Fixing broken social shares on your online fundraising pages

Peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns rely on the ability for fundraisers to share their campaign with friends, family and colleagues and request donations. While e-mail remains the strongest driver for online giving – both donors and data show this is the mostly likely channel leading to giving – social has obviously become an essential complement. Roughly 32% of online donors say social media is the channel that most inspires them to give and on average, 15-18% of donations are referred from Facebook, Instagram or X.

raisin empowers fundraisers to expand their reach with easy-to-find social widgets to share their pages across key social channels like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Linked, and even AI-powered messaging that crafts compelling and on-message posts across different call-to-actions and tones.

Sometimes when these posts are shared, Facebook (or any Linked, X or WhatsApp – but mostly Facebook) displays the wrong image, title or description. Not ideal! Relevant visual content has been shown to drive engagement, per Buffer, and a broken preview or a wrong image can be especially frustrating after you or a P2P fundraiser have spent time crafting the perfect page.

Why does this happen?

The photo, title and description that appear when site visitors share to social media are “scraped” automatically based on the Open Graph (og:) meta tags it finds on the page. Facebook grabs that information the first time the URL is shared, and then caches (or saves) it. That cached preview typically persists for about two weeks or longer before the crawler re-scrapes the page on its own. So, if you’ve received updated a page, photo or campaign title, those changes may not be reflected in shares right away.

The fix?

Fortunately, Meta offers a free tool called the Sharing Debugger. The tool previews how content will preview the page when shared, show exactly what Open Graph tags Facebook sees and flags any errors or warnings.

If you’ve found that Facebook is sharing an old photo:

1. Simply enter the page URL you’re having issues with in the Sharing Debugger
2. Hit “Debug”
3. Click “Fetch new scrape information”. This will force Facebook to re-crawl the page for the page, find new content and refresh the preview.

A few additional best practices worth mentioning

For shared link images, Facebook – and nearly every other major platform including LinkedIn, X, Slack, and Discord – recommend an image of 1200 × 630 pixels at a 1.91:1 aspect ratio. The good news: this single size satisfies roughly 95% of social platforms, so one well-cropped image will travel cleanly across the channels your fundraisers use most.

Try to keep image file size under ~1 MB (and under 300 KB if WhatsApp is a meaningful share channel for your supporters, as it can drop heavier previews entirely.)

Also, if you can’t access Meta’s tool, third-party debuggers like Microlink, OpenGraph.xyz, and various Chrome extensions preview the same metadata across multiple platforms at once

The end result after you scrape? The perfect share across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and beyond.