5 best practices for non-profit organisations using Instagram

With one billion active users monthly, Instagram is becoming a very powerful tool that NGOs, entities and associations want to be able to use to find their place on social media. According to the Open Data Project, 89% of non-profit organisations around the world are using social media as part of their strategy for digital marketing and fundraising, and 75% use Instagram.

Pay attention to your profile picture and bio

Leaving a positive first impression is crucial to attract new users and ensure that any organisation has an avatar that is known, with a profile picture that is well designed and visually attractive.

Having an attractive bio is also needed. Limited to 150 characters means you must go straight to the point, catch people’s eye with emojis and stickers of your campaigns and including a call to action. Categorising the account and contact details is key. That is why, under Category, you should add “non-profit organisation” when editing your profile.

Upload posts regularly

The most accepted best practice is to post on Instagram one to three times a day, but for most organisations this is too much of a big effort that doesn’t make up for it in times of resources, times, and materials needed to make this happen.

So, most non-profit organisations should aim to post regularly, 3 to 7 times a week.

Catchy pictures, good subtitles and location

According to Hubspot, posts with one single image receive 28% more likes than videos and 14% more than stories. On Instagram, you should do everything possible to post catchy pictures for your followers. However, is the pictures aren’t excessively nice or impactful, there’s nothing bad in posting them so long they help to explain the organisation’s story.

It is not advisable to post long stories in most cases, but it is a good practice to write titles with sentences using tags and emojis strategically. Posting a location is also good for localised organisations.

Authenticity, tags and emojis

When Instagram was first created, using a large number of tags was acceptable. So much so, that it was seen as a good practice to use 10, 20 or even 30 tags, with the belief that would help reaching out to more people. Far from reality, using too many tags is now seen as hashtag spamming. Using more than six tags in a post reduced the level of engagement; quality means more than quantity.

Linking content to your bio

Attracting traffic from sites outside Instagram continues to be a big challenge, even if non-profit organisations can now post active links on their posts. However, there are other alternatives that may be effective such as adding a link to your bio or Linktree, a tool that allows you to bring together several links under one single link.