As the Internet evolved, so did the way people manage and use it. New tools emerged. The ones that managed to outperform their predecessors stayed relevant and found new applications for businesses. Today we have a list of social media management tools for nonprofit organizations that may be of great use to you or your organization.
Free or discounted social media management tools for nonprofits can help organizations big and small manage their marketing efforts and increase exposure. The following are some of the best social media management tools available to nonprofits with a 501(c) (3) tax-exempt status.
Social media management tools for nonprofits can be difficult to find. The process of choosing the best platform for your nonprofit can be tricky. You want to find something that will actually meet your needs without breaking the bank.
Social media management tools can be a valuable asset for nonprofits, who often have to stretch every resource as far as possible. Luckily for nonprofits, this is one area where there are plenty of options for helping to make your social media efforts more efficient. Below the best free social media management tools (and two bonus ones) you should be sure to check out if you haven’t already.
Free Social Media Design Tools
A nonprofit rarely has a designated designer on staff. More often, the marketing team is wearing many hats and
“Designer” is just one of them. Thankfully, since not everyone is a Photoshop wiz, free tools are available to help create stunning social media graphics.
Canva
Canva is a beginner-friendly, template-based graphic design app. With a huge, searchable library of templates, you are bound to find what you need for your next social media campaign. And, it’s easy to share and collaborate with others; all you need is an email address. The free account gives you access to 250,000+ templates and 5GB of storage in the app You can get even more with a monthly subscription.
Pros:
- It’s super easy to use.
- Templates are organized by size, so you know you are working in the correct format.
Cons:
- Slide decks are limited to 15 pages.
- You can’t change image dimensions after starting a project.
Last Word:
For a completely free app with a vast library, Canva will provide most of the design tools you need as a small marketing team. And, if you like it, more options and functionality are available with the paid plan at $9.99 a month.
Adobe Spark
From the creator of such design powerhouse tools like Illustrator and Photoshop comes Spark. This drag and drop tool provides customizable templates that you can adjust to fit your brand: upload photos, your logo, and color scheme, and ‘brandify” your project. You can create custom templates that are reusable and add animation to make your design stand out. It can also automatically resize your project to fit the aspect ratios needed for different social media platforms. The starter plan is free, the individual subscription offers a one-month free trial, or you can opt for the team subscription.
Pros:
- You can make videos, images and pages.
- Very easy to use. Five minutes and you’ll have it mastered!
Cons:
- Only integrated for direct sharing with Facebook and Twitter.
- Templates don’t allow you to enlarge text or images.
Last Word:
If you’re already in the Adobe world, Spark can tie in to your existing account. And you know you have the backing of a design solution developer with a decades-long reputation.
MeetEdgar — Best social media automation tool
The biggest problem most businesses experience when it comes to social media is a scope of work that includes repetition. Instead of wasting your time, effort, and resources to go about your daily social media needs, you can use MeetEdgar to eliminate repetition and optimize your social media content.
Two main benefits come from increased brand awareness and an opportunity to connect with your target audience in a meaningful way. Using the power of automation, MeetEdgar allows you to efficiently manage your brand’s online presence by handling all repetitive and tedious social media tasks.
Key features
- Social media scheduler
- Automated social sharing
- Auto-refill queue
- Unlimited content library
- Category-based scheduling
- URL shortener and in-app tracker
- Browser extension
- Auto-expiring content
- Direct video uploads
Pricing
MeetEdgar – $49/month
Post Planner — Tool for increasing engagement
Post Planner social media manager app is an excellent tool for increasing engagement, improving lead generation, and conversion rates. It’s mostly designed for professionals and small businesses. If used properly, it can help generate up to 510% more engagement than before.
Aside from generating engagement, this tool helps locate the content, plan and optimize your content, and automate and streamline your publishing. Use its advanced social media scheduler and post planner features to optimize your content and posting, and you’ll dive into a much wider pool of audience.
Key features
- Planned posts
- Top articles
- Status ideas
- Bulk uploads
- Sharebar
- Custom domain
- Email opt-in
- Post targeting
Pricing
- Starter – $3/month
- Love – $11/month
- Guru – $24/month
- Master – $59/month
- Agency – $125/month
- Custom – by quote
Tailwind — Best scheduling tool for Pinterest
In the online world of the internet, visual content provides the best feedback for businesses. If you’re into digital marketing, it’s simply impossible to run a digital marketing campaign without visual content.
That’s exactly where Tailwind can help. This is a perfect tool for handling everything around visual content on social media. Tailwind is exclusively designed for platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
It allows you to schedule, clone, and create multiple posts and pins on a daily basis, almost effortlessly. Still, the thing that makes Tailwind worthy of the best social media marketing tool title is its stunning scheduling intelligence. It intuitively suggests content and proper timing for reposting, how to locate and create top-quality content, and how to measure your performance along the way.
Key features
- Pinterest analytics and reporting
- Pinterest content marketing
- Pinterest content optimization
- Schedule pins on Pinterest
- Instagram analytics and reporting
- Instagram audience management
- Instagram UGC content management
Pricing
- Plus Plan – $15/account/month
- Professional Plan – $799.99/month
- Enterprise Plan – By quote
Tweepi
Tweepi gets you more Twitter followers by discovering relevant users that might be interested in your topic and then actively engaging those users.
Cost: You can purchase the silver plan for $12.99/month or the platinum plan for $24.99/month.
Notable customers: Bookmark and PublishingPush.com.
Socedo
Socedo is designed to identify social media users that fit your buyer persona by monitoring social behavior and using it to categorize users. It also gives you the opportunity to divide those individuals into segments.
Cost: As with many software sellers and service providers, you must contact Socedo directly for pricing information.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers helps businesses monetize campaigns by measuring your competitive performance and using your followers’ data to make informed business decisions.
Cost: The essential package costs $200/month for 10 profiles or $400/month for 20 profiles.
Notable customers: National Geographic, Heineken, and Sony.
ZeroFOX
This tool works with social media platforms to identify and protect businesses against potential hackers. It also protects businesses’ reputations by actively removing offensive content and protecting your followers against scammers.
Cost: Contact ZeroFOX for flexible pricing that fits your business.
Notable customers: Phoenix Suns and First Command.
SocialPilot (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Edge)
With many apps in this category, if you want to delegate social media management to someone else in your organization, you’ll have to pay a serious premium for the privilege. (You could give them the login credentials to save money, but that comes with a whole host of security concerns.) With SocialPilot, though, the Small Team plan starts at $50/month and includes two other team members and 25 social media accounts. With Buffer or Hootsuite, you’d be paying hundreds of dollars more per year.
While SocialPilot’s user interface is a bit dated, it’s entirely functional. The sidebar has tabs for managing your posts and accounts, accessing your inboxes or analytics, lining up content from RSS feeds, and configuring your team and client setup. All the features you’d expect of a good social media management app are there—though it’s the Team options that are most compelling.
Different team members can be assigned roles, based on what you want them to be able to do. For example, you can set things up so content creators have to submit all posts for approval, or allow managers to edit and schedule but still retain final approval for yourself. This allows you to delegate responsibilities to the people you work with, without having to give them free rein.
SocialPilot also integrates with Zapier, so you can automatically add content to your SocialPilot queue whenever something happens in the other apps you use most.
Social Pilot Price: From $30/month for the Professional plan; the Small Team plan with 3 users and 25 accounts starts at $50/month
MeetEdgar (Web, iOS, Chrome)
MeetEdgar is like an autopilot for your social media accounts. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This isn’t an analytics tool—just a scheduling one.
What makes MeetEdgar so different is its automation. The app can find quote-worthy text from links, and then compose updates to go along with them. After pasting your link, simply click Suggest Variations, and MeetEdgar will create four alternative updates based on the contents of your link. You can edit them, delete them, or add your own manual variations, and then click Save to Library. This is the only tool we came across while researching that actually creates your content for you. Better still, it can generate variations on past updates that have performed well, making it easy to recycle updates without duplicating content.
Another standout feature is the ability to categorize your updates. Add different types of content to different categories, so you can better space out content types over the course of your schedule. You may want to create one category for blog posts, another for how-to posts, and another for promotional material. Color-coded categories make it easy to ensure your schedule contains a good range of content that will appeal to different users. You can also automatically add content from sources like your blog or your Medium, WordPress, or YouTube accounts with a quick import.
There’s little in the way of analytics tools in MeetEdgar, but the app does implement A/B testing to isolate best practices; plus, you can use the built-in ed.gr link shortener to track clicks. You can schedule content via the web, via the Chrome extension, or using a bookmarklet for Safari and Firefox.
MeetEdgar integrates with Zapier so you can, for example, automatically add your and other folks’ articles to your Edgar library for posting.
MeetEdgar Price: From $19/month for Edgar Lite with 3 social media accounts, unlimited media library, 4 categories, and unlimited support.
Sendible (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)
Sendible is a complete social media management package, with one big feature that makes it stand out: its price. It offers more advanced features at a lower price point than almost any other app we tested.
As you’ve likely come to expect, a full set of scheduling tools is included. You can queue up posts for all connected social networks, blogs, and mailing lists. Smart Queues make it easy to maximize engagement by adjusting publication times for you, with the option of setting your best-performing evergreen content to be automatically recycled in the future.
These scheduling tools are as good as any in the business. A shared calendar displays all of your pending updates across any networks you have connected, with the option of connecting RSS feeds to curate and automatically schedule future content.
Unlike many of the more affordable social media management apps, Sendible enables you to monitor social media for mentions of your brand, competitors, or other terms of interest. It’s just a matter of setting up an appropriate keyword alert. You can pick which keywords you want to target, optional inclusions and words you want to exclude, and where the posts were made. You can then browse the list of relevant keyword results from your dashboard or have them automatically emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis. You can even choose to just receive the positive or negative alerts.
Similarly, Sendible offers eight pre-built reports (including integration with Google Analytics) even on its cheapest plan, so you can see how well your social campaigns work. You can also see any new comments, mentions, or direct messages sent to your social media channels and address them from within the app. While common with enterprise social media management apps, few other options in this price range offer all that.
Sendible Price: From $29/month for the Creator plan that includes 1 user, 6 services, and 100 posts per day.
Which Tool Will You Choose?
Whether you’re a social media expert or just getting started at your nonprofit, these tools can help you save time and get better results. Let us know which tools you are using to manage and monitor social media at your nonprofit!
Conclusion
Social media is an avenue for nonprofits to increase their visibility and to gain trust from potential donors. This is why it is crucial for charities to know which social media platforms are best suited to them.
Nonprofits are increasingly using social media as an integral strategy of their marketing and fundraising. The advantages don’t stop there. Social media tools can be a cost-effective way of getting your message out to people across the world for free.