A Facebook Page strategy is the set of activities you organize to achieve a specific goal. It can be short and specific, or long term with a series of campaigns and objectives.

Elements of a Strategy

• Mission: The overall impact your nonprofit is trying to make.
• Goals: What you want to achieve through your Page to support your mission.
• Target Audience: The types of people you aim to reach with this campaign.
• Content: The stories and visuals you’ll use to engage people.
• Measurement: The metrics you’ll track to determine your campaign’s success.

Mission

It’s great if you already have an outline for how your program activities map to your mission statement. If you don’t, you’ll want to create a basic outline that shows how your organization creates impact. An outline for building a Facebook strategy helps you:

• Make sure your Facebook activity contributes to the impact you want to make
• Clearly communicate to people what you need from them and why
• Create compelling calls to action

Goals

Your campaign should relate to your overall mission. What needs to be done to support or enhance that mission? How could a campaign on Facebook help achieve your program’s objectives? Starting with a list of ideas will help you choose a campaign goal or goals that are best suited for Facebook.

TIP: Try to set narrow goals that are measurable. For example, if your mission is to decrease the number of children that suffer from malnutrition, try to break down the goal into smaller goals like: educate more parents about good nutritional practices, grow your email list to distribute information, or gather petition signatures to support a new piece of legislation.

Who Do You Want to Reach?

Look at the goals you’ve set for your organization and think about the ways in which people can help you achieve them. How do your programs fulfill a need or solve a problem that a potential supporter would care about? Broadly think about who might be interested and who may benefit from being involved with your organization. Figuring out the value you bring to a community is the first step in identifying your ideal target audience. When choosing your target audience, consider demographic and interest characteristics:

• Demographic: This may include age, gender, location, ethnic background, marital status, income and more.
• Interest: This identifies more about potential supporters’ hobbies, behaviors, connections, lifestyle and more.

TIP: To help you pick the characteristics to target with your posts (for both paid and unpaid posts), we recommend using the Audience Insights tool to choose the characteristics you want to target and see how many people fit that criteria. This can show you if you should narrow or broaden your audience criteria, as well as identify the top Page likes and typical activity of a potential target audience. Note that the Audience Insights tool is currently available on desktop only.

What Posts Will You Create to Support This Campaign?

Once you’ve determined your goals and targets, the next step is to create a series of posts that reflect your objectives. You’ll want to present your message in a way that your target audience finds compelling and wants to engage with.

• Outline content types and themes that you want to create
• Create a content calendar and use the post scheduler

What Metrics Will You Measure to Determine Your Campaign’s Success?

A campaign’s success is determined by how well it’s achieving its outlined objectives. The results you measure should be tied to your campaign goals. It’s important to think through what metrics to measure and how you’ll track them. For example:

• Reach: How many people see your posts
• Engagement: How many people like, comment on, share or view your posts and videos
• Conversion: How many people take an action, such as share, sign up, visit your website, attend an event or donate