Social Media Fundraising That Is Worth Your Time
Somewhere in a board meeting this year, someone is going to ask why your organization is not on TikTok. It is a fair question asked in good faith, and it usually arrives with a theory attached — that there is a crowd of would-be donors out there, and the only thing standing between them and your mission is a video nobody has made yet.
Meanwhile the person who would have to make that video is also writing the year-end appeal, staffing the spring event, and trying to close three major gifts before the fiscal year ends. I did that work myself for years in ministry, in the margins of everything else, and I remember the particular guilt of a page that had gone quiet for two weeks. What I have learned since is that the question worth asking is what social media actually does inside a development office, and how many of your hours that job honestly deserves.
What Social Media Actually Does for a Development Office
Start with the number that reframes everything else. Giving through Facebook's built-in fundraising tools accounted for 0.2% of all online revenue for nonprofits in 2024, down from 1.1% the year before. The same M+R data shows the average Facebook fundraiser collecting three gifts averaging $36, for a total of $108. Those are real dollars and they are worth having. They are also not a fundraising program.
Social media earns its keep earlier in the process. It builds recognition, keeps your mission in front of people during the eleven months you are not asking, and moves a small share of those people onto your email list or onto your donation page, which is where the gift usually happens. Once you accept that social media fundraising is mostly a traffic and trust channel, the strategy questions get much simpler, and so do the arguments in board meetings.
The reach math explains why. Social Status puts organic reach at an average of 2.2% of a nonprofit's Facebook followers, and M+R puts the average nonprofit at about 53,000 of them. That is roughly 1,200 people per post, most of whom scroll past — in Rival IQ's benchmark data, nonprofit engagement rates run around 0.046% on Facebook and 0.623% on Instagram. A page with 53,000 followers might be having a real conversation with a few dozen people on a good day.
Which is exactly why every post needs somewhere to send those few dozen people. If your donation page is slow or your email signup is buried three clicks deep, the attention you worked for evaporates on arrival. Social is one road in a larger online fundraising program, and roads are only worth paving when they lead somewhere finished.
Most of the social media work in a development office is repeatable — the same weekly rhythm, the same handful of post types, the same follow-up. That is the kind of work worth systematizing once instead of reinventing every Monday.
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Pick Two Platforms and Let the Rest Go
The 2026 M+R Benchmarks study gives a clear picture of where nonprofits have actually landed. Nearly all participating organizations maintained a presence on Facebook and Instagram, 74% were on YouTube, 43% on TikTok, 37% on Bluesky, and 32% on Threads. Twitter/X sat at 54%, a marked drop from prior years, and 31% of the nonprofits still there said they were planning to leave or sunset the account. X was also the only platform where nonprofit follower counts fell, down 3% on the year.
TikTok had the fastest-growing audience of any widely used platform, with follower counts up 37%. That growth is real, and it is growing from a small base — the average nonprofit has about 3,000 TikTok followers against 53,000 on Facebook and 18,000 on Instagram. Another way to see the same gap: for every 1,000 email addresses a nonprofit holds, it has an average of 1,041 Facebook fans, 251 Instagram followers, and 36 on TikTok.
So when your board member asks about TikTok, the honest answer is that it depends entirely on who you are trying to reach. M+R found that follower counts vary enormously by sector — wildlife and animal welfare groups have huge Instagram audiences, while advocacy organizations do far better on X. Platform choice follows your donors and your content, not the trend line.
Here is the discipline I would hold to in a small shop. Choose two platforms. Choose them because your donors are already there and because you can sustain the kind of content that works on them, then let the other platforms go without apology. Two accounts posted to consistently, with a real reason behind each post, will beat five accounts fed by guilt every time. And a dormant account is a cost, since it tells a curious prospective donor that the lights are off.
Where the Money on Social Media Actually Comes From
Three things on social media move real dollars, and none of them is the organic post from your page.
The first is paid social advertising, and the numbers deserve a careful read. M+R's data puts the average return on ad spend for fundraising ads at $0.76 on Meta platforms and $0.04 on TikTok, with an average cost per donation of $74 on Meta against $590 on TikTok. A return of 76 cents on the dollar means the first gift does not pay for the ad that produced it. That can still be a good decision, because you are buying a donor rather than a donation — but only if you have a plan for the second gift. Ad spend without a welcome series is a slow way to fund Meta. This is the same arithmetic behind first-time donors quietly disappearing across every online channel.
The second is influencers and creators, which sounds like a big-budget play until you look at who nonprofits are actually working with. M+R found that 58% of participants partnered with influencers in 2025, that every one of those programs included Instagram, and that 87% used accounts in the 10,000 to 100,000 follower range. Small and local, in other words. Six in ten of those programs included a direct fundraising ask. The small-shop version of this is the board member with 4,000 local followers, or the parent whose child came through your program and who already talks about you online. Ask them to post something specific on a specific day.
The third, and the most overlooked, is the fundraiser somebody else runs for you. By M+R's count, 97% of all Facebook fundraising revenue comes through supporter-created fundraisers rather than a donate button on your own page. Birthday fundraisers, memorial pages, a runner raising money for a race. That is peer-to-peer fundraising living inside a social platform, and it responds to attention. GivePanel's data puts the lift at about 35% for fundraisers whose organizers get thanked by the nonprofit during the campaign, over those who are left alone. Ten minutes of thank-you messages is one of the better returns available to a development office in any channel.
Social media is a patience channel, and some of the people quietly following you for years are capable of giving in ways a donate button was never designed to handle.
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A Social Media Plan You Can Actually Keep
If this resonates and you want to reset how your office handles social, here is where I would start this week.
1. Count the hours honestly. For one week, log the time your team spends on social media, including the meetings about it and the mental space it occupies on Sunday night. Most development shops are surprised. Compare that total against what those same hours would produce spent on donor calls, and let the comparison set your budget for the channel rather than the other way around.
2. Cut to two platforms and set a floor, not a ceiling. Two posts a week you can sustain in February beats a daily plan that collapses in March. Consistency is what the algorithms and your supporters both reward.
3. Give every post one job. Roughly one post in five should ask for money. The rest should earn the right to ask by showing the work — a photograph from a program, an update on something a donor funded, a volunteer in her own words. This is where impact storytelling pays off, because the story is what people remember three months later when the appeal shows up in their inbox.
4. Measure what social is actually for. Track email signups and donation page sessions that originate from social, not likes and follower counts. Tag your links with UTM codes so your analytics can tell you which posts sent people who mattered. Nonprofit Tech for Good's research puts the share of organizations doing this at about 22%, which means most organizations are arguing about social media performance with no evidence in the room.
There is one exception to all of this, and it is worth planning for. Social media does convert directly during a concentrated moment when everyone you know is talking about the same thing at the same time, which is the whole design behind a giving day or crowdfunding campaign. Save your biggest social push for a window like that, and let the rest of the year do the quieter work of keeping your mission familiar.
The relief in all this, for anyone carrying the whole development function on their own shoulders, is permission to stop treating social media as a fundraising program that keeps underperforming. Judged as an awareness and traffic channel, it is doing fine, and it needs a couple of hours a week rather than a couple of hours a day. Those recovered hours have somewhere far better to go.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.