If you have a non-profit organization with a page on Facebook, you likely received a notice that Facebook is changing the look for these organizations. The message they sent out didn’t contain much information or examples, so it left people with a lot of questions.
One of the things that people wanted to know about right away is how it is different from what they currently had, especially in regard to going beyond just the appearance of the Page. Here’s what you need to know, or what your site admin will need to know.
First of all, if you don’t want to be responsible for dealing with the changes on Facebook, you can appoint someone else to be an admin. Admins have “administrative” privileges and responsibilities including being able to see, access and edit all of the details of the Page’s “back-end,” including payments and what other people can do on the Page. Only ad admin can appoint another admin.
Admins can preview the new Page template before turning it on. To do this, navigate to your Facebook page and click the Settings button in the top right corner.
Then select Edit Page from the left-hand menu.
From there, navigate to the Templates section of the Edit Page menu and click Edit.
From there, you will likely need to scroll down until you see the Nonprofit template. Then click on View Details. When you’ve checked it out and you’re ready to use the template, click on the Apply Template button.
So what’s different about the new nonprofit template?
There are more call to action buttons to highlight and encourage donations to your cause. The Page template has more tabs, where you can add information such as photos, videos, details about your cause and events. You can edit the button language. For instance, if you don’t want it to say Donate, you can change what it says to an option that works best for your audience. You can edit and rearrange the tabs based on what aspects are most important to your audience.
Once you apply the new template, Facebook will offer to take you on a tour of the new Page design. Page owners also have the option to opt out of the page design as of June 19. If your Page already has the new template installed, you can switch back by clicking the Edit button in the Template menu as you did previously to view all the different templates. Scroll through until you see the Standard template, and then click the OK button to apply it.
As most people know who use Facebook on a regular basis, the company is always changing things. This seems like a big switch but it might not be in the long run. And it might be changed and refined as time goes on. If you have a nonprofit and you really don’t like the change, now would be a good time to give the company some feedback on what you don’t like about it. Or alternatively, if you have ideas to make it even better.
Regardless of what the Page template looks like for nonprofits now, the most important thing about Facebook is audience engagement. What is most important to people on Facebook is not necessarily what a Page’s design looks like, but how relevant the information is that is shared. Most of the action on your nonprofit Page will continue to be in the News Feed, where people see your updates as they are scrolling through as usual, so keep that interesting and engaging.
