Introduction
How do you build your nonprofit communications?
Fundamentals.
Fundamentals position your organization to succeed more often than not. Additionally, they build your foundation. If you were to try something different tomorrow, it wouldn’t burn your team out or waste your time.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a podcast by Marlene Oliviera via Maytree Foundation that goes over this very topic. This post is my expansion on it.
Here’s a simple analogy to drive home my point:
Nonprofit communications is like sports: In order to be great at it, you must master the fundamentals. In other words, you need to understand the components of a communications strategy. However, you also have to understand what makes those components work individually and together to get you wins.
Sports is the same way. You have to master the fundamentals to build your approach in a way that makes you a winner. In a sport like volleyball, that means understanding how your form, technique and strategic outlook work individually and together to best your opponent.
Why should you build your nonprofit communications fundamentals?
It’s important you know why you’re starting with fundamentals. Perhaps one or more of the following is happening:
- A new strategic direction
- You’re trying to align your communications to everything else
- You need to refresh your approach
- Something is not working anymore
Or maybe it’s as simple as you don’t know what to do. That’s okay! It’s never a bad idea to position your organization for comfort with communications as opposed to discomfort. In other words, you only stand to benefit from building your nonprofit communications fundamentals.
Here are some of the benefits:
- Have a solid foundation that allows you to try new things easily and with confidence
- Avoid being overwhelmed by organizational growth internally and externally
- Work at a pace that reflects your time, money and resources
- Easier to get buy-in about new ideas from senior leadership
- An invaluable amount of clarity
- You don’t have to do the grunt work twice
What are the nonprofit communications fundamentals?
People who know how to build your nonprofit communications have varying answers to this question. A simple search of “nonprofit communications fundamentals” is not necessarily helpful in this respect. Let’s be honest: There are a lot of answers and many of them look impractical. So, here’s my hopefully practical list of nonprofit communications fundamentals
1. Ongoing analysis of your communications landscape
It’s a good idea to do this on a consistent basis and when things change on the communications front. For example, if your organization is taking a new strategic direction, it’s important to know what the current situation is regarding your communications. Without this analysis, you risk making decisions without any evidence to support them.
The way to analyze your communications landscape is by conducting a communications audit of pretty much everything – brand positioning, target audience, strategic approaches, website, best practices etc. You want to be thorough here so that you’re moving with complete confidence that you understand your situation. If a communications audit sounds too overwhelming right now, start small with just a SWOT analysis.
Learn more about my Communications Audit service.
2. Understanding of your target audience
I have written about target audiences to no end on my website. I have also included it as part of the aforementioned communications audit. However, I wanted to include it as a standalone item because it’s that important. Knowing and understanding your target audience is fundamental to your nonprofit communications. It’s not just that you want to target the right audience. You also want to know when and how their needs and problems change. Without knowing this information, you may end up using strategies, tactics and tools to reach your audience that don’t work anymore. Worse, you don’t know why.
The way to understand your target audience is to revisit your audience personas, tweak them where necessary and identify the elements of the persona in action through your approaches. If that sounds a bit too overwhelming right now or beyond your capacity, take a look at your website backend. See if you can identify patterns in terms of who is visiting your website and what they’re looking for. You can even do the same on social media. This way, you start to see and pay attention to who is engaging with your work. You want to build your nonprofit communications at a pace that makes sense for your organization.
3. Guidelines for your content
I write the word “alignment” a lot but it’s for a very good reason: Every single piece of web content you share should be aligned with your organization’s overall strategic direction. Furthermore, all of the content should support the organization’s goals, values and mission. Without that kind of alignment, you risk investing in content that simply doesn’t serve you. That investment could cost you time, money and/or resources. Therefore, it’s necessary to know how your content aligns with everything else.
Guidelines help you with this. Brand guidelines, style guides, editorial guides or simple language guides make it possible for your brand to be positioned in the way you want it to. Furthermore, guides like these build your nonprofit communications by making your online voice consistent.
The way to create guidelines for your content is to break your brand down into smaller pieces. You want to evaluate things like voice, tone, colour palette, key messaging, target audience, brand positioning and more. This is not a process you want to rush. So, my suggestion is to do a little bit at a time. Start with the home base channel for your communications, which is most likely your website. Also, this may be something you hire a freelance communications specialist for.
4. Key messaging
Key messaging is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the important communications that tells your organization’s story. Furthermore, it positions your organization in such a way that associates it with certain topics, themes and work. Key messaging is fundamental because it is the framework through which all your communications will be analyzed, developed and shared. Without it, you risk inconsistencies with your brand. Worse, people can recognize your brand but are not sure what work you do. You want people to associate your brand with certain topics!
The way to clarify your key messaging is figure out your brand identity. I know, it sounds weird but let me explain. Think of your organization as a person. A person has a personality, quirks, interesting ideas and things they generally always say. In the same way, an organization has an identity, a position online and offline that they hold and support, ideas and work they share and do and common taglines or messages. All of these components surround your key messaging and make it easier to be consistent. Figure these things out slowly and carefully so that everything that may follow is in alignment with it.
Learn more about my Strategy Planning service
5. A story bank
A repository of stories is necessary for nonprofits. They provide you with information about your target audience, your organization’s impact and how well you’re communicating your key messages. Stories are fundamental for reasons I’ve written about before:
For nonprofits, stories help people understand the true significance of your work. Stories can:
– Inspire people to act
– Compel people to support your cause
– Spotlight your members and/or employees
– Promote inclusivity and belonging
– Show evidence and impact
– Connect your work more closely to your mission and vision
Without stories, how do you share what your organization is truly doing?
The way to build a story bank is to simply collect stories. Look at the frontend and backend to tell you what people are saying. Also, look at your comments, reviews, newsletters and social media presence. Furthermore, ask your key stakeholders, including your staff members. Ask them about the impact your organization has had on them. There are stories everywhere. You just have to notice them.
It’s much harder than it sounds. So, it’s helpful to have a strategy in place to help you collect stories. Here’s a really handy guide about how to collect stories. You don’t have to do all of the things on the list. As I’ve suggested previously, start small. Do one and go from there to see what works best for you. When you get the hang of collecting stories, you then want to ensure that the way you craft them aligns with your communications strategy.
Learn more about my Ready-to-go Storytelling package.
Over to you
If you have these fundamentals already, that’s great! I suggest simply revisiting them to make sure they are up to date and align with where you’re going as an organization right now. Or, you can evaluate them to see where you can go. If you don’t have these fundamentals in place, I suggest changing that. Communications takes time and effort. But the payoff is invaluable. To me, it’s always worth it to invest in communications because they offer long-term benefits.
Remember: these fundamentals can’t steer you wrong. You cannot lose on this investment. Rather, this investment in communications only gives you a strong foundation to work from, bringing you closer to your goals.
If you’re ready to get started, let’s get in touch!