LinkedIn Outreach for Nonprofits: Profile and Message Tips

Your Profile Is the Sales Page

In the second Hey Nonprofits! LIVE session on LinkedIn, Randy Molland came back to answer the questions that poured in after part one. Hosts Trevor Nelson and Sandy Hilsenrath kept returning to the same theme: when you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, the first thing they do is click your name. What they find decides whether the conversation goes any further.

Randy compared it to walking into a chamber of commerce meeting. If you look professional and you know how to hold a conversation, you can work your way around the room. If you walk up to a stranger and say, I help nonprofits with X, would you like to hear about our services, you won't get far. On LinkedIn, he said, a clean profile with a clear photo and a clear description of what you do means you never have to introduce yourself. The profile does that for you, and you can go and make friends.

Lead With What You Do, Not Your Title

The most useful part of the profile is the headline. Randy showed a client example that starts with what the organization does, helping college students and youth build careers, then says the person is the founder, and then finishes with a few personal details such as being a husband and father of two. Each part has a job. The first part tells people what you do. The second shows you're a decision maker. The last part makes you human, and gives someone like Randy a way to talk about sports, music or travel.

There's a practical reason to put the benefit first. The first few characters of your headline are what appear next to your name when you comment on posts or send messages. Randy pointed to a comment thread where one person's headline said he was turning LinkedIn into a fundraising engine for nonprofits, while another's said only that he was an executive director at an organization whose name didn't explain what it does. He knew what the first person did and had no idea about the second.

Trevor made the point from the other side. He said it was a massive unlock to learn that people don't care about your label, and that includes degrees and designations such as an MBA or a CFRE. They're worth the work, and you can mention them after you've talked. First, show people what you do.

Mini takeaway: Rewrite your headline so the first words say who you help and how, then your title, then something personal.

Make Your Website One Click Away

Randy's second profile priority is simple: make sure your website is easy to reach. The top mistake he sees is that visitors can't find a link, so he wants as many places as possible to send people to it. A client's profile he showed had five. Those include your contact info section, the website button near your name, and the featured section, which Randy called a hidden gem for nonprofits. Add your website to featured with just the company name and no description. When there's a description, the visitor has to take one more step before the page loads, and every extra step costs you clicks.

Trevor's word for it is friction. We tell organizations to make it easy to find you and easy to give, and a link that needs one extra click does neither. Randy said he tested it on his own profile, and that it brought 15 to 20 people a week opting in to a free resource without any outreach. That's his own result, but it shows why he treats the profile as a landing page.

Tell Your Why in the About Section

For the about section, Randy's advice was to write the story, not a list of facts. Why did you get into the nonprofit world? Why are you passionate about solving this problem? His example was something like losing a grandparent to cancer and wanting to help others. A real story is easy to read, and it's what a visitor remembers when they get on a call with you.

He also recommends formatting for short attention spans. Write one sentence, leave a gap, and use bullets or arrows to break up the text. Randy said he has ADHD and calls it a gift, but that a large paragraph makes his brain say he doesn't have time to read it. Most people feel the same. If you want a model, he suggested pasting in posts you admire and asking an AI assistant to help you write in a similar structure about your own work.

What about posting? In part one, Randy said you don't have to create content. In part two he added a note of balance. A client of his closed a significant sponsorship with a professional profile and just one post from three months earlier. But Randy still encourages posting, because it builds authority when you write your own material. If you never post, you can look inactive. If you do post, share your own thoughts and metrics, not just reposts of other people's content. And he stressed that all of this applies to your personal profile, not the organization's page. You can't send connection requests from a company page, and personal profiles build trust faster. If your team is small, have everyone set up a strong profile, and ask board members to do the same.

Write a Connection Request That Gets Accepted

Randy called this the magic of everything. Cold calls and cold emails are close to dead for most fundraising teams, since most people no longer answer unknown numbers or open emails from strangers. LinkedIn offers something different: you can become friends with someone first. He compared it to a networking event. You wouldn't walk up and ask a stranger to buy your services. You'd say you love their glasses and ask what brought them to the event.

So the connection note should be about the other person. Randy wrote an example on the spot for a CEO who happens to be a cancer survivor: I saw you're in the nonprofit sector and gave a great TEDx talk, I'd love to connect and hear more about your talk and the impact you're making, and by the way, I saw you're in Miami, what a gorgeous city. Nowhere does it say who Randy is or what he sells. He's using information from the profile to show he did his homework, and the profile answers the question of who he is.

He shared the numbers behind it. If you send 50 identical copy-and-paste notes, you lose trust with about 47 of them and get maybe three who want to chat. If you send 50 personalized ones, you may get 48 who feel it's a real message. His rule of thumb is that about 200 messages lead to about 20 connection calls. Most of his connection requests, he said, arrive with no note at all, and he sees the ones with a message instantly stand out. Randy also shared a cautionary example in which a client wrote a note saying she liked someone's last post on an important topic. The recipient wrote back that she had confused him with someone else, because she couldn't say what his last post was. If you reference a post, make sure you can say what it said.

After someone accepts, Randy's sequence is to ask them to tell him more about themselves, then invite them to a connection call. He doesn't ask for a donation on that first call. He's building the relationship, and the sponsorship conversation can come later.

Mini takeaway: Spend your first line on something specific about them. The accept rate follows.

Keep Sponsors Warm After They Say Yes

A viewer asked how to stay top of mind with current sponsors on LinkedIn. Randy's answer begins with a fact from his time as a liaison between for-profit and nonprofit organizations: almost every business he worked with said they felt like an ATM to the nonprofit sector. The only time they heard from the organization was when it wanted money.

His fixes are small. Post about your impact on LinkedIn so sponsors can see what their money did. Tag them when you thank them, and tag them again on content they'd enjoy. Randy said he's donated to many nonprofits, collectively giving a few million dollars with the businesses he's worked with, and none of them ever came back to say they'd posted about it on LinkedIn. He also recommended replacing the huge monthly newsletter with a short plain-text email every two weeks. He said his own short, plain-text emails get a 53% open rate over a 90-day stretch, which is his own figure, but the principle is clear: small, regular messages feel less overwhelming than a giant newsletter once a month. Randy's rule of thumb is seven touch points before you ask for another donation, which is the same plan gratitude idea Trevor teaches at HGA.

Go After the Mid-Tier

Randy also steers nonprofits away from the elite target list. Everyone wants an introduction to a huge brand that writes a $100,000 check. But those organizations take a long time to reach, and you'll be competing with a lot of other nonprofits for the same attention. He prefers mid-tier businesses, roughly in the range of $750,000 to $10 million in size, where an outreach on LinkedIn may reach the CEO or owner. If someone like that learns that you're doing a bike giveaway for kids and he loves cycling, a request for a few thousand dollars is easy to say yes to. He'd rather have 50 warm relationships than one big one, because when a $5,000 to $10,000 sponsorship comes up, he has 50 people to choose from.

One practical use is the golden ticket. Trevor walked through the math: a golden ticket prize costs around $2,500, you sell 100 tickets at $100, and you raise $10,000. If a corporate sponsor underwrites the prize, the whole $10,000 is yours. Randy added a tip on how to ask. Don't reach out to a sponsor you haven't talked to in six months and say you have a golden ticket for sale. That's the ATM feeling. Build the relationship first, mention in conversation that this is the sort of thing your sponsors help you do, and let them ask how to be involved. We cover the format in The Golden Ticket Raffle.

Ask Your Board for Introductions

One of the strongest moments in the Q&A came from a question about boards. Randy said to stop asking board members to fundraise and start asking them to make introductions. A board member can say, I know you support our organization, is there someone in your network who'd be a good introduction as a corporate sponsor? That takes almost no work. If a member can't do even that, he said, it's fair to ask what value they bring.

Trevor agreed and added the practical part: give them the tools. Tell your board precisely what to do, down to the connection request wording and the message you want them to send, and you remove the excuses. Give them the script, and then see who follows through.

Insights in this article are drawn from the Hey Nonprofits! LIVE webinar “Unlocking LinkedIn for Nonprofits: Strategies for Success”, featuring Randy Molland.