While social media is a great tool for businesses, it's also valuable for non-profits to grow awareness of their cause, keep their community informed, and raise funds. You're probably familiar with the ice bucket challenge, the viral campaign from 2014 that had everyone from your neighbor to Arnold Schwarzenegger dumping buckets of ice water over their heads to raise money for ALS research and other charities. It started with three friends who wanted to cure a debilitating disease. When Pete Frates was diagnosed with ALS, he and his friends wanted to fight a diagnosis and raise money for ALS research. So they turned to Facebook to amplify their reach and get their story out to the world and it worked. [NOISE] >> Very grateful. [MUSIC] >> Ice bucket challenge inspired the 1st generation of Facebook fund raising tools. To date there are 2.4 million ice bucket challenge videos tagged on Facebook and movement continues to raise money today. Non-profits like businesses are able to create Facebook pages, events, use Messenger and groups. As well as Instagram accounts for free to connect and engage with their communities. Given the connections between people in social networks, they offer unique opportunities to promote causes, drive awareness and raise funds. And, several social media platforms offer tools designed especially for non-profits and causes. Of course, just like businesses, non-profits rely on marketers to grow and engage their audience. So if you land a marketing role in a nonprofit, it's good to be aware of some of the core tools that exist. Let's take a look at some of these specialized tools. With Facebook's charitable giving tools, non-profits can raise money and awareness for their cause on Facebook an Instagram. These free tools help non-profits collect donations and enable supporters to fundraise for a non-profit. Non-profits using Facebook's payment platform to process donations paying no fee, so 100% of the donations go to the charity. Facebook is not alone in offering special tools and services for non-profits, YouTube's non-profit program for instance, helps non-profits connect with supporters, volunteers and donors. For many causes, video is a new but essential format for storytelling. With one billion viewers on YouTube every month, non-profits of all sizes can use YouTube videos to share their stories and reach a global audience, drive empathy and engage supporters. For example, as part of the YouTube non-profit program, non-profits can set up fundraisers with tools that viewers can use to make donations to an organization or cause right from a video on YouTube. Here is an example of a fundraiser set up by Smosh Games together with St. Judes Children's Hospital to raise money for free care for children and families in need. So non-profits have really cracked a code on engaging audiences and turning them into donors through the use of social networks. Let's look at this example from the WWF. They use Snapchat to share pictures of endangered animals, images shared on Snapchat disappeared after they've been viewed, and the WWF cleverly accompanied their image with this hashtag. #lastselfie, they suggested to Snapchat users that they should take a screenshot of the images and share them, so this would not be the animals last selfie. Users share their screenshots on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and so on. Adding viral strength to this campaign, an raising awareness for the WWF's effort to protect endangered species among the millennial audience. Let's look at a short video about the campaign. [MUSIC] Finally, I would like to mention two organisations that have created tools that help people to tap into the power of social networks to help their cause. One of them is GoFundMe, a platform where people can create a web page for their own fundraiser. They can share this with friends through integrations with social networks like Facebook and Twitter for instance, raising awareness and donations for their cause. Petition website Change.org is another platform that uses the power of social networks to rally people behind causes. Users and organisations can create petitions on the sites that they can share through their social networks. As you can see, social media can be a very powerful channel for non-profits. They can tap into the unique tools and services on social platforms to raise awareness about a cause, educate people, and raise funds. Marketing for non-profits isn't different from marketing in businesses. Marketers work on understanding their audience, creating a powerful message, put that message in front of their audience and then measure and optimize the impact.
