The Challenge
Shelters to Shutters is a national nonprofit organization committed to transforming lives from situational homelessness to economic self-sufficiency by providing employment, housing, and career training opportunities in collaboration with their real estate partners. Their social media presence was in need of growth to help advocate their mission, as well as increase social engagement with their audience.
The Solution
Shelters to Shutters contracted Catalyst in October 2021 to manage their social media service, with a specific focus on content strategy and content creation. This entailed developing a cohesive social feed, prioritizing organic content, and generating innovative posts and graphics.
Catalyst worked with Shelters to Shutters to promote their mission and vision by posting about industry partnerships; career upskilling services; fundraising opportunities; and program graduates, participants, and industry partners, including training testimonials from participants. For the ongoing social media service, the highest performing assets continue to be campaigns about the organization’s success stories — sharing participants’ experiences and triumphs from being situationally homeless and unemployed to having a new home and a new career at the apartment community at which they were hired.
The Results
By implementing cohesive branding to Shelters to Shutters’ social feeds, which is most easily visible on Instagram, the growth of the organization’s social presence has been successful. Over the course of 14 months (October 2021 to December 2022), they gained 3,015 followers with 1,094 of them coming through LinkedIn. An engagement rate of 7.2% was achieved, meaning nearly 10% of followers react to posts.
Shelters to Shutters’ social media presence continues to shine with strong, ongoing content, including key takeaways that have significantly impacted their account:
- Success stories were promoted with organic content. Showcasing wins as a nonprofit organization is the feel-good messaging their users, partners, and investors wanted to see.
- By tagging partnerships, this allowed messages to be shared outside of the organization’s social page, which in turn expanded their reach to more users and allowed partners to share content.
- Having a personal and approachable presence on their channel created a platform to respond positively to users who reacted to content.
Engagement has shown many industry partners, volunteers, donors, and program supporters have liked and shared posts, which met the need Shelters to Shutters had of advocating their mission and spreading the word about the importance of lending a hand up to help reduce situational homelessness.