By Marc W. Halpert and Colleen McKenna

Editor’s note: “Company Pages” may sound like something only for-profit businesses should care about. But those pages provide valuable visibility to nonprofits as well. On Wednesdays, we’ll be running a five-part guest series on how nonprofits can reap significant benefits from LinkedIn’s Company Pages.

Nonprofits overlook or ignore the easy and obvious marketing opportunity that LinkedIn provides. With LinkedIn your nonprofit can be seen by a potential audience of 135 million+. Do you want to look less than your best to that audience? If not, why is your   organization’s company page incomplete or absent? 

You can probably think of several reasons: 

Nonprofits wrestle with continuous turnover in the development sector and with changes in staffing at lower echelons. Layer on top of those problems the little-to-no time you have to do anything other than mission-critical tasks. Thus, the mere thought of something else to maintain isn’t appealing, BUT that is actually why LinkedIn will be beneficial to you and your organization.

Whether the organization’s pages are used for branding, business development, recruiting, or potential funding/alliances and partnerships, LinkedIn provides a stage on which to show how vital your nonprofit is to its cause, especially when in competition with other nonprofits.

Take the time to build out your LinkedIn Company profile because LinkedIn audiences are, by and large, well-to-do, professional givers. Other LinkedIn members, companies, and associations will be more interested in offering your organization their time and money because your LinkedIn Company page has given them a thorough representation of what your organization is all about.

That’s clearly a good return on your investment of time.

Consider how you can build the nonprofit’s LinkedIn Company Page to highlight the organization’s value, brand, services, and recruiting efforts. Here’s how.

Click on the link above.

Go to “Companies” on the navigation bar and click again where it says “Add Company” on the right side of the page. 

It’s important to make sure all employees, volunteers, current donors, and board members are “mapped” to the nonprofit’s Company Page. Do that by listing the organization’s page on each person’s profile exactly the same way it’s listed on the organization’s LinkedIn Company Page.

This “mapping” is really a way of showing all the people who are connected to or care about the organization. The more connected and affiliated the company page is, the more attention and exposure it will receive from the LinkedIn community.

This company page also gives a more “human” side to your organization than a website offers. Potential donors and affiliates will be attracted to the organization because of the direct connections to real people. They won’t need to sift through contacts on a website page or feel uncertain about whether they can actually reach you to donate, volunteer, etc.

Next week, we’ll show you how to make your profile active and engaging.

Marc W. Halpert has started, and continues to operate three companies in the past 10 years; the most recent is called and Connect2Collaborate, in which he uses his skills in networking and his LinkedIn evangelism to train and coach others. He teaches LinkedIn to groups as well as coaches individuals, is a frequent speaker at national, regional, and local conferences, and has authored numerous articles.

Colleen McKenna, Principal, and Intero Advisory teaches people and organizations how to build their creative and competitive professional brand to ensure greater productivity and success.

We do this by creating a plan and implementing the appropriate tools. LinkedIn, the professional social network, is where we begin.