What happens when missing nonprofit communications fundamentals rears its ugly head?
Highlights
- Family Service Toronto (FST) was halfway through their strategic plan and undergoing organizational restructuring
- Senior leadership wanted to build capacity to support long-term consistent marketing and communications
- Results: After three months, FST received a communications strategy, brand messaging guidelines, inclusive language standards, an editorial calendar template and an implementation plan that better positioned them for thought leadership
Before: The challenge
When your organization is halfway through its strategic plan, you turn to your marketing and communications team, right? But what if you don’t have such a team? What if you don’t have such a team AND a strategy? Or, what if you don’t have such a team, strategy AND guidelines?
That was Brian Porter, when he reached out to me about two years ago. His organization, Family Service Toronto (FST), needed long-term support developing the strategy and guidelines. The goal was to steer their marketing and communications efforts in the right direction. That wasn’t the only challenge. Brian was being pulled in numerous directions due to limited internal resources for marketing and communications.
The challenge: How can FST build their internal capacity to support the marketing and communications components of their strategic plan? How could senior leadership accomplish this while positioning the organization for thought leadership?
During: The solution
I met with Brian several times before we actually began working. When I gained more context about the situation, I gained more confidence to go forth with the first step in this process: A communications audit.
After reviewing internal and external documents, I audited them for specific things. I looked at brand messaging, content, channel use proficiency, best practices on social media and alignment with strategic objectives. To substantiate my findings, I also held online focus groups.
Doing this work independently gave Brian more time to prioritize his own tasks, especially because of one major change happening at FST: The organization was undergoing a restructure at the same time
An unexpected and welcome collaboration
The next step in this process was building the actual strategy. I brought the incredible Co-Effect team on board to support this step. Together, we developed a series of participatory workshop sessions. We needed to tease out key details that would become the basis of the communications strategy.
These details included:
- Information about target audiences
- Goals and objectives
- The diversity, equity and inclusion framework
- Communications needs
- Key performance indicators
- Organizational priorities
- Brand messaging
- Best practices for capacity-building and implementing the new strategy.
After: The results
As a result of this work, FST received:
- Communications strategy
- Brand messaging guidelines
- Inclusive language standards
- Editorial calendar template
- Implementation plan
Doing this work helped Brian identify people who could support the marketing and communications tasks. The work also helped illuminate the importance of making marketing and communications a more-than-one team effort. Finally, the process allowed Brian to leverage networks and identify opportunities for thought leadership. With new strategies, processes and guidelines, he could now build on those opportunities.
Reflection
A communications strategy is a strategic document that makes everything related to marketing and communications so much easier. Your brain (and your team) will thank you for having it. It builds capacity because it serves as the primary context for everything you’re doing and want to do. When you have it, there’s nothing to do except win.
Take first place in your race for effective and reliable marketing and communications.