How charities can use LinkedIn Premium

LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals. You may be surprised to learn that it’s older than Facebook. It was launched in May 2003 and, for a number of years, was simply a place to post your CV online and look for jobs.

 

Over the years the platform has developed and evolved and is now very much a networking platform for professionals. It’s moved on from purely recruitment to a place where conversations can take place, where you can learn new skills, and where networking happens.

 

LinkedIn has offered a premium business service, which includes InMail, since 2005. At the time it was aimed at recruiters but the service has evolved a lot since then and apparently 39% of LinkedIn users now pay for the added features.

 

If you need to reach decision-makers or senior leaders, this is a great platform to help you find them and connect with them.

 

 

What is LinkedIn Premium?

 

LinkedIn Premium is a paid-for service, which has four different subscriptions that you can choose from – depending on your needs. The Premium subscription plan includes:

• Premium Career
• Premium Business
• Sales Navigator Core
• Recruiter Lite

This article focuses on Premium Business and how individuals working at charities can use the features in this subscription. At the time of writing, a Premium Business subscription costs £42.99 per month and LinkedIn currently doesn’t offer a nonprofit rate for charity staff.

 

 

Who would need LinkedIn Premium?

 

There are a number of job roles within the charity sector that could benefit from a premium subscription. For bigger charities, those working in HR would benefit as they could search for candidates and headhunt for roles, potentially saving costs on using agencies.

 

People working in Business Development, Corporate Partnerships and also CEOs could benefit from the networking features offered in LinkedIn Premium as it helps them to find and contact people outside of their immediate network.

 

 

How charity staff can use LinkedIn Premium for Business

 

 

Network through InMail

 

InMail allows you to send a private message to individuals that you are not connected to. With Premium Business you can send up to 15 InMails a month. According to research, messages sent through LinkedIn are said to have an 85% open rate compared to traditional email. LinkedIn themselves claim that InMail is 2.6x more effective than email. When you send an InMail, the person is notified that they have received a message.

 

 

Enable Open Profile

 

An exclusive feature of Premium Business is the ability to improve the visibility of your profile through enabling the Open Profile feature. This allows any LinkedIn member to see your full profile and to contact you, whether they are in your network or not.

 

This is a really useful feature as people without premium accounts are unable to message people outside of their network. Having the Open Profile enabled allows them to contact you without having to pay.

 

 

See who has viewed your profile

 

With free accounts, you can’t always see who viewed your profile – or what you can see is limited. With Premium Business you are able to see the profiles of everyone who viewed your profile, for up to 90 days. This can be really useful to see which types of people are searching for profiles like yours. It could also help you to improve your profile if you don’t feel that the right people are finding you.

 

 

Access to training

 

Premium accounts have access to over 16,000 LinkedIn Learning Courses, in seven different languages. The training covers a whole range of topics and LinkedIn also recommends courses to you based on your job title and skills. It can help you to learn new skills or improve your existing ones.

 

Although this is a feature of a Premium account, you can also purchase LinkedIn Learning on its own, or for your team (up to twenty people).

 

 

Advanced search features

 

With free LinkedIn accounts, you can only see limited data around profiles. Having LinkedIn Premium offers you eight additional search filters. Some of these include being able to search which groups people are in and how many years experience they have.

 

 

Profile searches

 

Linkedin Business Premium allows you to view any profile – up to 3rd degree connections – and shows you more relevant search results. It gives you unlimited searches and you can save your searches too. So, if you have to perform a lot of searches for work, it’s a big time saver.

 

LinkedIn will also email you new profiles that fit or match your search criteria.

 

 

Access Business Insights

 

With a premium account, you’re able to access deeper insights into a company’s growth and trends. For example, it will show you total employee count over time, employee distribution by job function, new hires to the company and notable alumni. This could be really valuable research for business development.

 

 

Stand out

 

With a premium account, your profile will have more information than non-premium accounts when people search for your name or find you through a company search. Your profile will show a few extra lines, which can help people to decide whether to connect with you or not.

 

If you’re still not sure whether LinkedIn Premium would be useful, you can sign up for a month’s free trial to explore its features.