Three Simple Questions to Create a Communications Strategy

Do you get overwhelmed by the concept of a communications "strategy"? Does it seem so daunting that youkeep on doing what you're doing already?  Or, do you assume your strategy needs to be complete and perfect, so you don't even start to create one? Relax!  It doesn't have to be so hard.

Get the people who have a stake in your communications in the same room and ask them:

1) Who are the audiences we're trying to reach? (Hint: there is no such thing as "the general public." You have people inside and outside your organization that you would like to do something for the organization. Who are they, specifically?)

2) Toward what end? (Once we have built up a nice, preferably two-way, relationship with the audience, what will they start to do that they weren't doing before?)

3) What do we already know about these audiences? What do we need to find out to give them what they're looking for?

Answer these questions first, and then issues like the content of your messages, the media you should use, what counts as success and how you measure it will be much easier to resolve. 

But don't stop reaching out and interacting with people in the mean time! "Take a sad song and make it better." --The Beatles

Share of Mind, Share of Heart, by Sybil F. Stershic: a review

Sybil  Stershic wants you Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: the employees, volunteers, and Board members of your nonprofit organization.  In her new book, Share of Mind, Share of Heart, she explains the top two reasons why.

1. "Your service is your brand."  Think about it: there are a lot more points where people touch your organization than just the newsletters and emails you send them, or the social media you want them to see.  Every time a client or stakeholder walks up to your reception desk, calls on the phone, takes advantage of a service, attends an event, or volunteers for one of your programs, they are forming their impression of your agency.  That means that the people who represent your organization the most often are not the Executive Director, the Communications Director, the Development Director, or the Board chair.  They are the employees and volunteers who face the public every day.
2.  "Connection is the key." People who work at your agency for love or money must feel connected to the mission of the organization (and know how they are helping to move you forward). They also have to connect with your customers (or clients) to stay dedicated to a high level of customer care.  They want and need to connect with other volunteers, and with employees. Indeed, that may be the reason they came to work for you in the first place.  It certainly will be key to keeping them coming back for more.

Stershic calls this concept "internal marketing."  The term focuses  attention on the fact that employees, volunteers, and Board members are also customers, and they need to be motivated to keep buying what you're selling: the good name of your organization.

What happens when employees don't feel valued?  They disengage and leave the organization.  Or worse, they disengage and stay.

Don't let this happen to you! Share of Mind, Share of Heart is full of examples, tips, and "action plan starter notes."  The book is slim enough that you can read it through in a couple of hours, then go back and put the suggestions into practice that best fit the way your agency functions now.  That will help you make your organization a better place to work, improve your customer service, and at the same time, communicate to the world what you are all about.

My Recent Book Reviews about Communications

I'm learning a lot, and getting many good reminders about what I already know, by reading smart writers' books about Communications.  Here are the links to some that I recently reviewed:

The Nonprofit Marketing Guide 
http://dfischman.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-nonprofit-marketing-guide-by-kivi.html

Robin Hood Marketing 
http://dfischman.blogspot.com/2013/04/robin-hood-marketing-by-katya-andresen.html

Strategic Communications for Nonprofit Organizations
http://dfischman.blogspot.com/2013/04/strategic-communications-for-nonprofit.html

Switch
http://dfischman.blogspot.com/2013/02/switch-how-to-change-things-when-change.html

How to Find a Job on LinkedIn...
http://dfischman.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-to-find-job-on-linkedin-by-brad.html

Many of these authors, and other smart people, are giving good advice every day on Twitter.  Follow me @DennisFischman and check out my Communications list.

The Nonprofit Marketing Guide, by Kivi Leroux Miller: a review

Kivi Leroux Miller feels your pain.  And she wants to help.

You work at a nonprofit organization.  Either it's too small to have a communications department or nobody has recognized the need to market what you do until now.  You've recognized the need, but you feel daunted.  There are so many things you could do...and the so-called experts want you to do all of them yesterday! 

Where do you get started?  How much can you do?  What will work best for your group and its cause? You don't need theory or grandiose notions.  You need a friend who's been there and can guide you through the process. Kivi wants to be that friend.

Throughout this book, you will hear great advice that you can put to use right away.  If you love the idea of a "quick and dirty marketing plan," this is the book for you. 

Be warned, though: "quick" is a relative term.  There are no magic wands to wave and no lamps to rub to get a genie to do the work for you.  This book will give you a good sense of what you need to do to be ready to plan and of all the resources--mostly time--that you'll need to turn that plan into reality.  Knowing all that ahead of time will reassure you.  You'll be able to see the road ahead.

As you go on reading the book, I predict that you'll stop feeling daunted and start feeling excited.  You'll see that (in Miller's words), you can do it yourself without doing yourself in.  The later chapters of the book offer excellent advice on how to organize your efforts, how to take advantage of outside help when you need it, and "where to spend your limited dollars and where to scrimp."

In other words, all the things you'd ask a trusted, wise advisor if you could sit down with her over lunch?  They are either in this book or on her blog.  Spend some time with each.  Then get started.

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review.

You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there's a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen's Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.

Andresen, chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn't let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves--we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.

Read the book for the "Robin Hood rules" she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are "focus on getting people to do something specific" and "appeal to your audience's values, not your own."
Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They'll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don't, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?

Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.

Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

• What can we ask people to do that will be "fun, easy, popular, and rewarding"? (for supporters)
• "Who wins when we win?" (for partners)
• How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists--they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That's what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that's been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately--even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers' Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine's The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual's behavior, or even a lot of individuals' behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody's lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it's just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That's selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

Strategic Communications for Nonprofit Organizations, 2nd Edition: a review

Strategic Communications for Nonprofit Organization: Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Plan by Sally J. Patterson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Are you leading your organization through the process of creating a communications strategy? Good for you! There's a lot of scatter-shot communications in the nonprofit world, but very few organizations take the time to think about how to bring all their communications--in print, in person, on the web, through social media--together for the greatest impact. Whether you're a consultant, a staff person in house, or a Board member, this book is meant for you. 

If you are a seasoned communications strategist, the book will serve as a refresher and a series of checklists. It also contains two dozen worksheets, all available online, and you can use the ones you find most helpful to structure the discussions you lead. 

If you are new to strategic planning, don't get overwhelmed. Look at the overall flow of the book to get a sense of what steps are involved. You may decide you want to hire a consultant to lead the planning process, and this book will give you the tools you need to interview that person and decide whether he or she will meet your needs.

This book offers a lot of good advice. I particularly like some of the lists. For instance, here's a list that could serve as the itinerary for the whole process:

*What are we trying to achieve?
*Whom are we trying to reach?
*What do we want them to do?
*How will we encourage them to do it?
*How will we know if we have succeeded?

There are also some real drawbacks to the book. It seems to assume that people in the organization will already understand the value of creating a communications strategy and commit themselves to a what could be a very long process (every week for six months).  My experience tells me that you begin instead with a certain amount of information sharing and consensus building.  You might not want to tackle a wholesale audit of the agency's communications at the outset.  You might want to start with concrete questions like "Whom are we trying to reach?" and "What do we want them to do?"

I think that the process of creating a strategy and the process whereby you get the buy-in of the people who have to carry that strategy out are the same process. I wouldn't hand this book to people who know a lot about programs but not much about communications. It would alienate them.  Instead, I would take what I could from the book and apply it to my organization in whatever order would get the most participation in and eventual buy-in.  That's the way to make sure your plan doesn't sit on a shelf but instead directs the actions of your agency every day.




View all my reviews

Who Cares? The Need for Personalized Communication

Today I received a letter in the mail from my health insurance company.  You are taking a certain medicine, they said, so every year, you should have a certain kind of blood test.  Are you doing that?  Will you ask you doctor to make sure?

The company called the letter a Care Alert, and everything in it reinforced the message, "We Care."  The envelope didn't: it looked as if it might have been one of those Explanations of Benefits that don't explain anything at all.  And of course, one of the reasons they care is that if I look out for myself, I can avoid serious health risks that would end up costing the insurance company a lot. 

Still, the message itself was caring.  It was personalized, and it treated me like a responsible adult who can make good decisions with the proper information.

I would like to propose that nonprofits aim at making all their communications as personal and as caring as the letter I received.

What would it take to do that?

1. Knowing, and remembering, a lot about your supporters. 
2. Thinking, "How can I make my agency useful to this person?"  What topics matter to him or her?  What information would she or he find useful--not in a general way, but here and now?  
3. Calling on them to take action...and showing them how.

The tools exist to make all this possible.  Databases, constituent relationship management software and processes, email tools, various programs that remind you it's time to send this kind of message to this specific person: they're out there, and not that expensive.

But is your organization willing to spend the time and attention it takes to treating every client, constituent, prospect, or donor with at least as much care as a health insurance company showed to me?

Review of The Networked Nonprofit:Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change

Beth Kanter and Allison Fine have a warning and a promise for nonprofits.  The warning: with the rise of social media (and a generation that's used to quick and transient support for the cause of the moment), your old models are not going to work much longer.  Don't count on gaining new supporters who will be loyal for life.  If you don't adapt, you're toast.

The promise: if you narrow your work, open your books, and collaborate with other agencies and key individual actors, using social media, you may be able to get more done than ever before.

The book is full of real-life examples and checklists to help you put its lessons into practice.  Some of the examples are negative, like the organization that didn't want to let its young professionals group create a Facebook page that the organization didn't control.  (We should be happy if people want to spend time talking about our organizations!) Others are positive, like Planned Parenthood's use of its website and pages on Facebook and MySpace to let "individuals share their personal stories in their own words, images, and videos."  On the website www.networkednonprofit.org, they keep readers up to date with current thinking and provide more tools.

The Networked Nonprofit also includes helpful chapters on how (and how not to) use crowdsourcing, learning loops, online fundraising, and online tools for governance of your organization.

I do have some reservations about the book.  One assumption behind it is that the Millennial generation, or Generation Y, will keep on surfing from cause to cause and not form abiding loyalties to particular organizations as Baby Boomers like me have done.  I distinctly remember acting the same way when I was in my twenties and thirties--even without the aid of the World Wide Web.  As my dear wife Rona Fischman says, people create their own grooves and fall into them.  I am not sure that's going to change.  But that means it's even more important to meet young supporters in their chosen media, on their terms, now, so they will stick with us in the future.

The other reservation is about "Sticking to what they do best."  This is Kanter and Fine's idea of how you become more effective AND become a good citizen of the "ecosystem" of groups working on your issue.  They say:

A common refrain within nonprofit organization and by nonprofit staffers is, "How can I make my life simpler when I have so much to do?"  The answer is, well, simple: You have too much to do because you do too much.  (p.89)

I have a lot of respect for the wisdom of this observation.  At the same time, social problems are complicated.  If each group sticks to what it does best, who's looking out for the whole?  The authors would probably say that if you're not trying to DO it all, you have time to engage in those strategic conversations.  They are refreshingly frank that "It's too soon to tell whether and how the outcomes of Networked Nonprofits differ from their predecessors...."  Anyone who is interested in finding out, however, should read this book.

Planning for the Impossible

 Could thinking about the impossible be useful for nonprofit organizations?

I'm enjoying reading Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku.  Will we ever have Star Wars-style light swords?  What about a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak?  Discussing these questions, he manages to teach me a lot about electromagnetism and optics and the state of technology that I didn't know, and make it fun.

Kaku says there are three orders of impossibility.  Class I impossibilities are impossible today but "might be possible in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form."   Class II impossibilities "sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world" and might be possible in "millennia to millions of years in the future."  Class III impossibilities are "technologies that violate the known laws of physics...If they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding...."

What if we applied this framework to the challenges we face in running our organizations and achieving our missions?  (Of course the time scales wold have to be very different!)

Ask yourself: if what we want to do seems impossible now, what would it take to make it real?  If it's just funding, or a change in regulations, that might be a Class I impossibility--meaning not impossible at all for people as hopeful as people who work in nonprofits tend to be.  Figuring out the steps to get there and setting ourselves an attainable deadline might  embolden us to change what's possible, financially or politically.

If it's a change in society, it's a Class II impossibility: it might take the rest of our lives and then some.  But historically speaking, that's a very small time.  Ask yourself: Is the mission worth that kind of concentrated, persistent effort?  What will make that kind of effort possible?  What will sustain it for the time it takes?

And as for Class III impossibilities, it's good to be reminded that even things Einstein once thought impossible have been proven to be true.  Don't bet the organization on changes that violate the way you believe things are at a fundamental level.  But be hopeful, and be prepared.