5 easy steps to heighten your nonprofit’s LinkedIn profile appeal to donors and others

LinkedIn continues to achieve consistently healthy growth and for nonprofits it remains probably the most valuable external window into your organization both from and at the executive level. For nonprofit fundraising and donor acquisition that executive audience is of vital importance so it’s a great time to whether your current LinkedIn profiles are fulfilling that potential. For executive level positions and also now many at the management level LinkedIn has become the first stopping point in acquiring a full understanding of a company and those that lead it, be that in terms of recruiting and talent sourcing but it also can encompass the research being done by potential donors.

The reality is that the overall approach, goals and ideals of your nonprofit can be very effectively represented via your LinkedIn hosted data so taking the time to see how others are likely to perceive your organization is certainly time well spent. In our connected world studies show that potential donors conduct more nonprofit research than ever before and LinkedIn is an increasing source for that compiled information.

Ultimately the goal should be to develop a consistent message throughout your LinkedIn content about your organization so that each and every time a visitor is exposed to your organization they are receiving consistent key information about your goals and values.

Here are five easy ways to improve and refine how your charity’s profile appears via LinkedIn.

Enhance leadership profiles and ensure entire team have profiles: Take the time to review the profiles of your entire leadership/management teams. Encourage any members who do not have a profile to add one. Add specific goal based content about your nonprofit and explain a little about the achievements and objectives of the charity and explain the roles the individuals play in achieving this. A consistent and focused message is the goal.

Improve the networking of your executive and front-line management team: Ensure all members (as noted above) are networked by connecting to one another in addition to your organization and any sister companies, vendors or like minded causes. LinkedIn operates the networking algorithms that influence what LinkedIn browsers see in their searches and again the more linking that you achieve within your teams will help display your nonprofit more prominently.

Research what currently can be found online about your organization: Go to Google and type the name of your organization and LinkedIn and surround the entire entry with single quotation marks, for example ‘Oxfam LinkedIn’. This will display all results for your charity that also relate to LinkedIn which provides an ideal starting point for what can be updated and refined plus will help see what members of your teams have added via various social media channels to connect the company and LinkedIn. Use this as an active checklist for areas, profiles and content links that need additional work.

Integrate social media and/or blog updates: Ensure that your main profile and key members of your leadership team integrate blog posts or key news updates on your site within their profile feeds. You can learn more about using hashtags on LinkedIn via this link.

Register and Engage with appropriate related groups: Groups are extremely active on LinkedIn and provide a good platform to learn a great amount of detail or indeed share advice, tips and expertise that may be relevant to your cause. Groups provide an effective forum to build the awareness of your organization, just be sure to read the group rules before posting and be conscious of not spending too much time ‘promoting’.

Try and set aside the time to work through all six of these suggestions over the coming months. With some fine tuning and a little time spent your nonprofit profile as represented via LinkedIn can improve significantly in the eyes of potential donors in tandem with helping your organization attract and recruit leading talent as positions become available. Also be sure take the time to review your LinkedIn visits and visitor trends(along with all social media channels) via Google Analytics. Typically you’ll see that LinkedIn visitors are spending longer on your site and exploring more pages than the average visitor to the site. If you have additional LinkedIn suggestions and tips please be sure to share below.

___________________________________________________________________________________

For nonprofit, nonprofit fundraising, CSR business and other news, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Pinterest or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.