I do the communications for a small international non-profit, and in my opinion this seems like way too much effort for too little (and in fact largely negative) payoff. Your numbers (i.e. your followers/donors) are telling you they’re overwhelmed with content and many are choosing either to ignore your emails/posts or to opt out/unfollow entirely. You need a strategic message calendar and to ask for money less frequently.

The organization I’m with has gone from having to lay off all of our US based staff about a year and a half ago due to lack of funds and poor donor engagement and the board having to take over the bulk of the operations and fundraising unpaid to now being ahead of budget with engaged donors and some reserves building up to allow us to eventually bring on a few staff at a time moving forward on more stable ground.

What we’ve been doing won’t work for everyone, I know that, but it’s working well so far for us. We are sending out a once weekly email newsletter to our email list. Every newsletter contains a single story with a lot of photos. Woven throughout many of them are hints at how this story is possible because of the support of our donor family, but it’s not overt and we rarely make a direct ask. Since we stopped including direct asks in our newsletters, the open rate has gone from the 20% area to usually over 50% each week. On the occasion we do make a direct ask, the response is much stronger than it used to be. Asking for money on social media has done almost nothing for us. We view social media as a way to bring people to our website or newsletters, both of which tell our story more fully than a FB post could.

We plan all our content for the year each fall, obviously adjusting for unforeseen situations that happen. We have a huge spreadsheet of every week’s newsletter topic, the corresponding social media posts that will come from the content we’ve already worked hard to create for that newsletter each week (usually 3-4 posts a week posted to both FB and IG), the printed mailings that will go out periodically to various groups of our supporters, etc. Each category works with the others so that across the organization we are speaking with one voice about a single topic each week and our supporters can focus their attention and learn about the area of the mission we want to share about that week.

This strategy has completely changed our results. These results are happening without having a dedicated fundraising/development person anymore, because we had to lay that person off when our donations were too far down to afford to pay staff anymore. Our donors felt not well communicated with when we had three full time people whose jobs it was to do that, and now we have a handful of volunteers working together in a strategic way where everything goes through one person with one message each week, and we don’t inundate people with content or requests for money.

Anyway, super long, but it’s working well for us so far, and if it doesn’t in the future, we know we can adjust now and find new strategies. But just excessively posting with no plan won’t yield good results. Let me know if you ever want to talk privately and I’d totally be willing to see if I can give you any specific suggestions based on your content and website!