We hear a version of this question often: "Do we really need a website, or is our Instagram page enough?" It is a fair question, and it comes from a real place. Building an audience on social media is free to start and fast to see results from. A website costs money and takes weeks. On the surface, social media looks like the better deal.
It is not a fair comparison, because the two are not competing for the same job. Treating them as interchangeable is how organisations end up with a large following and nowhere to send someone who actually wants to work with them, or a beautiful website nobody ever hears about.
What social media is actually good at
Social platforms are built for discovery and relationship. Someone scrolling encounters you by accident, in the middle of something else, and a good post can spread far past the people who already know you. It costs nothing to start, updates happen in seconds, and it is genuinely the best tool available for showing the human, behind-the-scenes side of what you do.
- Reach beyond your existing audience, through shares, algorithms, and people who have never heard of you before.
- Low cost of entry. No build time, no hosting, posting starts the moment you create an account.
- Immediacy. An announcement can go out the same minute you decide to make it.
- Personality. Stories, short video, quick updates. This is the natural home for the parts of your work that are hard to put on a formal page.
What it is not good at
You do not own a social media audience. A platform can change its algorithm overnight and quietly halve how many of your own followers see your posts. Accounts get suspended by mistake. A page name change can break links that took years to build. None of that is under your control, and all of it has happened to organisations who assumed it would not happen to them.
Posts are also close to invisible to search engines. Someone searching "web design for NGOs in Ghana" is not going to find your Instagram grid, however good it is. And a DM inbox is not a reliable place to run enquiries through, messages get missed, threads get lost, and there is no record a colleague can pick up later.
The one-line version
Social media brings people to your door. A website is the door.
What a website is actually good at
A website is permanent, in a way a feed is not. It is the one place online you fully own and control. It is what search engines index, so someone with a specific intent, "youth nonprofit Accra" or "who built this platform", can actually find you through a plain search. It is what a funder, journalist, or partner expects to exist as your home base, the place every social bio link ultimately points to. And it is the only one of the two built to turn interest into an actual enquiry, through a form that lands in a monitored inbox rather than a feed you might not check for a day.
The workflow that actually works
The organisations that get the most out of both are not choosing between them. They are running a simple loop:
- Post often on social media, for reach, relationship, and the human side of the work.
- Give anything substantial its own page on the website, a program launch, a finished project, an announcement worth remembering in six months.
- Link social posts back to that page, so a moment of attention on a feed converts into a visit to something permanent and searchable.
- Put the social links on the website too, so the two channels feed each other instead of competing for the same visitor.
We recently did exactly this with our own accounts, adding X, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn links across this site's footer. The site remains the home base. The social accounts exist to bring people to it, and to show the parts of the work a formal page never quite captures.
If you are only doing one of the two right now, that is not necessarily wrong, a small team has to choose where its time goes. But it is worth being honest about which job is going undone. A website with no social presence is missing free distribution. A social presence with no website is building entirely on land you do not own.