Social shares drive a meaningful share of peer-to-peer donations, but cached previews on Facebook can display the wrong image or title long after a page has been updated. Meta's free Sharing Debugger lets you preview what supporters will see and force a refresh on demand. Pair it with a 1200 × 630 pixel image and your shares will look sharp across Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and beyond.
Peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns rely on the ability for fundraisers to share their campaign with friends, family, and colleagues and request donations. While email remains the strongest driver for online giving, both donors and data show this is the most 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 LinkedIn, and even AI-powered messaging that crafts compelling and on-message posts across different calls to action and tones.
Sometimes when these posts are shared, Facebook, LinkedIn, 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 found 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 recently 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 the page will appear when shared, shows exactly what Open Graph tags Facebook sees, and flags any errors or warnings.
If you’ve found that Facebook is sharing an old photo:
Enter the page URL you’re having issues with in the Sharing Debugger.
Hit “Debug.”
Click “Fetch new scrape information.” This will force Facebook to re-crawl the page, find the 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.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Facebook showing the wrong image for my fundraising page?
Facebook may be showing an older cached version of the page’s Open Graph metadata. If the campaign image, title, or description was recently updated, use Meta’s Sharing Debugger to fetch new scrape information and refresh the preview.
What size should a social share image be?
A strong general-purpose size for shared link previews is 1200 × 630 pixels with a 1.91:1 aspect ratio. This size works well across many major social and messaging platforms.
What are Open Graph tags?
Open Graph tags are pieces of metadata that tell social platforms which title, description, image, and URL to show when someone shares a webpage.