7 Steps to Make an All-Star Meme For Your Nonprofit/Cause/Thing that Matters - by @WebSkillet

It's true: You can have absolutely no design skills and make all-star memes for your nonprofit. 

But first, what's a meme? "Memes" are a name for those catchy visuals you see on Facebook these days--some kind of photo, with elaborative text layered on top. Memes are also called "macros" -- I sometimes take to calling them 'Facebook postcards'. Whatever you call them: they're bite sized informative visuals that people tend to share on social media.

As an aisde, the near epidemic of memes may yet spell the end of Facebook (along with Sponsored posts, and the like) but that doesn't mean us social agents can't try and take full advantage of this trend while we can.

At first glance, "memes" are in the department of good graphic designers. And it's true: good graphic designers will always be able to make the best designs. But folks like you and me without any design skills can fare pretty well, too.

So, how do you make an all-star meme? In short: I use PicMonkey -- a free, online photo editor. 

Below are 7 steps I use to make memes with Picmonkey.com. 

1) Visit PicMonkey.com (and use Firefox -- Chrome doesn't seem to like PicMonkey as much)  

 2) Click "Edit a Photo." 

Choose a photo you'd like to upload and edit with a text layover. Chances are you want your image to be related to your campaign or cause. Anything from a photo of a sunset, to a photo of your team's volunteers, to a photo of someone whose quotation you'd like to feature. Think in advance about where you'd like to layer the text. Text looks best on a consistently colored background.

3) Once you're in PicMonkey's photo-editing dashboard, Click the "P" on the far left.

4) Clicking the "P" on the left opens up the text editor -- which lets you layer text over the photo. In this case, over Eli's face. You can choose different sizes, colors, and fonts for the text as well. Pay attention to what colors stand out over different backgrounds. White font tends to look stronger over darker backgrounds, and vice versa. 

If the text is spilling out beyond the borders of your image, go into the text box, and split up the text over different lines to break it up. This may take some troubleshooting.

5) If the image looks good to you, then you're ready to save it. If you want, you can add other text or play with all sorts of other whiz-bang features. Just click "Save" in the top right menu bar when you're done. Make sure to save the image in "Russel" size. The bigger and crisper the image file, the better it should look on Facebook.

6) Now you should have a saved meme on your computer. It may very well look like this:

7) And now you're ready to upload your meme to Facebook (or wherever else!) If you're really proud of it, ask your fans to 'click like' or 'share' to help it simmer to the top of peoples' feeds. But don't ask for "Likes" and "Shares" all the time--that may lead to burnout. 

While the above meme is delightful, it's not entirely what we mean by making powerful memes for your issue. Check out some other examples of memes we've made with PicMonkey below:

Good luck storming the Internets with your new-fangled meme skills. And remember to try and skill up and experiment a bit before posting--we don't want to contribute too much to the downfall of Facebook with crappy memes. Or do we? 

For more social media tips, wisdom, and occasional snark, follow @webskillet!