A shelter whose social accounts belong to a departed volunteer
A volunteer-run animal shelter has one Facebook Page and one Instagram account. Both were created three years ago by a volunteer who left after a disagreement; her personal account is still an admin, and the shared password sits in a WhatsApp group with nine members. Two volunteers currently post by logging in with that password. The Instagram account is a personal profile, not a professional one. Nobody is certain which email address owns the Page. The Page still lists the shelter's previous address and names a former manager as the contact. The shelter has 4,100 Facebook followers, 900 Instagram followers and a monthly donation drive it wants to promote with paid ads.
1. Describe the correct ownership and access structure, and list the first three actions in order.
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Correct structure
- A Meta Business Portfolio owned by the shelter itself, created with an organisational email the shelter controls and can recover (e.g. info@), not a volunteer's personal address.
- The Facebook Page held inside that portfolio, and the Instagram account converted to a professional (business) account and linked to the Page through the same portfolio - this is also the prerequisite for running ads.
- Access granted by role per person (Admin for the coordinator, Editor or Moderator for volunteers), each person logging in with their own account and 2FA. No shared passwords.
- Recovery phone and email that belong to the organisation; a written record of who holds Admin.
First three actions
- Establish an admin the shelter controls - recover or add an admin via business verification, then change the recovery email and phone and enable 2FA.
- Remove access for the departed volunteer and anyone else who should not have it; rotate the password out of existence by moving everyone to role-based access.
- Document who holds which role and where the credentials live.
Ordering reason: until the shelter controls Admin, it cannot run ads, cannot remove a hostile ex-volunteer and cannot safely change anything else - every other fix depends on step 1.
2. The coordinator proposes deleting both accounts and starting clean. Evaluate this.
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Reject it as the default, keep it as a fallback.
What deletion destroys:
- 4,100 Facebook followers and 900 Instagram followers - three years of accumulated reach that a new Page would take years to rebuild, and the shelter's donation appeals depend on that reach.
- Post history: evidence of the animals rehomed and the work done. For a donation-driven charity, that history is the trust signal.
- Reviews and recommendations attached to the Page, plus any existing ad history and audience data.
- A new Page with no history is also more likely to be treated as suspicious by the platform.
Crucially, deletion does not solve the actual problem. The problem is ownership and access, and that is fixed by getting an admin into the account - usually an hour's work. Deleting throws away the asset to fix a fault that the asset does not cause.
The fallback case is narrow but real: if the Page is genuinely unrecoverable (the owning email is dead and verification fails), then a new Page is necessary. In that case, do not delete the old one - post a final pinned announcement pointing to the new Page, and update the website, printed leaflets and collection tins on the same day.
3. What must be changed on the Instagram account before any paid donation campaign, and why?
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Convert it to a professional (business) account and link it to the Facebook Page inside the Business Portfolio.
Why this blocks everything else:
- Ads and boosted posts are placed from a Page and an Instagram professional account inside a portfolio. A personal profile cannot be selected as an ad identity, so the campaign literally cannot launch in a properly managed way.
- Insights (reach, profile visits, follower growth, audience location) are only available to professional accounts - without them the donation drive is unmeasurable.
- Linking means comments and messages from both platforms land in one inbox, which matters for a small volunteer team handling donation queries.
Alongside that, before launch:
- Correct the address and contact name on both profiles - a donation page that sends people to a former address undermines the campaign.
- Set a clear profile category, profile photo, bio and a single link to the donation page.
- Make sure at least two people, not one, can administer it - the current situation is exactly how the last ownership problem happened.