Reddit was founded in 2005 is a community platform categorized around different interests. As of January 2025, Reddit had over 500 million people registered as users. 110.4 million daily active users and 416.4 million weekly active users, 44% of US Redditors were aged 18 to 29 years old and around 2 in 3 Reddit users were male. Redditors tend to be significantly younger than other online communities like Facebook, with less than 3% of users being 65 or over. 

These community members use the platform for highly targeted content, via whatever community, or subreddit, they subscribe to. And that, together with the demographics of the platform, are why I find Reddit so valuable for outreach: I can reach a group that’s hard for me to reach otherwise (people under 35, as well as young men) and I can target specific groups, like just the users that live in the town where I live (because there’s a subreddit for that), women that ride motorcycles.

If you have struggled to connect with young, male audiences regarding your nonprofit’s work, or if you want to get a handle on what young people say regarding nonprofits, volunteering, civic engagement, etc., Reddit is a great place to get to know.

Reddit has not only given me amazing insights into how young adults think about volunteering. It has also:

• Helped a nonprofit I support FINALLY land a group of volunteers from a very, very large and well known company in our area that we had been trying to reach for a couple of years, with no success. I posted info about a one-day volunteering event on a subreddit for a large city near us and one of the employees stuck it on the employee intranet and, boom, we got volunteers from that corporation at long, long last – and later, a donation of $5,000.
• I’ve been hired twice by another very large, well-known company for consulting work because of my activities on Reddit – on r/volunteer in particular.

Of course, your mileage may vary…

I hear a lot of people say they have no idea where to get started on Reddit. If you work for nonprofits, here’s what I recommend:

Look at my Reddit profile and see what subreddits I’m a part of and what I’ve been posting (you can also follow me on Reddit).

Then look at Reddit4Good, a massive list of Reddit communities that relate somehow to doing good. It has a list of:

• Subreddits focused on areas related to nonprofit work, like biology, agriculture, etc.
• Subreddits for formally established programs (CASA, AmeriCorps, Red Cross, Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity, etc.).
• Regional-based subreddits focused on volunteering (the UK, Brazil, Oregon, etc.).

ONE BIG CAUTION: change your settings so that you do not get a notification every time a new post or comment is made to any of the subreddits you join. Trust me on this – you do not want that many notifications in your life.

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