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Check out these best practices for nonprofit professionals and organizations.
Nonprofit Professionals
- Complete Your Profile – Your profile is an incredible way to enhance your own professional brand. Use it to convey passion for your cause and expertise that makes you unique and valued. A complete profile helps people find you and therefore helps you build your network. Some great examples of complete profiles: Greg Baldwin, CEO of VolunteerMatch and Beth Kanter, Author of book Networked Nonprofits.
- Add the Volunteer and Causes Field to your profile – Help us make social impact the professional norm. Add your volunteer experience, causes you care about and organizations you support. Discovering shared passion points among professionals is a great way to network and also raise awareness for important causes.
- Make Connections – Stay in touch with your colleagues, and leverage existing relationships by asking your connections for introductions.
- Join LinkedIn Groups – There are over 75,000 nonprofit groups on LinkedIn, offering you the opportunity to network with professionals in your industry and participate in conversations on relevant and timely topics. Some great conversations are already happening in The Chronicle of Philanthropy group and the Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations group.
- Connect with Experts – Find and connect to the most influential people in your industry by searching for skills like Volunteer Management or Fundraising using LinkedIn Skills.
- Use Status Updates – Communicate to your network on a frequent and ongoing basis to build thought leadership in your network. Share blog articles you’re reading, make an important announcement about your organization, or discuss recent results and activities at work. Don’t forget to connect your Twitter account to your LinkedIn Status Updates so you can share to both places at once. Kate Olsen from Network for Good uses LinkedIn Status Updates effectively through her profile.
- Stay on Top of Nonprofit News – LinkedIn Today shows you the top articles shared on LinkedIn and Twitter by people in your network. This is an incredible way to stay up to date on what’s happening in the nonprofit space by following the Nonprofit industry or following sources like the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Nonprofit Organizations
- Encourage Your Staff to Create 100% Complete Profiles – The more complete staff members profiles are, the more likely your organization is to attract and connect with all your critical audiences: staff, supporters and clients. Share this short video to help your staff learn more.
- Encourage your members/donors/volunteers to add the Volunteer and Causes Field to their profile – Adding this information to their profile is an implicit endorsement for your organization and can help strengthen your brand, drive awareness and build your community.
- Create a Company Page at No Cost – Join over 101,000 organizations that currently use a Company page to create an official presence on LinkedIn. They use their Company Page to position their organization and differentiate themselves. The Company Page created by the American Red Cross has attracted thousands of followers.
- Create Groups at No Cost – There are over 75,000 nonprofit Groups on LinkedIn, offering nonprofits a place to connect and host conversations with all their audiences. For example, The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN) uses their Group to host content and agenda discussions before their large annual conference every year.
- Hiring? Save time and money with LinkedIn Recruiter – Organizations of all sizes are using Recruiter to reach out to prospective staff and board members. Organizations of all sizes like: Susan G Komen, Habitat for Humanity, Teach for America, Sick Kids Foundation and many more are using Recruiter to boost their recruiting and interaction productivity greatly. A simple search for “volunteer manager” turned up in 287,985 member profiles within LinkedIn Recruiter. Organizations using Recruiter are better equipped to find and connect with people directly, manage candidate pipelines more efficiently and keep internal staff on the same page better. A small nonprofit in Chicago called Goldie’s Place used Recruiter to lead a successful board search. Finding and contacting a targeted set of local community leaders with a highly specific set of skills and experiences took only a matter of minutes.
- Promote Yourself as THE Organization to Work For by Investing in a Career Page – Finding, engaging and hiring great people can be difficult for any organization. Nonprofits are using Career pages (housed within their Company Pages) to help candidates better understand and identify with their culture and career opportunities. Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest has a great example of a winning Career Page.
- Strategically promote and manage applicants for open jobs by investing in Jobs – Nonprofits utilize the Jobs Network to automatically direct the jobs they’re hiring for to the most qualified professionals, for positions from entry-level to Executive Director. Organizations find that promoting open positions on LinkedIn has generated lots of interest from high quality candidates in a short amount of time. Here are several jobs posted by Teach for America. Amanda Coyle and her team at Network for Good had a great response to one of the Jobs they posted. According to Amanda, their Director of Development and Recruiting, “The value of LinkedIn was proven to us quickly. LinkedIn Jobs generated more high-quality candidates than our other channels. We hired one of the great candidates.” Check out their Company Page.
- Include LinkedIn in Your Broader Social Networking and Advertising Initiatives – If your organization is interested in specific products and services referenced above please contact us at this link.
