| What should my nonprofit do about social media? | Social media is shaping every facet of nonprofit work. It’s messy, confusing, and it’s only going to get worse. To make the right choices for your organization, here are four things you need to know. |
If you work in any part of the social impact sector, you must be wondering what to do about social media right now.
Social media is shaping every facet of your work, from the way you communicate with the public to the way the public thinks about your issues. It’s messy, confusing, and it’s only going to get worse.
In the US, the frantic dismantling of civic institutions and the capture of public assets has been made possible by support from social media giants. Meta and X, for example, are unapologetically spreading misinformation and supporting efforts to erase decades of environmental, racial, gender, and economic progress.
In Canada, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, commissioner of the public inquiry into foreign interference, is warning that message manipulation is a major threat to democracy:
Justice Hogue calls out social media and artificial intelligence tools, in particular, for being vehicles that spread disinformation aggressively and have the potential to undermine our society.
We can’t cover all the ways that social media is shaping public discourse in one article, let alone explore all of the implications for nonprofit work. So let’s keep it simple. Here are four things you need to know right now to make smart decisions for your organization:
It’s not just your social media person or your communications department that needs to pay attention. These seismic shifts in public discourse affect all aspects of an organization: what you need to do, the urgency of your work, future challenges, as well as the programs and tactics you implement every day.
The public is learning about your issues — maybe even the entire concept of government and society — from a wide variety of sources. Many of those sources have a hidden agenda. Many aren’t even real.
In 2025, roughly half of all traffic on the internet is bot traffic. Bots are computer-generated messages, accounts, or crawlers that distort your understanding of what real members of the public care about. And we aren’t very good at sorting real voices from fake ones; in one study, people couldn’t tell the difference between bot and human users most of the time.
Because of the deluge of unreliable information cascading over people on a daily basis, you can’t assume anything about your audience:
> You can’t assume people you are trying to reach have heard about your issue.
> If they’ve heard about it, you can’t assume they know basic facts about your issue.
> You can’t assume they agree that there is a problem to be solved, even if they understand the issue.
> If they agree there is a problem, you can’t assume they believe that they can or should do something about it.
This fog of false information doesn’t just affect the general public. Experts, politicians, government officials, and members of your professional network are wading through the same torrent of unreliable messages. So are you.
Every nonprofit’s success depends, in some part, on garnering support from other people. If you could wave a magic wand and achieve your goal, you wouldn’t have to do the work you’re doing.
So your communications strategy needs to repeatedly cover what you thought was basic information. Whether online or in-person, make sure you establish a common understanding of your issue before you try to get people to move forward together. Don’t take anything for granted. And be prepared to spend time responding to mis-perceptions, gaps in understanding, and mistrust.
You can’t just focus on your own key messages or calls-to-action. Your message is sandwiched between a lot of other voices, and you don’t have control over the noise. Assume that everything will take longer and you’ll need to work harder to earn people’s trust.
If you work in online spaces or lead others who do, spend a few minutes learning how to recognize and respond to misleading information. This primer on misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (“MDM”), from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security is a helpful place to start.
Many of us fell in love with social media because it was free, both literally and philosophically. It was a way to communicate with members of your community without having to buy ad time, produce expensive content, or pay for accounts.
Social media hasn’t been free for years now, sadly.
Most platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, etc.) want you to pay for a “verified” account in order to reach a larger audience. They promise you’ll reach more people, including all those people who already follow you, if you pay them a monthly fee.
They also want you to pay to promote individual posts to your own audience. The “best” performing accounts only reach between 1.5% and 4% of their followers using the free platform. If you want to reach people, you need to pay.
Social media platforms also decide which posts and topics to highlight in people’s feeds. They tend to boost the content that works well for the platform, typically content that keeps people online longer, fires them up emotionally, and motivates them to buy what they see in ads. Social media platforms tend to bury content that encourages people to leave the platform, like links to your website or articles and stories. They also tend to downplay content that make users feel satisfied with who they are and what they already have, because those users don’t hang around long.
You may have built up a following online, but it doesn’t mean people are actually seeing what you’re saying. The only way surefire to reach all the people you are trying to reach is to (a) pay money; and, (b) say things the platforms like you to say.
Stop treating social media as a “free” way to reach the public. Take a look at the real costs of reaching your community on social media.
> How much money are you spending in staff time, design software, advertising, verification fees, analytics and social media management software?
> How much engagement are you getting from that investment?
> Is there a way to use those resources to generate better results?
Your organization’s communications plan should reflects the true cost of your social media investment and get you the value you deserve.
Social media platforms succeed through what’s called a “network effect” — each platform’s value depends on the number of people who are using it. On its own, a platform has no value; it becomes useful only when a bunch of people use it.
This is the Catch-22 of big social. You think it’s valuable, so you show up. And because you showed up, it becomes valuable.
The trade is fair when the platform provides you with a service equal to or greater than what you’re paying to be there. But if you’re giving more than you’re getting, the equation changes.
It’s hard to believe that the average nonprofit is getting more value from social media in 2025 than the social media giants are getting from controlling public discourse. Especially smaller nonprofits and organizations with direct links to their core community.
The big social media companies are not neutral platforms anymore. From selling stuff to reshaping government, they each have a commercial and/or political agenda of their own.
When you use their tools, you support their agenda.
Whenever you invite your community to gather, you’re endorsing the place you’ve chosen to meet.
It’s important to ask:
> Will my community be safe here?
> Do the benefits of gathering here outweigh the risks and costs?
> Are we making the problems we’re trying to solve worse by using these particular tools?
The reason we’re having this conversation is because the social media giants are right about one thing — we need to talk to each other.
Nonprofits and social impact organizations, in particular, depend on their ability to reach people, build support for important causes, recruit volunteers, disseminate life-saving information, raise money, and influence behaviour in positive ways.
Communications is your lifeblood.
You can’t stop trying to reach people. And you can’t always control where people are gathering. There is no perfect solution to the social media problem right now. The only thing we know for sure is that the status quo is over.
Social tools are fracturing — there is no “one size fits all” network anymore. You can’t reach “everyone” you need to reach on any single platform.
If you are in a leadership position in your network, move to channels that you control. You have a responsibility to make sure the conversations you spark are respectful and productive, so you need to choose platforms that make that possible. You also need to have control over your own list, message history, and records, especially if you work in science, justice, environment, race, gender, or poverty spaces.
If you don’t have the power to move people, make sure you maintain your own contact lists; don’t trust Meta or X or TikTok to keep you connected to your community. Encourage people to connect in person or small groups. Focus on building tight, trusting relationships. Build your email list. Create alternative spaces when you have the chance. Migrate to Bluesky, which is at least open and ad-free. Follow your community wherever they go.
Social media has been disrupted. The emperor has no clothes. Politics and political discourse merged with entertainment and advertising. AI and bots rendered the public conversation fictional. This incessant stream of misleading information is both depressing and exhausting. The question is, what happens next?
This isn’t the kind of issue that someone else will resolve for you. If you are doing social impact work, then you need to be a leader.
Go back to the basics of your strategy. Your North Star is connecting with your community. Don’t be distracted by the generic, overblown promises of legacy social media companies; there may be 3-billion people on Facebook, but you don’t need to reach all of them. Who do you need to engage to accomplish your goal? What is the best way to engage with your community and build trust? Do that. And the moment that stops being effective, do something else.
That’s the paradox of social media: people go where the people are. The only power they have is the power you give them.
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