Top Communications & Messaging Tips for Nonprofits
During our free session on the 10 Things Nonprofits Need to Know About Communications & Messaging for Impact, Social Impact Communications Expert Kathryn LeBlanc from The Good Growth Company roster.
By reading this recap, you’ll get an idea of the content covered including learning how to adapt your communications to maximize your potential for social impact, discussing developing strategic messaging to align your team and amplify your social impact story, and becoming prepared to educate your team on how to overcome today's pressing communications challenges.
During the session, we also answered questions from attendees from nonprofit organizations. Those are integrated into this recap.
What do you need to know about messaging for impact?
Nonprofits were enlightened on ten crucial aspects of effective communication and messaging for impactful social work. Kathryn emphasized the necessity of a comprehensive communication strategy, detailing the importance of clear objectives, audience definition, and resource management. Crafting strong messaging across platforms emerged as a cornerstone, with Kathryn advocating for consistency and simplicity, ensuring resonance with target audiences. The role of the communications team was explored, with Kathryn highlighting the imperative of clear messaging regardless of expertise levels within the team. Language choice, emotional connections, and ethical storytelling were also addressed, emphasizing human values and sensitivity in portraying social issues. Visual branding's significance, evaluation practices, and project management strategies rounded out the discussion, stressing the importance of organized processes and clear roles. Insights were also shared on individual donor acquisition, leadership transitions, and budget advocacy, providing a holistic view of effective nonprofit communications.
Let’s go into some of the topics further.
Top Takeaways & Topics
Importance of Communication Strategy
Kathryn emphasized the significance of developing a comprehensive organizational communication strategy that encompasses all programs, projects, campaigns, and channels. She stressed the need for specific objectives and reverse engineering strategies to achieve them. Kathryn also highlighted defining audiences, available resources, and capacity building as essential components of an effective communication strategy.
Strong Messaging in Communications
Kathryn underscored the importance of crafting clear and concise messaging that resonates with target audiences across different platforms. She recommended creating a message guide for organizations to ensure consistent messaging across various activities or campaigns. Additionally, she mentioned that good messages are designed to be repeated for clarity's sake.
Role of Communications Team
Kathryn discussed the blurred lines between the roles of a communications team in building clear messaging and strategic planning for a nonprofit. She emphasized that regardless of the context or expertise within the team, clear messaging is crucial for evoking clarity throughout the brand. Kathryn provided examples to illustrate how to recognize when messaging needs improvement and stressed that creating concise messages facilitates repetition.
Writing Style for Nonprofit Messaging
Kathryn advised using language that resonates with people, even when addressing complex topics, emphasizing writing at an eighth-grade level. She highlighted the importance of ensuring messages are easily repeatable by considering whether they can be effortlessly conveyed to others over coffee. Additionally, she cautioned against investing resources in design and other aspects before refining messaging.
Emotional Connection in Communications
Emphasizing emotional connections in communications, Kathryn underscored their impact on engaging audiences and fostering support for social impact work. She urged incorporating shared human values into communication efforts as it helps build connections rather than echo chambers.
Ethical Storytelling & Communication
Discussing ethical considerations in storytelling within social impact work, Kathryn stressed being mindful when working with communities who have experienced trauma or difficult circumstances such as homelessness or refugee experiences. She highlighted avoiding portrayals that perpetuate stereotypes like the "white saviour complex" while centring donors versus communities supported by nonprofits.
Importance of Visual Branding
Highlighting visual branding's significance beyond corporations, Kathryn emphasized its role in enhancing effectiveness across social impact communications efforts despite budget constraints often faced by nonprofits.
Visual Branding and Refresh
Kathryn emphasizes the importance of a strategic visual brand for nonprofits, highlighting the need to avoid cluttered and confusing branding. She suggests strategies such as comprehensive brand guides, logo retention with strategic build-out, or complete rebranding when necessary. Kathryn also discusses potential funding sources for branding projects, including project grants from government departments and support from foundations.
Evaluation of Communications
Kathryn stresses the significance of evaluating communications work regularly, similar to program evaluations. She recommends integrating evaluation into communication strategy documents with specific cadences for reflection exercises. Additionally, she addresses qualitative evaluation methods and advises on balancing them with digital analytics while considering organizational capacities.
Project Management in Communications
Kathryn underscores the critical role of organized project management in successful communications work within nonprofits. She advocates for clear project management tools such as Asana or Monday.com to streamline tasks like graphic design and translation while emphasizing that disorganization can significantly impact communication team effectiveness.
Importance of Processes
In this segment, Kathryn highlights the value of processes in conjunction with project management within nonprofit communications teams. She explains that processes serve as rules to follow and suggests creating formalized procedures for staff requests from comms teams among other aspects.
Request Process
Kathryn emphasized the importance of establishing a clear process for handling requests within teams, especially when conflicting requests arise. She suggested codifying timelines for product requests setting rules for hiring communication vendors and managing budgets to ensure consistency in branding and effective resource allocation.
Roles and Responsibilities
Kathryn highlighted the need to define roles within the organization, particularly concerning who can hire communication vendors or manage budgets without consulting the communications team. She stressed that maintaining a pulse on design work, videography, and illustrations is crucial for ensuring brand consistency.
Content Creation Strategies
Kathryn advised batch working when creating content by writing multiple social media posts or emails in advance. She also recommended time blocking for strategic reflection time to avoid neglecting this essential task.
Marketing Comms Impact
In response to a question about marketing comms' role in sustainability beyond grants, Kathryn discussed how strong messaging, visual branding, end-of-year fundraising campaigns, and monthly donor initiatives contribute towards organizational sustainability by attracting donors and positioning the organization favourably for opportunities including grants.
Organization Differentiation
To differentiate an organization from others with similar missions, Kathryn emphasized clear messaging that communicates impact effectively along with strong visual branding as key strategies.
Individual Donor Acquisition Strategy
In response to inquiries about acquiring individual donors through social media platforms, Kathryn suggested focusing on email fundraising efforts instead of relying solely on social media channels due to their limited effectiveness in attracting individual donors directly.
Essential Skills for Communications Role Success
Kathryn outlined the essential skills required including strategic thinking ability, to create clear messaging, and project management skills. She also highlighted building good relationships internally & externally as vital components contributing towards success in a communications role.
Crafting Effective Messages
Kathryn shared her approach to crafting messages using a four-bullet format which includes emotional connection, naming problems and solutions, and call-to-action elements. She offered further resources related to message-crafting research materials.
Effective Communication of Leadership Transition
Kathryn emphasized the importance of effectively communicating leadership transitions, highlighting the need for clear communication and announcements to avoid rumours. She stressed the significance of having strong HR and organizational governance planning in place to support effective communication during tricky leadership transitions. Additionally, she mentioned the necessity of building confidence through interim leadership and strategic storytelling.
Advocating for Budget Allocation to Communications
Kathryn discussed advocating for budget allocation to communications within an organization by emphasizing the need for strategic background work such as developing a communications plan and messaging. She advised starting with basic efforts even if there is disorganization within the department, socializing realistic budget needs with leadership, and strategizing ways to secure funding through grants or collaborations with fundraising teams.
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