn:

→ different types of celebrations you can shout out on social media.
→ ways to make more engaging – hint hint, use of video.
→ putting celebratory events on your calendar so you don't miss them.

Full Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] It's my birthday. Yes, it's my actual birthday as this episode is going live on August 22, I am officially 41 years old. And I thought since we're talking about social media all month long, this would be a great opportunity to talk about ways that we can utilize social media to help us celebrate the amazing things that are going on in our organization, with our donors, with the people in our community that we love and appreciate. And really shout them out and have some fun with it. Social media is a great way to engage and build conversations with people. But it's also a great way to celebrate them. And these celebrations are more likely to get shared and shown with other people, if we do them, right. So I'm going to give you a few ways and ideas that you can celebrate all the things in regards to your organization on social media, to increase conversions, get more conversations going and just give some love to the people that really matter inside your organization, whether they're volunteers, donors, board members, staff, what have you. So this will be a quick fun episode.

But I just want to say thank you so much for making this podcast. So much fun. I love bringing it to you. And since it's my birthday, and a day of celebration, I am just so grateful to all of you for allowing me to continue to do this for another year. Now, this episode is not brought to you by anything, but if you have a moment, I would love it. If you would give me a birthday shout out on your social media tag, the first click marketing in your post so that we can get this podcast out to even more people. Your birthday present to me, I would love if you would do that. It would mean so much to me. And I would love just to celebrate with you and make this birthday one for the books 41 folks. Anyway, let's get into the episode

[Intro] You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

[Sami Bedel-Mulhern] Celebrating is fun, and doing it on social media helps bring your community in on the celebration that you're having, and allows them to engage and have some fun with you. So there's lots of ways that we can think about celebrations. And it all starts with milestones. What is the anniversary of your organization? Did you hit a big campaign goal? Are you wrapping up a capital campaign? What are the things that are happening in your organization that you want to make sure to shout out. And this is not personal, right? This is something that is organization specific, what are some things that we can share, making sure that those are on the calendar, your social media calendar every year prepped and primed and ready to go is a great way for you to get the public and to celebrate with you. It's also great for media pickup, we're not talking about PR this month. So think about that. Put those dates on the calendar so that your team doesn't forget to make sure to shout those things out. And then make sure they're connected with a fun photo. Even better Creek, some 32nd clips of you all celebrating. Maybe there's balloons in the background or you're having fun with your CEO give people a little behind the scenes of what it's like to work at the organization, the culture that you have, and how you all celebrate each other internally, as well as because you're sharing this video, allowing people to celebrate with you externally. This is great, fun content that can show your personality, show the personality of your team and allow people to connect with you on a personal level. So again, remembering what are the big milestones that you might want to celebrate in your organization. Another great thing to celebrate is people that have been with your organization for a long time. Maybe you have program staff or you have a development director or an office manager or your IT team, whoever it might be, figure out what that looks like and shout them out. Again, another great way to create social media content that's just fun and behind the scenes and doesn't require a lot of work and effort on your part and makes that employee feel super special. You can do the same for your board members. You can do the same for your volunteers that have been with you for a long time. Shout out those anniversaries and give them some love. Now if you have a smaller team you could also do this with birthdays. But I think for birthdays, the thing that I love the most is celebrating birthdays and asking those folks to run a Facebook fundraiser on your behalf. Hey, it's your birthday. Here's some graphics you can use. We know you're a huge fan of insert your organization, we'd love it, if you would share it on Facebook and do a quick little fundraiser. Imagine if you have 40, or 50 or 100 people that are part of your organization, or care about your organization doing a Facebook fundraiser on your behalf each year, they each raise $100 $200, it doesn't have to be a lot individually to make a big impact. But making that kind of celebration part of your culture is super fun. And a really easy ask, a lot of people would be happy to do that for you, they just probably haven't ever been asked to do so. So reach out, but give them everything they need step by step instructions. Here's how it works. Here's a graphic that you can use with a photo that we love from you at a past event or at a volunteer event or whatever. Put all that stuff together for them, package it up and say we'd love for you to do this on our behalf. Give them the language, make it easy. We've talked about promo kits on this podcast in the past. And this is a great way to do just that as well. And allow them to celebrate something about themselves and be the hero to say this is something we care about. I would love if you would celebrate me on my birthday by by giving to this organization as well. Now, the downside to running Facebook fundraisers is that you don't always get the contact information for the people that are giving they do get a tax receipt. But you will get some information. And you can always engage in comment with folks on that Facebook post to be able to participate with them even more. This is about building relationships and growing. And this is one unique and fun way that you can do it and celebrate the people that are important to you inside your organization. We also want to think about celebrating our community. So people that we serve, the environment that we serve all of that we want to celebrate certain milestones, or just wins. So thinking about all the little things that happen throughout the work that you do, that might feel maybe I don't want to say is insignificant, because I don't think that's the word. But you know, you're working towards this bigger goal, right? There's milestones that you're hitting along the way. And sometimes we don't shout those out enough, while we're in this journey, while we're working towards a bigger picture. So maybe your goal is to raise enough money to create a million or to serve a million meals in the year, create whatever those milestones are, and shout those out and celebrate them. Maybe it's every 10,000 meals, you're doing a thank you or 200,000 meals, whatever that looks like for you. But what it does is gives you reason to reach out to share, to post fun things on social media, and to encourage people to share and talk about the mission that you're doing. It also tells people where you're at in the process and can encourage them to give or participate with where you're at. So maybe you're at 900,000 miles or miles meals and you only have 100,000 meals to go. Now that's a push to get people to rally behind you to close that gap. You have donors that are motivated by really helping you kick things off, you have donors that are motivated by helping you close the gap. And so by sharing these kinds of celebratory, where we're at in the process posts, it really allows you to hit donors where they're most motivated in there giving style. If you're in a shorter term campaign, you could create a social media banner that has a thermometer or something that you can update regularly. If you're in a longer term campaign, just keeping people updated. So they know where you're at creating graphics that are consistent, can also be awesome in allowing people to easily recognize this is an update on a fundraising campaign that they're doing. I want to take a look at that. But really thinking about celebration is not just we've completed something, but bringing people along the journey and celebrating the process in between. Maybe you have

shows that you're booking for the upcoming season. You want to be able to celebrate and shout out once you booked somebody when you're allowed to do so. But even if you're not that if you're not able to really launch the names of the shows, right? Different people have different contracts. You could still say hey, we're booking six shows for the next season and we're so excited Now that we've booked four of the six, you could T genre, you could give trivia questions and try to get people to guess there's all sorts of ways that you can still celebrate the work that you're doing, while engaging your audience and getting them to engage back with you. So the last kind of way that will not the last. But the last one that I'm going to bring up here is really celebrating and shouting out your whole kind of universe. Now, I know this is really broad, but just bear with me here for a second. Celebrating people for no reason is a great thing to celebrate. So random acts of kindness, small gestures, but let's celebrate those people that we know have made an impact on our organization, regardless of it being an anniversary or their birthday, or because we raised X amount of dollars. Sometimes those shout outs are the most important, right? My husband and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day, it's just not a thing for us. If you love Valentine's Day, no shade on that, it just for us has always been a thing. It's just something that we don't celebrate, we don't like being kind of forced into that. Everybody has their own opinion. But there's something about then him or or myself randomly doing something planning a date night for no reason, planning a get together. So we can go spend some quality time together. That means a little bit more to us because it was something that we chose to do on our own. So you could think about it the same way when it comes to the people in your universe. Did somebody just do something small, like maybe you had a board member that just went out and picked up some in kind donations because they knew you were swamped. Or maybe it is a volunteer who took you out to coffee just to you know, share some of the things that they've been loving about the organization and ask if there's more that they can do to help. Maybe it's a donor that showed up to an event when you weren't expecting them to to volunteer and help out with a canned food, drive, whatever it might be paying attention to those small things that people in our, our universe do alongside of us to help us increase our impact. And making that a regular shout out a regular thing that you're posting on social media, because this is going to do a few things, right, it's going to make your community feel special, it's going to make that person feel special, it's also likely that that person is going to share that content, because they've been shouted out, which is going to increase your visibility. But it's also going to show the culture of who you are and the values that your organization stands stands behind, it's going to show that you value the people in your world, whether they're donors, or their giving of their time or their employees, but it's just going to show that you have a culture of giving back just as much as people are giving to you. And that goes a long way of building trust at building new relationships and bringing in new people to your sphere that are going to step in and walk alongside you in your impact as well. So those are just a few ways that you can use social media to celebrate, I hope that you'll make a list of all of the things that you can start to put into the mix. Because now, once you know exactly the types of things that you want to be shouting out on your social media channels, you'll be able to start to hear more of those things coming at you. And before long, you'll have a long list of things to talk about and share. And that's what I love. I love when organizations could shout out the big wins, which we often do. But let's always pay attention to celebrating the small things too. Because without those small things, we wouldn't have the big things to celebrate. So they're worth it. And they are valuable as well. Big or small anniversaries or just celebrating the little things. I hope that you will add celebratory posts to your social media mix. So that was my quick down and dirty celebration episode. I'm gonna get back to my birthday celebrations. I would really appreciate it if you would subscribe, wherever you listen, your second birthday present that you can do for me right? Subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review if that is applicable to the platform that you're on. I hope that you enjoy these episodes. And thank you so much for being here and allowing me to come into your ears every single week. I appreciate you and have a piece of birthday cake for me. We'll see you in the next one.