More than 1,5 million non-profit organisations use Facebook Pages to build their communities – including SchoolNet SA. On 26 June 2018 we participated in the Facebook’s NGO Day workshop held at the Raddison Blu Hotel in Sandton #FBNGODAYSA. This workshop included a number of great sessions for representatives of NGOs who are using Facebook to share the work that their organisations are doing with their beneficiaries and funders.
At this workshop, Sam Posselt of Phambano Technology Development Centre, Cindy McNally who runs the SA NPO Network and Gina Woo the Facebook Global Program for Good Manager, shared some great tips for setting up and managing Facebook pages for organisations. We are including some of their tips on our blog because many of them will apply to schools that have Facebook pages.
In this post we focus on setting up the right kind of Facebook account for your school or organisation and in our next post we will focus on getting your posts read.
Don’t set up an account for your organisation or school as a normal Facebook profile (like the one you have for yourself). People will then need to make friends with you to view your posts and you will be limited to 5 000 “friends”.
Instead, set up a Facebook Page for your school or organisation. You can set up a business/ brand or fan page and encourage people in your community to “like” your page to engage with you. From a fan page you will be able to boost posts and you can target your message to people who have shown an interest in your organisation. If someone likes one of your posts – you can ask them to like your page to grow your audience.
Consider setting up a Facebook group. A Facebook group allows you to create a community of people who have something in common (for example they are your trainers or parents with learners at your school). People need to ask to join a Facebook group which helps keep out spammers and encourages people to follow the rules of the group. Group members can share information and resources using the files section and can ask questions of one another that are related to the aims of the group. Be aware though that you can’t boost posts within a group; it can be quite time consuming to moderate a group, and people have to join their groups in their personal capacities (i.e. they will post as themselves, not as their organisation’s Facebook page).
We hope these tips will help you to set up a Facebook page for your school. Please like our SchoolNet SA Facebook page if you haven’t already done so so that you can stay up to date with our events and activities.
