Nonprofit Social Media Budget Template for 2021

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How often do you wish you had more resources and money to spend on your social media efforts as a nonprofit?

Having a social media budget should be a given in 2021. When done right, social media has the power to become it’s own revenue stream, increase brand awareness, and facilitate new advocates.

Whether you’re the person that controls the budget or you’re the one asking for a social media budget, here’s a template to put together a strategic budget for your ask.

Take out a piece of paper and answer the following four questions.

Step 1: What’s your GOAL?

Write your B-SMART goal that this budget will help achieve. (Go back to the previous blog post or video to learn about creating a B-SMART goal)

Step 2: Where will you pull DATA from?

To prove your budget helped increase brand awareness or raise donations, you’ll need to provide ROI. On social media, everything is measurable. Will you use a third-party platform like Sprout Social to pull your metrics or use the native platforms themselves? Then, what’s the monthly or annual cost of this platform?

Step 3: How will you create CONTENT?

There are free platforms for nonprofits like Canva to design your social media posts and Unsplash to pull free images. If you’re looking for more support and guidance, Social Media Content Curators for Nonprofits is $47/month and provides curated photos, captions, Canva templates, and a full content calendar full of ideas!

Are you planning any events or upcoming fundraising campaigns? Think about any photographers or videographer costs that you’d want to shoot those events or campaigns.

80% of videos are watched without sound, so it’s important to include the cost of creating captions.

(Zubtitle is a great cheap option for this, usually, a video production company will do it for you – here’s a 50% off code: PWQ855 OR Veed.io allows you to edit videos and add captions as well on Windows and Mac computers with no software downloads.

Step 4: What should you spend to AMPLIFY that content?

Social media advertising is key to reaching a very target audience with your message. Your audience’s feeds are saturated with content, so very targeted social media ads can prove effective to cut through the noise. Facebook’s minimum ad spend is $1/day. Yep, that’s it! You won’t achieve very much, but again you’re tracking success based on your B-SMART goal.

This is a great article on the average cost of social media advertising in 2020.

Now, let’s break it all down!

GOAL: I want to launch a new 2020 brand awareness video campaign to reach a younger demo and share our mission. Success would be having 50,000 people watch our campaign video for 15 seconds or more.

DATA: I will use Sprout Social to track our social media analytics. It costs $99/month.

CONTENT: We’ll hire a video production company to compile video footage we have, shoot some new footage and edit together a 3-minute video. This will approximately cost $5,000. (I think we can get a sponsor to cover this!)

AMPLIFY: To reach 50,000 views, we’ll focus our priority on Facebook ads. Based on average video view costs ($.01-$.03), I’d estimate we’d need an ad budget of $1,500-$2,000.

*TIP* Be strategic about asking for sponsor dollars to create co-branded content, this will help your funds go further AND it’s likely they’ll share the content on their social channels increasing your organic reach.

When you have a solid strategy like this to present to your boss, it’s much more likely to get a budget approved!

You got this!

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ABOUT THE WRITER

I’m Dana Snyder! An entrepreneur, digital strategist, and passionate conscious consumer. I founded Positive Equation in 2017 with a focus on helping nonprofits cultivate passionate online audiences of donors, partners, and advocates using social media.

Currently based in Atlanta, I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with Movember, Dress for Success, USTA, Honest Company, Sports Illustrated, American Idol, The Global Foodbanking Network, The Gary Sinise Foundation, LA84 Foundation, and many more on their digital strategies.

Not sure where to start? Take my Mini-Ads Course, Visible Reach In A Week ($27) to start increasing your brand awareness right now!