Learn everything you need to know about social media appends with this guide.

Social Media Appends: Locating Your Supporters’ Profiles

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In today’s fast-paced world, social media is one of the most direct and effective ways to reach out to constituents. In fact, around 22% of social media users spend their time online to be a part of a community that values the causes and interests they care about. The vast online space allows them to connect with global, like-minded communities and interest groups by simply joining a Facebook group or following different Twitter profiles and topics.

If you want to take advantage of the social media world for nonprofits, social media appending can help you tap into those tight-knit communities!

Collecting data through accurate social profile appending empowers you to get to know your supporters, their ever-changing interests, and what drives them to support your cause. In turn, you can form deeper, more meaningful relationships that help donors, volunteers, and other supporters feel more fulfilled in their philanthropic lives by pushing your mission forward.

To help you start reaching prospects where they already are, we’ve put together this ultimate guide to social media appending. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Here at NPOInfo, we value effective data management. While our main focus is on other types of appends, we recognize that social media is an incredible resource when it comes to getting to know your supporters. When paired with other appends like those for email and postal addresses, it’ll help your marketing ROI skyrocket!

Let’s dive in so you can learn how to take advantage of the wonderful world of social media appends!

Get started with our social media appending services.

What is a social media append?

Social profile appending is the process of updating outdated social media information and pulling new details for contacts in your CRM. This allows your marketing team to do the following

  • Invite existing supporters to join your nonprofit’s groups
  • Encourage them to follow your pages
  • Dive into their profiles to learn more about their interests

Especially when stewarding deeper supporter relationships, being able to find them online will be incredibly helpful. Constituents’ interests constantly change, so you can’t rely on the same information they provided you at the start of their relationship with your cause!

Further, turning to a professional services provider will ensure you receive accurate social profile append results. They can extract the information for you, removing the time commitment for your marketing team.

All you have to do is provide them with identifying information, such as your supporters’ names, past social media profiles, postal addresses, contact information, and any other details they’ve shared with your team. They’ll locate as many supporters on different platforms for you and share that information with your team!

Why use social media appending for your nonprofit?

Social media is a powerful fundraising tool with 32% of donors being inspired to give by social media. Plus, knowing where to find your supporters online has other obvious benefits, such as seeing what attracts them to your cause and forming connections. However, it may not be clear which social media platforms your nonprofit’s audience uses. 

That’s why we recommend turning to social media appending services. This allows you to pull supporters’ profiles in bulk by matching their data against a comprehensive database of social media profile information.

Once you have your supporters’ information from your append, you can launch your social media strategy to amplify your mission and forge deeper connections. As a result, your nonprofit will experience the following benefits:

These are the benefits of social media appends.

1. Tap into a global network.

There are more than 4.6 billion social media users worldwide, meaning your nonprofit’s content has the potential to be exposed to a massive audience. While not everyone who sees your posts will convert, social media can put you into contact with mission-oriented individuals who feel strongly about your cause. Plus, in addition to attracting a new audience, you’ll be able to connect with your current supporters to leverage peer-to-peer marketing.

Peer-to-peer advocacy is one of the most effective marketing strategies available to both nonprofits and businesses with 84% of consumers stating they trust the recommendations of their friends, family, and colleagues. Logically, this makes sense. After all, if a trusted friend vouches for a nonprofit’s work, it’s easy to extend the faith you have in that friend to the nonprofit they’re advocating for, especially when compared to cold outreach where you have to take an unknown organization at their word.  

Social media outreach creates this same level of social proof, as supporters see their friends talk about their own giving habits. When supporters follow your pages, share your content, or comment on your posts, this information will pop up in their followers’ newsfeeds or notification centers. This spreads awareness of your cause and presents your nonprofit as an organization new supporters can trust.

2. Send targeted appeals and create tailored program offerings.

Social media users curate the content shown to them based on who they follow, what topics they state they are interested in, and the posts they regularly interact with. By analyzing your supporters’ social media profiles, you can get a strong sense of your target audience’s likes, dislikes, and overall preferences. 

By having your marketing team explore your committed supporters’ posts and likes, you can:

  • Create tailored outreach that speaks to their unique interests
  • Adjust your product offerings to fall in line with their values
  • Create prospect profiles to guide who your team reaches out to 

This data can also be used for marketing outside of social media. Assuming your audience as a whole shares the general values of those with active social media presences, you can incorporate what you learned from your supporters’ profiles into your email and direct email strategy.

3. Create an open line of communication.

Social media differs from other digital marketing platforms by opening the door for two-way communication. Not only can supporters like, comment, and share your nonprofit’s posts, but your nonprofit can do the same!

Through your nonprofit’s profiles, you’ll be able to do the following:

  • Respond to and like their comments on your organization’s posts. Appoint a social media manager to post on your account and interact with anyone who engages with your content. This might involve answering questions, thanking supporters who shared that they donated, or empathizing with individuals who share personal stories about how your cause relates to their lives. These little interactions make your nonprofit more memorable and can lead to future support. 
  • Like, share, or comment on anything they post about your cause. If a supporter takes the initiative to promote your nonprofit, let them know you see their posts and appreciate them. Comment to thank supporters for the shout-out and provide additional context to their posts if necessary, such as sharing specific statistics about your work or linking to your website.
  • Direct message them when relevant. Social media is a form of indirect marketing where your posts are for a broad audience rather than a specific individual. However, platforms with messaging tools let you practice direct messaging, as well. This can be useful for answering highly specific questions, listening to and resolving supporters’ complaints, and forming connections with supporters who want to share their personal stories in a more private manner. 

Putting a friendly face on your nonprofit can be a challenge, but with social media, you can establish a positive brand reputation and build connections far more easily than through other platforms. After all, while supporters may not remember every digital ad they see, the nonprofit that responded to their comment personally is likely to stick in their minds.

4. Guide your omnichannel marketing strategy.

A social media append gives you another outlet to communicate with supporters, allowing you to expand your omnichannel marketing strategy. Omnichannel marketing is an approach to nonprofit outreach that uses multiple channels to guide a supporter through their donor journey. 

While multi-channel marketing delivers the same message on multiple platforms, omnichannel takes each supporter’s specific relationship with your nonprofit into account to customize the next message they receive. 

For example, let’s say you make a post on social media about a new program you’re launching, and a supporter comments on it. You then follow up with that supporter by emailing them more information about the initiative and inviting them to volunteer. Then, after they sign up to volunteer, you send a letter in the mail thanking them for joining your volunteer program. Finally, when they show up to volunteer, your volunteer manager may mention in person how volunteers can also help out by donating.

This approach helps push donor relationships forward while also building brand recognition. With a social media append, you can add social media engagement as one more link in your omnichannel approach.

5. Re-engage lapsed supporters.

A person’s social media profile gives you insight into who they are and how their values have changed over time.

If your marketing team wants to learn why someone stopped donating or volunteering with your nonprofit, take a look at their posts and the pages they engage with online. You might be able to pinpoint why they lapsed and find opportunities to connect with them based on their current interests.

Types of Social Media Appends

Here's an overview of different platforms for which you might append social media information.

You might have an idea of which platforms are most important to your cause, but if not, it’s worth considering early on alongside your marketing team.

Depending on the social media appending services you turn to, there are different sites you might pull supporters’ information from, such as:

  • Facebook: Considering this is the most widely-used platform, you’ll likely want to append social media profiles for Facebook. Great for connecting with your boomer and millennial audiences, this platform lends itself well to local marketing and relationship building. You’ll be able to easily share photos, post links to your nonprofit’s website, post long-form posts, and livestream to your supporters.
  • Instagram: Particularly popular among Gen Z and Millennials, Instagram is a fantastic place to share photos with supporters, conduct polls on your Story, and tap into both eCommerce and organic engagement.
  • Twitter: Great for connecting with people between the ages of 25 and 49, you might want to append social media profiles for Twitter if your nonprofit often has news stories to share, wants to engage in discussions with supporters, or has a more playful voice.
  • LinkedIn: If you want to tap into more of a professional audience, consider social media appends for LinkedIn. This platform is great for learning about supporters’ professional backgrounds, identifying corporate giving opportunities, and sharing long-form content about your nonprofit’s work.
  • TikTok: Most popular among Gen Z, TikTok is great for nonprofits that want to entertain their audiences, share inspirational stories, and call attention to pressing issues that require a community to get behind.
  • Snapchat: This platform is most popular among teenagers and younger millennials. If you have a younger audience, consider social media appends for Snapchat! However, bear in mind that this platform lends itself more to paid and location-based advertising rather than organic engagement.

Before you start locating supporters online, you’ll want to determine which platforms are most important to your cause based on your target audiences. Then, find a services provider that will append profiles on those sites for you!

For instance, you may online want to append data for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In that case, you won’t have a bunch of extraneous information since that’ll only clutter your CRM. You’ll instead only append and only pay for the data you need, helping to maintain good data hygiene.

How Social Media Appending Services Work

When it comes to finding your supporters on social media, your best bet is to turn to professional social media appending services. Expert services are much more reliable than appending the data yourself or using a generic database you find online!

A professional team will help you identify only relevant accounts for your contacts and remove the ones that aren’t useful or are fake.

When you partner with a data append team, here’s how you can expect the process to go:

This graphic outlines the social profile appending process.

  1. You provide the existing data you have to your social media append team. This might include full names, email addresses, past social media usernames, or any other information that will help them identify the correct people’s profiles.
  2. They search their database of consumer and business contacts for your constituents. Often, this can be done by simply entering people’s names or email addresses. This helps them find profiles associated with that information.
  3. They return the appended social media profiles to your team. They’ll let you know whether they found a profile associated with each constituent and what their username is. They may even import the data into your nonprofit’s CRM for you.

It’s that simple! While NPOInfo doesn’t offer social media appends, we’re happy to match you with one of our partners in the data enrichment space.

As we mentioned, we also offer plenty of other data append services that will pair well with your social media strategies. Whether you’re looking to append email addresses, postal addresses, dates of birth, or phone numbers, we offer services that can take your multichannel marketing strategies to the next level!

Reach out to chat about our data enrichment services and how we can help you strengthen your customer profiles with insightful data.

Additional Data Enrichment Resources

Social media is an incredibly powerful resource for learning about who your supporters are, why they support your cause, and how you can re-engage anyone who’s losing interest in your work.

If you want to more intentionally incorporate social media into your nonprofit’s marketing, social media appends will help you do exactly that! Turn to professional services to find your supporters online and reel them into your cause.

If you want to keep learning about data-driven strategies, the NPOInfo team is here to teach you all about effective data management! Get started by checking out these educational guides:

Get a free quote for NPOInfo's social media appending services.