So, you have a LinkedIn page for your nonprofit, but you aren’t getting the traction or visibility you want and need to advance your mission on the platform. With LinkedIn’s 830 million users–and counting–across over 200 countries and territories worldwide, you see a world of opportunities for your nonprofit to:
- Build your donor prospect list
- Network with like-minded organizations
- Show up in more searches on the platform
- Increase your credibility and become a thought leader
- Move more people to action by donating and volunteering
To find out what sets the most successful nonprofit LinkedIn pages apart from the crowd, we look closely at a few great examples. Learn from the best to make your nonprofit’s LinkedIn page click!
Key Components of LinkedIn Pages for Nonprofits
LinkedIn is a user-friendly platform that attracts a diverse audience, including people looking to network, find a job, stay on top of industry trends, and much more. In addition to featuring short posts and videos, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn also lends itself to long-form content. Nonprofits can harness this website-like capability to create an effective online presence that drives results.
On nonprofit LinkedIn pages, there are several tabs that users can click through to learn about your organization and make an informed decision about whether they want to engage further. Let’s explore each LinkedIn page tab and its functionality.
Home
This is the first thing someone will see when they click on your nonprofit’s LinkedIn page, and includes a broad overview of your organization, as well as what they can expect to learn on your page.
About
In the About tab, users will find an Overview section or summary of your nonprofit’s mission and other key information like a link to your website, your company size, headquarters locations, and specialities, including relevant terms related to your areas of focus.
Posts
When someone clicks on the Posts tab, they will see all your past LinkedIn posts. A user can sort them by top or most recent, as well as by images, videos, articles, documents, and ads.
Jobs
Here, you can list information about current job openings within your organization, along with accompanying links, such as to an application. Keeping this tab up to date can help you attract new talent, whether for employment or volunteer positions.
Life
On the Life tab, you can give users an idea of what it’s like to engage with your organization. This is a great place to add trending photos and videos from your employees, supplemental information about the work you do, and various links to your website, such as your career page.
People
The People tab features a bird’s eye view of your employees, including the number of employees who work at your nonprofit, where they live, where they studied, what they do, what they’re skilled at, and more. Along with that, this tab lists links to your employees’ LinkedIn profiles.
Events
Here, you can add upcoming events to make it easy for users to sign up and share. It displays an archive of your past events too, so people know what to expect in the future. In addition to promoting and linking to your virtual events, you can also use LinkedIn Events and Live Videos to host or stream your event directly on the platform.
Videos
On the Videos tab, your most recent video posts will appear at the top, followed by all your previous videos, listed in chronological order.
Many factors impact the number of LinkedIn followers a nonprofit has and their level of engagement, including clicks, reactions, shares, comments, and follows. To stand out and show up more often in this digital space, the most successful nonprofit LinkedIn pages have detailed, relevant and user-friendly content listed under several or all of these tabs.
As you update or build out your LinkedIn page, you can decide whether to fill out every tab or to focus on a few that highlight your strengths.
What Are the Top 5 Nonprofit LinkedIn Pages?
To attract and engage more people, you can learn from five leading organizations and apply their best practices to your own page. Each of the following nonprofit’s LinkedIn pages (listed in alphabetical order) has hundreds of thousands of followers.
American Red Cross
LinkedIn Page Tab Where They Excel: Posts
The American Red Cross has over 300,000 followers and growing. They use single-question quizzes to engage followers and educate people about common aspects of health and safety, such as how to remove a tick and how many glasses of water you should drink in a day.
In addition to this engaging posting style, they frequently post videos on everything from how to pack an emergency kit to client testimonials. Likewise, they’ve also hosted several events on the platform for different audiences, including prospective candidates for other nonprofits and more.
Ashoka
LinkedIn Page Tab Where They Excel: People
Ashoka currently has over 160,000 followers and more than 1,500 workers listed on LinkedIn. Their People tab features details where their employees live by percentage, where they studied (universities), what they do (area of expertise), what they studied, and their skills.
Below this demographic information, you will find a long list of their current employees with their LinkedIn profiles up to date with their current position. This enables Ashoka to increase their visibility on the platform through their employees’ network.
Environmental Defense Fund
LinkedIn Page Tab Where They Excel: Events
The Environmental Defense Fund has over 120,000 followers, and they consistently promote events on LinkedIn. They hold events catered to multiple audiences on a range of topics related to climate action.
To date, the most popular event they promoted on the platform had 592 attendees. Since they have past events listed on the Events tab, people can find out what topics they focus on, which can pique their interest and increase the likelihood that they will attend a future event. Users can also click on links to watch the recordings of previous events.
The Nature Conservancy
LinkedIn Page Tab Where They Excel: Life
The Nature Conservancy has an impressive 480,000 followers, and their Life tab sets it apart. At the top, they have a video titled “Life at TNC,” followed by trending employee content. Not only do they have over 5,000 employees, but their employees actively engage on the platform by posting and resharing content regularly. This gives them a great advantage–access to their employees’ networks.
Anyone who visits this page knows they prioritize their employees and want to attract passionate individuals to join their ever-growing team. They’ve incorporated a small section calling for new applicants with a link directly to their list of current openings, as well as to their application platform.
They also highlight their professional networking opportunities with clear calls to action to follow them on Facebook and Twitter. To top off this tab, they’ve included a section dedicated to employee testimonials, followed by company photos.
United Nations Foundation
LinkedIn Page Tab Where They Excel: Videos
The United Nations Foundation currently has over 130,000 followers and over 470 employees. Though this nonprofit has fewer employees than some other nonprofit organizations found on this list, their Videos tab shines. Typically, their videos range from about 30 seconds to three or four minutes to hold people’s attention.
Along with speaking to their audience through an engaging medium, the United Nations Foundation focuses on current events and trending topics or discussions. Each video is informative, while also encouraging people to act with calls to action like “take a stand,” accompanied by a relevant link.
On top of that, each video features hashtags, which ensure their content will appear in more searches and reach more people. Likewise, they tag both individuals and organizations in their video posts to build and maintain connections.
8 Tips to Enhance Your Nonprofit’s LinkedIn Page
Although each of the top nonprofit pages listed above stands out in unique ways, they share several common characteristics. Not all of them have every available tab filled out. Nevertheless, the tabs they have chosen to focus on feature-engaging, applicable content that people on the platform want to interact with regularly.
One way to take your nonprofit’s LinkedIn page to the next level is by channeling energy into the sections that make the most sense for your organization and letting your team use their strengths.
Learn from these top five nonprofit LinkedIn pages and follow the tips below, working to become a thought leader in your field and achieve the results you want.
1. Update and Maintain Your Page
Keep your LinkedIn page up to date with complete and accurate information about your nonprofit, with an on-brand logo and a clear description of the work you do. It also helps to include a list of specialties or topics related to your areas of focus. That way, when users search for related words, your page will be more likely to appear in their results. A complete page can help you increase your weekly views by up to 30%.
2. Engage Your Employees (& Their Networks)
Use the networking capability of LinkedIn to grow your connections by asking your employees, board members, volunteers, and advocates to update their profiles to demonstrate their role within your organization. You can also set a notification to alert your team members about important posts, so they can engage and reshare them with their networks.
Be sure to respond to comments on your content and reshare related posts from similarly focused organizations, employee ambassadors, influential individuals, and passionate advocates to establish deeper connections with people online.
3. Post Regularly & Use Tags
Posting engaging, motivational, and/or informative content daily during peak times can increase your chances of attracting more viewers. According to LinkedIn, organization pages that post twice a day get twice as much user engagement. You can also post announcements about your nonprofit directly on the platform to keep your followers informed.
Remember to add related hashtags to your posts, so your content appears in more searches. Tag employees, volunteers, board members, influencers, and other nonprofits or organizations you admire (using the @ symbol followed by their name) to get more eyes on your page.
4. Use Videos to Increase User Engagement
Along with posting regularly each week, remember to supplement your written and visual posts with videos to increase user engagement up to five times. Remember to make your videos between about 30 seconds and three minutes to hold people’s attention. When you click on a video you posted, you can see how many reactions and other forms of engagement it generated.
5. Add Value to Your Field with Long-Form Articles
Keep in mind that, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn enables you to effectively share long-form content. When thinking about your LinkedIn content strategy, aim to create articles between 1,700 and 2,100 words with 5, 7, or 9 headings and eight images. These have been shown to perform the best in terms of user engagement.
6. Build Your Credibility with a LinkedIn Newsletter
A LinkedIn newsletter can help you add more value to your network by providing content that people look forward to reading, commenting on, and resharing. Over time, this can help you build your nonprofit’s brand and position your nonprofit as a thought leader in your field.
7. Promote & Host Events Directly on the Platform
When it comes to promoting and hosting events on LinkedIn, you have several options. If you use another platform to host virtual events, you can still promote and link to them via LinkedIn to alert your online network. Another option is to host your event directly on LinkedIn. If you go this route, you can create a sign-up form that users fill out directly on the platform.
8. Stream LinkedIn Live Videos
If you have an in-person event coming up, like your annual fundraiser or an important announcement, you can use LinkedIn Live to connect with more people in real-time. In addition to your in-person audience, people can tune in virtually from anywhere in the world. According to LinkedIn, on average, LinkedIn Live Videos generate seven times more reactions and 24 times more comments compared with regular video posts.
When building out your LinkedIn page, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel or add much more work to your plate to start developing more meaningful relationships with donors, advocates, employees, volunteers, and other organizations.
As you evaluate your current page, think about how you can repurpose the content that’s already on your website into your page tabs, posts, videos, articles, and newsletters.
By applying these tips to your nonprofit’s LinkedIn page, you can drive more conversions, increase your credibility, show up more often in organic searches, and reach your donor acquisition objectives.
Revamp Your Nonprofit’s LinkedIn Page to Engage More People on the Platform Today
If your LinkedIn page could use a lift, start by taking stock of your tabs and looking at nonprofit pages you admire. When you build your content posting strategy, focus on incorporating polls, quizzes, videos, and live events that foster user interaction and draw more eyes to your page.
Contact the iMission team to learn more about how to elevate your nonprofit’s LinkedIn page to generate the results you want!
