Meet digital communications strategist Lianna Pisani! Photo by Alexia Hunt.

This is the fifth post in the “A Conversation With” series, where I interview talented folks about their areas of expertise, whether that’s social media, marketing, or communications. You can read past entries in the series here.

This month, I interviewed Lianna Pisani, a digital communications strategist based in Toronto. We discussed how to measure social media ROI, the value of qualitative data, and so much more. Please note that the views in this blog post are solely Lianna’s and do not necessarily represent those of her employer. I hope you enjoy her insights!

Tell me about your current role at a nonprofit and a bit about how you got there.

Right now, I work as the social media manager at World Animal Protection Canada. I manage all of our social media accounts, our email newsletter, blogging, the website, and various other things.

I attended Ryerson and York Universities in Toronto and got a Master of Arts in Communication and Culture. I like to tell people I have a Master’s in Selfies, because I researched feminist political selfies and how social media enables people to create and propel a movement. Now that I’m working for a nonprofit with a strong mission, a lot of that time I spent on Twitter analyzing movements for my research has come in handy. Some takeaways: have a strong, concise message, share engaging content that encourages responses, and ask people to take action and do something.

I have eight years of experience in communications generally, six of which were working with nonprofits. For more technical social media work, like running Facebook ads, I’m entirely self-taught. I took courses through CampTech in Toronto on SEO and Google AdWords and learned Facebook Ads Manager by trial and error, with the help of many YouTube tutorials.

What kinds of questions have you gotten from nonprofit leaders about social media’s efficacy?

There are so many, I’m sure you’ve heard them too. Things like:

Is social media even necessary? Do we even need to be on there?
Should we just go on every platform?
Can I hire an intern to do this?
How much should I be investing?
What can I do without a big budget?
How do I know if this is working?
What are the tangible measurements?

Is there a go-to social media platform you find that nonprofits get the most ROI out of?

Every nonprofit should test. It depends on your message and movement, the audience it would resonate best with, and where you can reach them.

That being said, I’ve found Facebook to be the most useful for nonprofits. Most nonprofits are looking for people to join in on their mission and donate. Facebook used to be for college students, but now it’s mostly over 40 and a lot of boomers. When you consider who has disposable income, it’s usually the over 40 crowd. From a practical standpoint, it’s one of the best choices.

Also, with Facebook advertising, they have a great algorithm down. They have an in-depth, detailed, systematic way of setting up ads. They allow A/B testing and you can optimize in a lot of different ads. We can easily serve targeted ads to that over 40 crowd with disposable income.

What metrics do you measure to track social media ROI?

It depends! You always want to think about what your goal is. If you’re looking for donations, email signups, or new leads, you’ll measure each one of those differently. If your goal for a specific campaign is donations, then you’ll measure how many donations you received and how much money you raised.

More generally, you want to look at reach and engagement. While some people consider reach a vanity metric (editor’s note: for definitions of terms like ‘reach’ and ‘vanity metric’ check out my social media glossary), I think it’s important for nonprofits as we all want to grow our audience.

What kinds of reports do you provide to your supervisor at your current job?

I put together a monthly social media roundup with a big focus on qualitative data. I don’t recommend just recording monthly and quarterly numbers. It’s important to dig deeper and study specific campaigns. It’s good to know and be on top of the numbers, but what do they really tell you? What did you do right that month? Look at the actual posts and which ones are most successful.

In my roundup, I’ll talk through one campaign that went well and why. The storytelling piece is really important. What’s the narrative behind the numbers? In the roundup, I’ll also share the top two or three posts for each platform based on organic engagement and take screenshots that capture the essence of the conversation on those channels. Qualitative data can be really insightful when paired with quantitative numbers. While qualitative is less tangible and can be harder to explain to your boss, it can lead to more success long-term.

What types of campaigns have you found to be the most effective for nonprofits?

It’s always good to have a variety of campaigns. You need to look at the journey your supporters would go on and consider your goals. Lots of nonprofits want to find new people and bring in donations, but getting a donation is a very high barrier conversion. Something like signing a petition is a lower barrier--you’re giving away your name and email which the internet already has--but someone needs to care a lot more to make a donation.

For a lead generation campaign, you could have an Instagram Story ad with a strong, concise message that encourages people to swipe up and sign up for the newsletter. What do you do with these new people next? You can boost your posts to make sure your new audience is seeing them. You could also do a remarketing campaign--if you have really interesting, top performing blog content, then you can create an ad that targets the people you just brought in on the lead gen campaign. Help them along on the journey with you; get them invested in your content.

A reach/brand awareness campaign could be the next step, or a low-barrier campaign like making a pledge or signing a petition. All of this would take place over the course of a month. It usually takes quite a few months to really engage with someone to get them to the donation step. From there, you could move into the donation conversion campaign. This is also all amidst organic community management and engagement going on throughout the journey.

You can’t just skip from lead generation to donation conversion. It won’t be successful. You wouldn’t give someone $5 on the street if they said they were from a charity and needed money. You have to take a step back, understand that they’re new to the organization and know absolutely nothing, and help them learn.

Are there any specific social media tactics you’ve found to have higher ROI than others?

The #1 thing I think is overlooked is talking to your followers. Read the comments, reply, answer their questions, and ask them questions. Make your brand personable and friendly! That’s the best way to get people to come back to your page. People who are creating tons of videos and posting 70x a day often overlook the very simple strategy of just talking to people. People go on social media to start conversations and connect with people.

Working for an animal charity, people are really engaged and we get lots of comments. I’ll do things in the copy like “If you agree, leave a tiger emoji in the comments” and we’ll get tons of tiger emojis pouring in.

A few practical things that work well:

Posting often on a somewhat regular schedule, especially on Instagram.
Facebook prioritizes external links like news articles, so in between your own organic content, you probably want to post some articles to give your page a boost.
Look back on posts that have been most successful and try more of that. If something really flops, it’s probably not the right content. You might have to take the personal hit of thinking it’s a really good one and it’s not.
Instagram boost campaigns - Last fall I ran one and spent about $10-30 to boost organic posts that were performing well. I targeted our followers and their friends. This gave us a halo effect of a ton of new followers! The goal was to reach new people, and it resulted in both new comments and new followers.

An example of the “drop a tiger emoji if you agree” tactic

Why is it important to build brand awareness?

It’s simple: if no one knows who you are or what you do, how are you going to grow? Even if your mission is selfless and wonderful, that’s great and we need you, but if nobody knows what you’re doing you’re not going to have the money to keep doing it. You need people to talk about you and the work you’re doing in order to raise the profile of your organization. Some brands that have a strong following already feel like they don’t have to do more work on it. But if you want to grow or reach new people based on different issues as your organization evolves, you need to diversify your following. It’s also super important to be seen as an expert in your sector. If people don’t know who you are, media outlets aren’t going to call you for interviews. They need to recognize your name and logo.

Why is digital marketing important to nonprofits, particularly during COVID-19?

Right now, people are at home and the best way to communicate is digitally. Anything you were doing traditionally needs to become virtual unless you can take that financial hit. All nonprofits should be in digital spaces anyways--it’s a great place to reach people.

Do you have any tips for rising above the noise as digital spaces become more crowded?

Have a strategy--it sounds basic and obvious, but when an organization hasn’t previously focused on digital, they go into it just trying random stuff. Everyone should sit down and spend the time to create a strategy. It’ll help you spend your budget efficiently rather than throwing your effort to the wind.

What aspects of social media marketing are meaningful but are hard to measure?

It’s good to consider it as a long game. Social media is an investment of time, effort, and resources. There are so many meaningful, qualitative aspects that are tough to measure, like the conversations you’re having and responding to people in comments. Follower retention and engagement rates are a good way to know whether or not your engagement is working. You can also look at conversions--three months down the line from a campaign, how are conversions? You can use data to make an educated inference.

One of the lessons here is that even if something seems difficult to measure on social media, it doesn’t mean you can’t use other metrics to tell the story. Don’t look at metrics on the surface level. Look at how they relate to one another and your goals. Think critically about how they all work together to tell the story. Measure the things that seem hard to measure.

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