Please Do Not Create a Facebook Page for Your Personal Ministry

This is for ministry leaders that must raise funds for their individual ministry, not for corporate or ministry fundraisers. Different rules apply.

Facebook most likely contains the largest percentage of people who support your ministry financially (compared to Twitter or Google+). But remember they joined Facebook to connect primarily with people.

Although many brands and organizations are making an impact on Facebook, 99.9% of the individual fundraisers who start Facebook pages experience below average and even negative returns on their investment.

Here’s why:

You are more interesting to your donors than your ministry. We are all trying to change the world and stepping out in faith, but most updates shared on Facebook pages such as these are prayer requests that are not that significant and come across as urgent, duplicates of other communications, and invitations to view communications that most donors have already seen somewhere else.

You cannot scale to a significant number of fans. Many of the pages I observe had under 50 fans, and most have around 20-30. Why go through the work to set up a facebook page, fill it with information you have already sent somewhere else, and send to only a select group of people that have already been communicated with elsewhere?

1/500 updates on average from a page makes it to the newsfeed of those who like the page. That’s most likely a significantly lower percentage than your email or direct mail open rate.

90% of people who like a page never return to it, and only view updates through their newsfeed. A facebook page is NOT a website! It appears similar but Facebook runs on the newsfeed. The goal of every savvy Facebook marketer is to get their content interacted with and shared on the newsfeed.

Instead Use Your Profile and a List to Communicate with Your Donors on Facebook

The more effective alternative is to use your profile and create a list of your donors to send updates. Your donors will receive these communications more personally, and you will not have to do the extra work of maintaining two places on Facebook.

When you share updates with your donors consider using 80% photos. Photos are the currency of Facebook, and will get more likes and comments than text or video. Although video has the potential to be more engaging, it’s a longer time commitment and most people scan their newsfeed. Also photos rarely come across as spammy, so you can send up to one every other day and not overwhelm or annoy people.

The goal of using Facebook is to personally interact with your donors. Try to think about likes and comments as metrics for success, not downloads or pageviews.

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