VolunteerMatch is about building connections—between good people and good causes. The goal of the organization’s social media efforts is to extend that mission. Like many nonprofits, VolunteerMatch uses Facebook and X to engage a passionate audience and provide valuable content, insights and service opportunities. To build on those efforts, streamline its management, analyze its progress and target its messaging, the organization teamed up with Sprout Social. VolunteerMatch uses a number of Sprout features, but primary efforts are focused around four key parts of the platform.

Queue

  • Situation: A single team member manages social media content publishing and distribution for the entire organization, so VolunteerMatch needed an efficient way to create a consistent stream of high-quality social posts.
  • Solution: Sprout Queue enables VolunteerMatch to streamline its entire social publishing process. The team member simply drafts their social posts, drops them in the Queue and each post is published automatically based on VolunteerMatch’s pre-set preferences for post frequency and timing.
  • Impact: By freeing up time previously devoted to constantly managing multiple profiles, the social team can focus on building strong relationships with social audiences through high-quality content and service.

Tasking

  • Situation: As social media’s importance grew, VolunteerMatch recognized a need to bring multiple departments into the social fold.
  • Solution: Through Sprout’s tasking features, VolunteerMatch’s social media manager can triage all incoming social messages and route them to appropriate departments when necessary. Now, instead of going back and forth on questions via email, the right person can respond to questions on the spot.
  • Impact: New functions of the business—including sales and support—have become part of the social discussion and customer questions are resolved via social media in a timely, accurate manner.

Sent Messages Report

  • Situation: VolunteerMatch had limited insight into what type of content resonated with social audiences and needed a way to easily measure the reaction and reach of its activity.
  • Solution: Sprout’s Sent Messages Report gives VolunteerMatch a quick overview of how successful each of its messages were in terms of clicks, reach and responses. Therefore, it’s able to identify and duplicate the type of messaging that resonates with social users.
  • Impact: Increased oversight into how thought-leadership and promotional materials are being received and shared enables VolunteerMatch to determine how social impacts its overall organizational goals and success.

ViralPost™

  • Situation: Given its three target audiences—volunteers, nonprofits and corporations—VolunteerMatch needs to spend more time on developing smart, meaningful content and less time figuring out how and when to post.
  • Solution: VolunteerMatch utilizes Sprout’s ViralPost™ function to take the guesswork out of publishing and determine the best times to deliver content for maximum impact. Based on usage and engagement patterns, Sprout automatically delivers VolunteerMatch’s social content at the moment it will have the greatest impact.
  • Impact: ViralPost ensures VolunteerMatch’s target audiences see and engage with content on an ongoing basis. Therefore, the team stopped worrying about distribution and started focusing on providing truly valuable content that audiences want to see.
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