Mission critical: How to find the right social media management tools for nonprofits

Social media is an integral part of nonprofit operations. It’s how donors and volunteers find causes they care about, and how organizations raise awareness at a local and global level. And with the right social media strategy and tools, nonprofits can amplify their mission, transform how they connect with audiences and meet fundraising goals.

But planning and executing a nonprofit social media strategy isn’t without a unique set of challenges. Understaffing. Limited bandwidth. Highly-scrutinized, tight budgets. Trying to understand and reach new generations of donors and volunteers.

By choosing the right social media management software for nonprofits, you can proactively engage donors, volunteers and staff members, while saving your team valuable time and resources. Use the questions in this article to help you evaluate nonprofit social media management tools, and, ultimately, deliver a social performance that fuels your mission.

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Why nonprofits need a comprehensive social media management tool

At their core, social media management tools allow you to manage your nonprofit’s social media presence in one centralized place rather than switching between native networks—which is key for boosting efficiency and reducing manual labor. As social has evolved, these tools have matured into sophisticated platforms that clarify the donor journey and enable you to lead your organization with a data-driven vision.

With a comprehensive social media management tool, your team can:

• Address workforce shortages and under-resourced teams by automating manual tasks, allowing your staff to prioritize their most important work and make time for innovation, while reducing burnout and turnover.
• Balance global and local strategies, while ensuring all content aligns with your overarching brand and mission.
• Tie your digital marketing efforts to key performance metrics like conversions and donor engagement/retention.
• Effectively reach new donors and volunteers from younger generations who want to engage and donate digitally.

But not all social media management platforms are created equal. The right tools should be powerful enough to handle your unique use cases and intuitive enough for your team to adopt and uncover insights.

For example, watch how Donors Choose uses Sprout Social to efficiently manage their complete social media presence—from publishing and engagement to analytics and reporting.

4 questions to ask when evaluating social media management tools for nonprofits

The right social media management tools streamline your workflows, make it easy to engage your community and provide access to key insights that your entire organization can use. Your platform of choice should prioritize innovation and adaptability—empowering you to maximize your mission. Here are the questions you need to ask before making an investment:

1. How will these tools alleviate my team’s workload so they can focus on mission-critical initiatives?

From managing workloads to retaining staff, workforce management issues are some of the top challenges nonprofits face, according to Salesforce’s Nonprofit Trends Report.

According to Navaris Hood, Senior Manager of Social Media at Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona, “Sprout is an invaluable tool for managing multi-platform social media efforts. It makes the process of scheduling content, engaging followers and creating customized reports simple and more efficient.”

A 2025 commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Sprout Social found that Sprout’s tools helped a composite organization representative of interviewed customers drive $1.11 million in social media team time savings (across scheduling, publishing, listening, replying and planning) over three years.

Here are a few Sprout highlights that help nonprofits collaborate more effectively:

• Content planning: Plan your strategy and maintain oversight from a central hub rather than disparate apps or spreadsheets. Organize posts across profiles, networks and campaigns using a visualized calendar to support your overall mission. For example, you can map out your posts for the upcoming week and month to assure your content lines up with seasonal holidays and donor events, like #GivingTuesday.
• Publishing: Boost collaboration between staff and increase productivity with campaign planning tools, automated workflows, and scheduling and monitoring tools. Create caption suggestions and alt-text with AI to break through writer’s block, and automatically publish your content at the times most likely to reach donors and volunteers.
• Message approval workflows: With internal and external approver features, ensure content is always approved and compliant with your brand guidelines—all within the Sprout platform.
• Audience engagement: Nonprofits receive an average of 62 inbound engagements on content per day, according to The 2025 Content Benchmarks Report. Stop manually triaging inbound messages and respond to your community faster with tools like automated message tagging and saved replies. Teams can also take advantage of AI-powered suggestions to refine the tone and length of your responses.

2. Will this tool help us maximize our mission and reach among key audiences?

Increasing awareness of your mission, fundraisers and initiatives is of the utmost importance at your organization. But with limited funds for paid efforts, you need creative, scalable ways to maximize your organic reach to get in front of new volunteers, donors and staff members.

Enter: turning your current employees and volunteers into your greatest advocates.

With a solution like Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social, you can put all your shareable content in one place so your staff and volunteers can quickly and easily post approved content to their social networks—extending your reach far beyond your bandwidth and budget. According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, the composite organization representative of interviewed customers saw an increase in organic traffic, generating $130,000 in additional profit over three years with the Advocacy platform.

Increasingly though, nonprofits are tapping into the power and reach of influencers to educate audiences about their cause and how to get involved. This can come to life in so many ways, from facility tours to livestreaming donor drive events.

Sprout Social Influencer Marketing helps teams quickly identify the most authentic, brand safe creators for your campaigns. AI-powered discovery capabilities reduce time spent manually searching for the right partners and reviewing their past content. The Forrester study found that organizations experienced 25% time savings using Sprout’s tools.

3. How will this tool help us grow and engage our community more meaningfully?

You want to foster relationships on social media that turn followers into donors, volunteers and advocates. To do so, you need to understand your audience’s journey and be responsive and authentic when they reach out to you. Strengthen your community engagement by using social media tools that provide your team with valuable intelligence about your audience, and empower swift, proactive communication.

The Sprout platform empowers you engage your community on social media better by exceeding your audience’s communication expectations and tracking your donors’ journeys from beginning to end. Here’s how:

• Smart Inbox: Unify your social channels into a single view so you can quickly monitor incoming messages, cultivate conversations and respond to your audience. Tagging and filtering capabilities let you prioritize what’s most important and discover unique engagement opportunities.

• Salesforce integration: Gain a full 360-degree view of your donors—from their first interaction with your nonprofit to their latest donation. Sprout enriches your Salesforce CRM records with social data to provide a comprehensive view, allowing your team to understand your target audience better. Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector takes it a step further by combining social data with other BI sources, giving you a complete perspective of your digital marketing efforts, without requiring time-consuming work.

4. Does it surface the insights we need to adjust our strategy and act on timely issues?

Agile social media analytics tools for nonprofits ensure you can make quick adjustments to your strategy and easily demonstrate social’s value for your organization. This is something many teams struggle with.

Sprout’s Analytics tools help you understand what content resonates with your audience so you can maximize your engagement. According to Becky C. Brynolf, Head of Digital Engagement at the Royal National Institute of Blind People, “So much of our work before Sprout was manual, and the tool we used for monthly reporting was nightmarish. Now, we can just nip into Sprout and ask things like, ‘Show me everything we’ve posted for the last two years arranged by highest engagement.’ It saves us time but also helps us spot themes and trends and be more proactive with our content.”

These Sprout tools are designed to help you fine-tune your content strategy:

• Tag Reports: Access an overview of your inbound and outbound tagged messages to easily analyze campaign effectiveness, volume and performance patterns.
• Post Performance Reports: Analyze cross-channel performance at the post level to understand what messaging and formats resonate with your community and why.
• Profile Performance Reports: Access a high-level overview of performance across all connected profiles to quickly evaluate social growth, and how that growth correlates with key initiatives.

While social data can reveal a lot about your performance, it can also mine audience insights around emerging issues like world events or proposed legislation that can help you craft an informed response. It can even help you get ahead of a crisis. As Sparks says, “One of our big focuses this year is improving how we approach community management and social listening, which Sprout has played a big part in. My team is able to quickly look across platforms and determine trending topics our brand is a part of and act accordingly.”

Using a social media management platform makes it easy to create clear reports that demonstrate how your social strategy translates to your mission, stay on the pulse of social media topics trending with your community and monitor brand health vitals. With Sprout’s tools, you can eliminate the time-consuming manual data collection processes in favor of automated, presentation-ready reports. The Total Economic Impact™ study found that Sprout reduced employee time spent on social media reporting by 80%.

• Social listening: Sprout’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology can help you gain critical intel about emerging areas of need and topics your community cares about. The platform sifts through millions of social media data points in seconds, helping you access and share actionable findings with leadership. The tools gather honest feedback about your performance on social and beyond. Learn what motivates someone to donate or volunteer with your nonprofit. With these insights, you will be empowered to produce more meaningful content and ladder-up your learnings to decision makers.

• Message Spike Alerts: If your message volume spikes, that could be indicative of a looming crisis. These alerts automatically send email or mobile push notifications when incoming messages exceed your hourly average, so your team doesn’t have to manually monitor your inbox 24/7.

Find the right social media tools to connect with people who care about your cause

Compelling social content inspires people to take action, and connects you with the right audience. By using a sophisticated social media management platform like Sprout Social, you can harness social media to drive donations, capture and deepen donor loyalty, and amplify your mission—all while boosting your team’s efficiency.

For a more comprehensive look at the potential value Sprout Social provides, download The Total Economic Impact™ of Sprout Social study, and learn how Sprout delivered a 263% return on investment over three years.

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