How to Use Social Media & Technology for Fundraising

Updated October 2024

Summary:

• Social media increases your school group’s reach and visibility, which can lead to more sponsors and more donations.
• Reviewing your existing social media posts for likes, shares, and comments can help you identify opportunities and encourage followers to take action.
• Use social media to include links to your online fundraisers. Linking to your FutureFund campaign on a social post makes it easier for people to take action by purchasing an item or donating.
• Every social media site has unique benefits. Facebook pages are great for bringing community members together, while Instagram reels can help sell school merch or promote activities. TikTok is great for getting students involved.
• FutureFund’s built-in messaging system, custom campaign pages, and automatic payment processing features make it easy to plan, launch, and monitor your fundraising campaigns more effectively.

Social media is a powerful tool for reaching and engaging potential donors, but using it effectively can be a challenge. To make social media work for your school group’s next fundraiser, you’ll need to set specific goals, identify your target audience, and know how to measure the success of each campaign.

We designed FutureFund to promote school fundraisers effectively, so we have plenty of social media tips and best practices to share with you! Find out how to organize your social media strategy and how you can use our platform to take your campaigns to the next level in this guide.

Make the most of social media by taking your fundraisers online

At FutureFund, we designed our free K-12 fundraising platform to let you plan, launch, and manage your campaigns online. You’ll get free features that work hand-in-hand with your social media campaigns to raise money, including:

• A built-in messaging system with custom audience filters. This gives you a direct way to reach parents and community members, supplementing your social media posts and any ads you run.
• Shareable links to your fundraisers that you can embed in social media posts, bios, and more. This drives traffic directly from social media to your purchase and donation pages.
• eCommerce tools to create custom online stores and make beautiful, user-friendly campaign pages. Encourage parents to buy or donate with tools like donation trackers, and enable installment plans or corporate matching to make it easier for them to say yes.

Not a FutureFund user yet? Get started for free today, then keep reading to learn more about how to use these features in concert with different social media platforms.

Building a social media strategy for your PTA or PTO

There are a few key steps you should always take when running a social media campaign to support your fundraiser. We’ll walk you through each one in the next few sections.

Step 1: Start with a (simplified) social media audit

A social media audit is an evaluation of your social media presence. While running an in-depth audit is a time-consuming process that usually requires help from a digital marketing team, it’s easy to get a general idea of what your best-performing content is all by yourself.

Start by reviewing the content you’ve already shared in the past. It’s okay if it isn’t related to a fundraiser—you’re just trying to get an idea about what your followers typically interact with and what they tend to ignore or overlook.

Step 2: Encourage people to take action

Make sure your posts actually give people a way to take action. If you’re sharing posts related to your fundraiser, you want to provide an easy way to participate as well.

FutureFund makes this easy by providing shareable links to your store and fundraisers that you can embed in places like:

• Posts on X
• Facebook posts
• Instagram stories
• Emails

Anyone who clicks the link gets taken directly to the page, where they can buy your products or register for your event. It’s an extraordinarily effective way to reach your organization’s goals!

Step 3: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs)

Each major platform has a way to track how often your content is seen and how many people interact with each post. Metrics, also called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), can help you tell exactly how often people see your posts and interact with them.

Common KPIs:

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Retweets
• New followers
• Page views

Experiment by posting about the same thing on different platforms and recording the results—this will help you decide what platform is the best match for the content your club produces.

Step 4: Set goals & objectives

Once you have a general idea of the kind of content your audience engages with, you can start laying the groundwork for specific campaigns. Begin by identifying and setting goals and objectives that align with the desired outcome of your fundraising activities.

Consider:

• What you want to achieve. Look beyond just raising money—what will the funds pay for, and how much do you hope to bring in? 
• Who you’re trying to reach. Are you trying to reach parents, students, teachers, other PTA and PTO members, or all of these groups at once? Do they already follow you on social media, or will you need to work on outreach, too?
• Your existing resources. Do you have an existing social media page, group, or website? Are you already a FutureFund member?

Think of goals as broad ideas and objectives as the steps that help you get there. Here’s an example of how you might set up the first week of a six-week field trip fundraiser.

Goal: Raise $5,000 for a school field trip within 6 weeks using FutureFund.

• Objective 1: Create, set up, and launch a campaign on Futurefund’s online platform.
• Objective 2: Optimize the campaign page with images, information, and at least one call-to-action (CTA).
• Objective 3: Create and schedule 5 Facebook posts that link out to your campaign page.
• Objective 4: Design and schedule 3 Instagram stories with buttons that lead directly to your campaign page or Linktree.
• Objective 5: Design 1 Instagram reel that links to the campaign page and share it on the first day of the campaign.
• Objective 5: Craft 10 tweets for X that make the best use of X’s character count limit to create compelling CTAS for fundraisers. Schedule 2 per day.
• Objective 6: Review results on the last day.

Remember, fundraisers tend to do best when organizers, PTAs, and PTOs reach out to potential donors across multiple social media channels. So the more of these tools you can learn to use, the better your fundraisers will be!

Helpful tactics & strategies

Not all posts are created equal. Text-only posts on X might be great for sharing quick updates on a campaign’s success, but photos, videos, and other visual content can help you promote eye-catching school spirit wear or videos showcasing exciting activities.

Understanding how to create assets—images, posters, videos, and other forms of media—that grab attention is just as important as deciding when to dedicate part of your budget to advertising and sponsored posts. When used correctly, all of these factors can strengthen your strategy and help you get the best results possible from your campaign.

Creating images & posters

We’ve seen just how powerful a well-designed image or poster can be during fundraising campaigns. We also know that not everyone is a designer—and that’s okay! You can use our FREE Canva templates to design:

• Fun run flyers
• Penny war posters
• Waiver forms
• Dance-a-Thon flyers
• Thank you letters

Canva is intuitive and easy to use, especially when you’re working with a template. So, schools, PTAs, and PTOs can print off what they need in only a few minutes.

Sponsored posts 

All major social media platforms allow you to make sponsored posts. These are like regular posts, but you pay a small fee to have the site advertise them so you can reach more people. To create a sponsored post, you’ll need to choose:

• The audience (who you want to reach)
• The timeline for the campaign (how long it should last)
• Your maximum budget (the most you want to spend)

You’ll pay a fraction of your total budget (usually pennies) whenever someone interacts with your post—until the campaign ends or the maximum budget is reached.

These ads (called PPC or Pay-Per-Click ads) can help cut through the noise on competitive platforms and reach people outside your organization’s existing audience. But messaging potential donors directly—with tools like our built-in messaging system—is also a great way to reach them without worrying about whether you’re on the right side of the algorithm.

The best social media platforms for PTAs and PTOs

It’s important to launch your social media campaigns on platforms that align with your organization’s goals. Common campaign goals for school groups might include:

• Increasing awareness of a fundraiser
• Calling for parent volunteers
• Running a membership drive

Some of these goals may be better supported by specific platforms. We’ll break down a few of the most popular options and outline what they can help your organization accomplish next.

Facebook

If connecting to the parents at your school is your main concern, making a Facebook page or group is the best place to start. As most parents with school-aged kids already have a profile, it’s easy to reach them with important updates. Groups are also effective online gathering spaces since they come with detailed administrative controls that make them easy to monitor.

Pros:

• Page features make it easy to post details about your club and your activities—including links to your FutureFund campaigns.
• Facebook’s privacy settings and admin controls let you ensure that only the right people are in your group.
• It’s easy to remove undesirable or offensive content to keep groups safe.
• Running ads on Facebook is an effective way to attract volunteers and promote fundraisers—as long as you have the budget for it.

Cons:

• Facebook is most effective for reaching middle millennials and older adults, as many younger millennials and members of Gen Z neither have nor want a Facebook account.
• You’ll have to be prepared to pivot in a few years as your parent population switches from millennials to Gen Z.

Instagram

Instagram is a highly visual medium, and it’s where the most people under 40 spend time on social media. If your organization can build a large enough following, Instagram can also be an opportunity to create additional revenue streams through sponsored posts or videos.

Pros:

• Instagram’s focus on visual media gives it a higher average engagement rate than more text-heavy platforms.
• Instagram hashtags and location tagging are effective ways to help fundraising activities gain traction outside the audience you already have.
• Your club can also feature sponsored posts on its Instagram page, where local businesses pay the school to advertise certain products or services in posts, videos, or reels (keep in mind that this will require a fairly sizable following in order to entice sponsorships).

Cons

• Building a following can take time, but because Instagram and Facebook are owned by the same company, it’s often easy to cross-post and pull Facebook users to your Instagram page.
• Growing a following on Instagram requires consistent posting, making it one of the higher-maintenance platforms for organizations that are trying to build an audience.

X

X.com, formerly known as Twitter, was originally created with short-form messages and updates in mind. Most users communicate through tweets that are under 280 characters each, although long-form posts of up to 25,000 characters are now available for premium users. But these longer posts aren’t necessarily worth it—images and videos tend to grab more attention.

Pros:

• Great for blasting out quick messages that don’t require a lot of time to craft.
• Easy to embed links to your FutureFund campaigns.
• If someone in your PTA or PTO has a sharp sense of humor, using X to share one-liners or puns is a reliable way to increase your following.

Cons:

• X is highly competitive since posts are short and easy to make. Breaking through the noise isn’t always easy.
• X’s faster, more aggressive pace and policies have occasionally been associated with online bullying and other negative behavior. You may need to monitor your account more closely.

TikTok

TikTok is a fun video-sharing platform that has exploded in popularity over the past few years. Over 450 million people now visit the site every single month in the United States alone, and more than a quarter of those users are under 18. With the option to post videos up to 10 minutes long, there’s always room for more in-depth updates, but short, funny clips work best.

Pros:

• TikTok is the perfect place to share short, unedited clips from events like pep rallies, fundraising events, or sports games.
• Sharing creative videos is a fun way to highlight your school’s campaigns, sell spirit gear, or just get students feeling more engaged.
• If there’s a parent or teacher in your PTA or PTO with a flair for humor or trendy challenges, TikTok is a great place for them to put their skills to use.

Cons

• It isn’t always easy to build a following on TikTok, mostly because you’re competing against a ton of other videos. Cross-sharing your videos on Facebook and Instagram can help bridge the gap.
• To grow your school’s following on TikTok, you need to post consistently on a regular schedule. The time and resource investment may be too much for some groups.

The Right Tools Make Fundraising Easier

Social media can seem complicated, but taking some time to understand the features of different platforms and create a strategy for promoting your fundraisers can make it a lot simpler. Combining social media with other tools can bring you even more success.

For best results, use social media to drive traffic to an online store or donation page to streamline the process and remove obstacles for your audience members. To learn more about how FutureFund’s platform can work with social media to power your fundraising, sign up for a free FutureFund demo here.