How to partner with creators to help your cause

Creators are not just a window to culture - they help to define it and shape it. They’re also an important reason why people come to platforms like Instagram and Facebook every day.

Organizations can partner with creators to help achieve different goals: for example, raise awareness, inform about an issue, drive donations or even change behavior. Creators can bring an authentic voice to a story, and their communities tend to trust them more than organizations. They can also help reach new and engaged audiences who are in the mindset to discover and connect.

So how can your organization partner with creators? Here are 5 steps when working with creators:

1) Define your objective

Before searching and reaching out to creators, it is important to define the objective of the partnership:

• What is your goal, what action do you want people to take?
• How will your partnership with a creator help you achieve your goal?
• How are you going to measure success?

Consider how creators fit into your overall strategy and if you are looking for a one-off collaboration or a long term partnership.

2) Discover creators you would like to partner with

Identify creators who share your values, and have a connection to your cause. To find the right creators, you can:

• Message creators who mention your nonprofit in their content.
• Ask your Facebook Groups, supporters or major donors about creators who could be a good fit.
• Explore hashtags about your cause or your supporters are using.
• Speak up, use Stories, Reels or a Feed post to call out creators who might be interested in collaborating.

You can also work with marketing agencies or partner with one of our approved Meta Business Partners to establish creator partnerships.

3) Brief the creator and co-create

Co-create and collaborate during the entire process by listening to their ideas and creative suggestions. Be open to thinking differently, embracing platform-native approaches and empowering them to have fun with formats.

To help co-create effectively, consider a creator brief that includes:

• Campaign objectives, what you want to achieve.
• Brand background, your mission, your impact, testimonials, your values and your brand guidelines.
• Clear deliverables, do’s and don’ts, formats and across which channels content should be shared.
• Budget and realistic timelines including approval processes.

Don’t forget the contract! Things to cover can include but are not limited to expectations, deliverables, approval processes, usage rights, payment, territories, disclosures, exclusivity, and non-compete terms.

Pro Tip: Consider Reels - Reels plays exceed 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram. ⁽¹⁾

4) Scale your campaign to reach more people

After co-creating, turn your ideas into a campaign on Facebook and Instagram. The campaign can come from both your nonprofit and creator’s handles by leveraging branded content.

• You can leverage Collabs to co-author content with other accounts for organic posts. When you use Collabs, your content will be posted across two different accounts; yours and your collaborator’s ensuring partnership transparency.
• To reach more people, consider Partnership Ads as a way to help scale content with Meta’s sophisticated targeting and optimization tools. You can download our Partnership ads set-up guide here to learn how to request permissions from a creator.

When using Partnership ads to run ads about social issues, elections or politics, both the nonprofit and the creators (the admins managing / editing / publishing the ads) need to be authorized and the page running the ads needs to have a disclaimer.

5) Measure, evaluate and iterate

Finally, incorporate measurement to improve your creator strategy over time. You can leverage our Meta Measurement solutions to understand the impact of creators’ marketing on KPIs and verify your hypothesis.

• To measure the impact on upper funnel metrics such as Brand or Message Awareness, consider testing with Brand Lift Studies.
• To measure the impact on lower funnel metrics like donations or sign ups, explore testing Conversion Lift Studies or A/B tests.

For more in-depth best practices about building successful creator partnerships, download our 'Creators for Causes' guide.

(1) Source: Meta Q2 2023 Earnings Call transcript - July 2023