According to Facebook, organic reach is the total number of unique people who are shown your post(s) in their News Feed through unpaid distribution and although Facebook Insights provide a lot of useful data about your fans and reach (organic and paid), the one critical piece of data not provided is your nonprofit’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly average organic reach. Using the method below you can calculate your average monthly organic reach. You can also tweak the equation to calculate your weekly, quarterly, or annual average organic reach.1. Go to your nonprofit’s Facebook Page, select Insights > Posts, and ensure that “Reach: Organic/Paid” is selected.
2. Add up the organic reach for each post shared during a month.
To calculate your nonprofit’s monthly organic reach, add up the organic reach for each post shared during the month. If your nonprofit does not pay for advertising on Facebook, your nonprofit can keep it simple and use the rounded-to-the-nearest-hundred numbers. For example, we added 3,600 + 2,700 + 7,500 + 1,200 + 9,600 + 847 + 1,200 + 909 and so forth for posts shared between September 9 and October 8 on the Nonprofit Tech for Good Facebook Page:
If your nonprofit does pay for advertising, hover over the bar to see actual organic reach numbers:
3. Divide the sum of organic reach for posts by the number of posts shared over the month.
Sum of Organic Reach for Posts (79,791)
÷
# of Posts Shared Over 1 Month (20)
=
3,990: Average Monthly Reach for Posts
4) Convert your organic reach into a percentage.
3,990 ÷ # of Facebook Fans Your Page Has (100,178)
=
.0398 or .04 or 4%
4% Average Monthly Organic Reach for the Page
5) Conclude the results.
Over the previous month, the Nonprofit Tech for Good Facebook Page reached 4% of its fans through posts shared on the page. Put another way, 96% of the page’s 100,178 fans were not shown the posts shared on the page. As mentioned in a previous post, that’s like sending an email to 100 people and having 96 of those emails blocked by email servers. That said, how many of the 4% of people actually saw and read the posts is unknown. Just because 4% of fans were shown the posts in their News Feed over the last month, that doesn’t mean they actually saw and read them. That’s why organic reach is considered by many to be a nonsensical number.
A more useful metric to track is your “Engagement Rate.” Engagement is defined as people who liked/reacted, commented, clicked, or shared your posts. Following the same method above, go to Insights > Posts, and ensure that “Engagement Rate” is selected, and then do the math:
