Using Facebook To Promote Your Cheerleading Fundraiser

Using Facebook to promote your cheerleading fundraiser is an excellent idea, especially in light of the fact that so many people use the social networking site so often. It’s simply a great way to reach potential supporters and donors.

The Key To Success: Use Facebook With A Purpose.

First things first, it’s probably a good idea to note that most organizations will want to use a Facebook Page for promotional purposes-this is a lot like a personal Facebook profile, except it’s designed for businesses and organizations. The help section and tutorials within Facebook have lots of good information on how to actually set up the Page itself.

Unlike the way Facebook tends to work for personal use, sharing random thoughts and ideas as they pop into mind doesn’t quite get the job done when posting to your Facebook Page for a specific venture, such as promoting your cheerleading PTO fundraising ideas. Instead, it’s all about focusing on your predetermined marketing goals and then applying them to your social marketing campaign.

Here Are A Few Facebook Fundraising Concepts That Are Proven To Work:

Encourage participation within your Facebook community. It’s easy to get into the rut of just sending out “one-way” posts on your Page. These are okay, mostly when they’re informative in nature, but building up a community that revolves around your cause takes more than just one way posting. Active participation creates a better sense of community.

Create awareness. Share relevant information and links that bring awareness to what you’re trying to achieve. Does your cheerleading team need to do fundraising to help overcome budget shortfalls? If so, share on-topic information about the budget crisis that is causing the need for extra fundraising. Planning a team trip? If so, you might try to create awareness by sharing details along the way of the various stages of planning the trip.

Ensure that all of your cheerleading fundraiser details are clearly posted. After all, this is the most important message, right? Sometimes it’s easy to get started by just posting random tidbits about your fundraiser-but your Page should be set up with a dedicated area that shares all of the relevant details for the fundraising event too. Many supporters will be looking for this information, so make it very easy to find on your Page.

Be Responsive. Answering questions that your Facebook fans ask is a great way to keep the conversation going in a positive way. No questions to answer? Think of some of the frequently asked questions that you get about your fundraiser from other sources-just answer these questions one at a time with an occasional post.

Come up with a creative catch. For example, some organizations have reported success with having another donor match donations made during a specified time frame. You could use Facebook as a near-real-time outlet to reach your donors and promote this message (and how much time is left to participate in the match opportunity). There are countless variations of this technique that would work well-it helps to be creative here and come up with a fresh idea that using Facebook can help you implement.

Drive traffic to your cause via Facebook. In its simplest form, using Facebook to promote your cheerleading fundraiser can do exact that-promote the cause. Use the popular social networking outlet to share your message and let people know about an event’s date and times, or just use it to help promote your fundraiser’s web page. This can of course be done with your Facebook page, but works even better when as many members of your team can also promote the cause via an occasional post on their own personal Facebook profiles. It might be helpful to brainstorm and provide some “talking points” to your cheerleading squad to help them accomplish this with ease.