Introduction
Nonprofit strategic communications are an often overlooked part of communications. I want to address this.
A few weeks ago, Imagine Canada, a national charitable organization that supports other charities and nonprofits with resources, advocacy, tools and other forms of support, posted a rather interesting Google Doc on their LinkedIn page.
The document is a non-exhaustive chart of project-based funding vs. actual core operating costs.
Here’s a screenshot of the chart:
The purpose of the document is to highlight what nonprofit organizations and charities need to run, what they actually get (i.e., project-based funding) and what happens when they cannot access core funding.
You should read the entire document for one simple reason:
Oftentimes, people underestimate the number of hoops nonprofit organizations have to keep jumping through to stay alive.
This is a deep dive into communications
However, the focus of this post is the communications section because, well, I’m a communications strategist in the nonprofit sector. It’s an under-the-hood investigation into what communications really is and how it works.
Many things jumped out at me, and I want to focus on the two big ones:
- The absence of nonprofit strategic communications as a core activity
- Why inconsistency is the major impact of a lack of core funding
What all three of these things have in common is that they contribute to the underestimation of communications work. In other words, their absence and misrepresentation allow people to continue believing that communications work is just making stuff and then sending it out (and then when you don’t have the stuff, the consequence is that people just don’t know about it). I want to explore this idea with this post.
Note that this isn’t a dig at Imagine Canada. Rather, it’s a deep dive into one section of their fantastic chart that provides further context to why lack of core funding for communications is always bad.
Let’s begin.
Nonprofit strategic communications is a necessary part of any business.
The biggest thing I notice is missing from the first column of the chart – the core operating costs – is strategic communications. It’s quite glaring when you consider that strategic communications is what makes everything else in the column possible.
Allow me to explain.
What is strategic communications?
Generally, strategic communications represents plans and strategies that advance your key messages – goals, mission and values – with your target audience(s). The “strategic” part represents two things:
- the intentionality you use to accomplish this that goal
- the alignment between the strategic and the long-term organizational goals
In the nonprofit sector, that means figuring out a way to achieve your larger organizational goals via purposeful communications. In other words, intentionality is your best friend.
Strategic communications can look like:
- defining your target audience
- choosing the key message(s) delivery system with credence to your audience and goals
- scheduling those messages for delivery
- figuring out a plan to follow up and engage with your audience
- creating content specific and relevant to your audience
Think of it more like a representation of a roadmapping approach vs. a set of activities.
Why does your nonprofit need strategic communications?
It’s simple: You aren’t trying to send any old message to your target audience (that is the quickest way to guarantee disinterest and mistrust from them). Rather, you’re trying to send the right message. Strategic communications positions your organization to do just that.
What is an example of nonprofit strategic communications?
Here’s an example of what I mean:
A few years ago, I created a social media strategy for Story Planet, a nonprofit organization that uses storytelling, graphic design and creativity to amplify the voices of children and young people in Toronto’s marginalized communities. Before I got to doing any communications work, I had to figure out a few things via several meetings:
- What their organizational needs and goals are
- Their capacities as a small team
- Requirements and background information
- Timelines, dates and expectations
Then, I could get to work.
In the strategy, I outlined their target audience, key messages, which social media channels would be best to use (and why) and what kinds of posts they should focus on.
The “strategic” part of this was aligning those things with their organizational goals and ensuring that their next steps were purposeful.
Remember: roadmapping approach instead of set of activities.
Why does this matter in terms of cost of operating costs?
Without strategic communications, you don’t have anything in the first column for one simple reason: Everything that’s there right now follows strategic communications, especially as it relates to the nonprofit sector. In other words, you can’t do anything in the first column without having a strategic communications plan first.
Here’s what I mean.
Marketing
Marketing is all about advertising a product after the fact. In order to do any marketing, it’s imperative to know your audience inside and out. It’s hard to promote anything or gain sponsorships when you don’t know how your audience would likely respond. Furthermore, it’s hard to create a press release about a new service at your nonprofit if you don’t know the kind of messaging you want to share.
Knowledge mobilization
Knowledge mobilization and translation is closely related to research and putting this into plain language. That doesn’t happen if you don’t know your target audience well enough to meet them where they’re at. In other words, if you can’t write in their language, they can’t really “read” what you are trying to tell them (read: strategically communicate).
Annual reports
An annual report covers the year in terms of activities, achievements, financials, stories and more. It doesn’t get completed without stories that satisfy basic level requirements for reporting AND draw key stakeholders in to invest more in your organization.
Website development and maintenance
You may think website development and maintenance is the outlier here. On the contrary! Think about this: How do you ensure end-to-end accessibility if the messaging, copy and presentation on the website is off? How do people trust your organization if there is a lack of consistency in your messaging?
All of this makes the second column look a lot grimmer. Not only do nonprofits have limited resources, but they also have limited capacities to do their communications properly.
Let’s take a look at the third column.
The lack of core funding is understated
Everything in the third column is true. When there is a lack of core funding, everything becomes difficult, challenging, confusing and muddled. Communications is essential to pretty much most business operations of any organizations. So, without it properly funded, core aspects of the business itself suffer.
How are other core activities impacted by insufficient communications?
Let’s look at fundraising:
Without communications, fundraising takes a big hit. If you can’t communicate, you can’t fundraise. So, if you can’t fundraise, you can’t reach your key stakeholders. If you can’t reach your key stakeholders, you begin to reach for any and everything to stay above water. But if that effort fails, you’re sort of stuck in a really precarious situation.
You can swap out “fundraise” for “advocacy” and the message is still true.
But I want to focus on what’s missing.
Consistency.
It’s not just that everything becomes difficult, challenging, confusing and muddled.
It also becomes inconsistent.
I’d argue that inconsistency is a bit worse than just sending the wrong messages. You can rework wrong messages into the right ones.
How does inconsistency factor into the impact of insufficient funding?
For example, I created an editorial style guide for Surrey Place to help them position their brand and messaging in a more consistent way. The guide included things about accessibility, technical grammar rules, how to be inclusive and terms to use on a consistent basis. I spoke at length with their teams and key stakeholders to get to an understanding of how they wanted to reach their target audiences.
You can use something like a style guide to correct wrong messaging.
Inconsistent messaging is harder to correct because inconsistent doesn’t necessarily mean wrong.
For example, let’s say you have a story on your website that explains what your organization is about, how it started, why it exists etc. The story may be wrong in terms of being inaccurate. You can easily correct that.
However, if the story expresses key messages that don’t align with your organization or perhaps includes details that aren’t necessary to the goals you want to achieve with your story, then you have a big problem.
No matter which one you’re dealing with, you have a lot of work on your hands.
Inconsistency introduces mistrust among your target audience(s)
Inconsistency tells your audience to associate your organization with things that don’t support your organization. Furthermore, it increases mistrust among your key stakeholders. If they find contradictory and hypocritical information on your website, for example, then they may be skeptical of investing further in the organization, whether that be resources or even donations.
To put it plainly: You quite literally risk losing your audience because of inconsistency. No one wants that. So, when you notice inconsistencies, you want to act quickly.
When I worked with Special Compass, an organization that helps students with learning disabilities achieve success, I reworked their About page (among other pages) to better align with their goal of reaching new participants. After gathering information and planning, here are the actions I took:
- Created entry points for readers to better understand the founder’s journey
- Stated plainly what they do in words readers understand
- Tweaked key messaging to include a hero’s journey arc and benefits of services
- Developed and included value proposition
- Added a call to action
Here’s the end result:
I think it’s pretty good, if I do say so myself!
Inconsistency creates a loss of opportunity
Unfortunately, correcting inconsistencies is kind of like starting over again. You aren’t just finding the inconsistencies and fixing them. Additionally, you are:
- cross-referencing them with the correct information
- aligning them with the right goals
- ensuring that the story would make sense to the target audience
- editing and/or rewriting as needed
All of this can take a very long time. That’s why correcting inconsistencies is kind of like starting over again from scratch. You have to return to the basics to make sure everything becomes consistent. And since funding is already inconsistent – as shown in the Imagine Canada chart – you lose out on possible opportunities.
Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that inconsistency costs A LOT more than many nonprofits may realize.
Over to you
Imagine Canada has started a very important conversation about how the lack of core funding is unfortunately normalized in the nonprofit sector. When I look at their Google Docs chart, I see just how much professionals in the sector are dedicated to making things work with whatever they have. However, I also see that it isn’t sustainable and something needs to change.
I wrote this post to zoom in on the communications row because I think that communications is far too often the first thing to go when core funding is lacking. That shouldn’t be the case. Let me be clear in that this idea that communications can be sacrificed when the going gets tough is directly related to what people believe they are paying for when they get support in that area.
Many nonprofits believe that they are getting marketing and content creation support. And that’s correct: You would absolutely get communications deliverables from a professional.
However, what you are actually paying for is someone who can think strategically, work diligently and adapt to changing situations. This is not an inexpensive item on a budget line. It takes experience and vision to even offer something like this. So, if you’re looking for someone, make sure you hire the right freelancer.
As I detailed earlier, strategic communications in the nonprofit sector is the backbone of most other communications efforts that organizations take. Without it, you get inconsistencies that, quite frankly, no one can really afford.