Introduction
Nonprofit communications fundamentals position your organization to succeed in all areas of its work. They build your foundation of communications. So, if you were to try something different tomorrow, you would have solid ground to build upon.
What are nonprofit communications fundamentals?
Nonprofit communications fundamentals are essential elements that drive internal and external communications. They are elements that meet the following criteria:
- You always reference them for all communications work
- They guide what you do and how you execute your plans
- They provide context and boundaries that ensure consistent presentation of communications
Therefore, these fundamentals generally include, but are not limited to:
- Current understanding of communications landscape
- Goals and objectives
- Key messaging
- Brand messaging framework
- Guidelines for brand, style, content, editorial etc.
- Documented audience analysis
- Boilerplate copy
- Content repository, such as a story bank
Generally, you will find all or most of these elements in your communications strategy because they each set the context for any communications plans, tactics or campaigns you may do later. In other words, a communications strategy is ultimately what you want to build towards with these fundamentals. However, sometimes that is not possible in the moment. So, starting slowly with key elements can be helpful.
Why should you build your nonprofit communications fundamentals?
Nonprofit communications is like sports: In order to be great at it, you must master the fundamentals. For a sport like basketball, you need to understand basic ball-handling techniques, positions on the court, common defensive plays and how each position supports the team. You have to master the fundamentals to build approaches and strategies that make your chances of winning more likely. Similarly, for a capacity-building function like communications, you must understand the components of successful communication. You need to understand how they work individually and together to effectively and successfully achieve your objectives and goals.
Every organization has different reasons for starting with fundamentals. Perhaps one or more of the following is happening:
- A new strategic direction
- You’re trying to align your communications with 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 gather the building blocks for successful communication while you sort things out.
Here are some of the benefits of focusing on fundamentals first:
- You build a solid foundation that allows you to try new things easily and with confidence
- You avoid being overwhelmed by organizational growth
- You get to work at a pace that reflects your time, budget and resources
- It’s easier to get buy-in about new ideas from senior leadership
- You gain an invaluable amount of clarity
How do I get started building my nonprofit communications fundamentals?
People who have experience building 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 you can start building right now. My suggestion is to read over all of them and do them in order. Building anything requires structure and order. This is no different, especially because there will be overlap.
1. Understand your current communications by conducting an analysis of your communications landscape
It’s a good idea to conduct an analysis of your current situation in terms of communications. The technical term for this action is called a communications audit. You are auditing your communications for a variety of things, such as channels you use, content you share, how your communications support your goals and objectives, etc. You’ll also evaluate your current situation for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, a process that is called a SWOT analysis.
You want to be thorough here so that you’re working with complete confidence that you understand your situation. If a communications audit sounds too overwhelming right now, start small with just a SWOT analysis and then revisit doing the audit later on.
Starting with a communications audit will help inform your next steps and avoid headaches. 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.
2. Monitor and analyze your audiences and build audience personas
While understanding your audience is fundamental to all parts of your communications, it’s important that this process of getting to know the audience is recorded and documented. Generally, nonprofit professionals call this an audience analysis. You are analyzing your audiences across many contexts, such as beliefs, attitudes, demographics, challenges, desires etc. You’ll also evaluate how these audiences engage with your brand online and offline. You want enough information to build what’s called audience personas, which are exemplar representations of your audiences. These personas help you align what you’re doing with communications and how your audiences may respond to your efforts. In other words, audience personas provide clarity and guide alignment between your communications efforts and your audience. There are also empathy maps and a variety of customer journey maps that could also be helpful at this stage.
Without knowing this information, you may end up using strategies, tactics and tools to reach your audience that don’t work anymore. Furthermore, you may end up discouraging your audiences from engaging with your brand as a result of misunderstanding what they want and need in the first place. Worse, you won’t know why that’s happening.
Monitoring and analyzing your audiences will help you identify themes and patterns that you can use to tailor your communications efforts. Additionally, it will help you prioritize the right efforts. If that sounds a bit too overwhelming right now or beyond your capacity, take a look at your website’s backend analytics first. 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’re prepared to understand who is engaging with your work.
3. Develop guidelines for your content, brand and editorial style by analyzing and evaluating your brand in bite-sized pieces
Through communications activities, you represent your brand in numerous ways. In order to grow your brand and seize the possibilities that come with that growth, you must be consistent. Consistency is the key to brand engagement, brand loyalty and brand visibility. Each of these brand-related items share one thing in common: Messaging. They each use messaging to accomplish whatever they are intended to accomplish. Messaging is meant to be repeated. In order for that repetition to be creative yet clear, there must be guidelines.
What do guidelines do?
These guidelines should support your organization’s overall strategic direction, mission, vision and goals because they, too, include messaging that is meant to be repeated. It follows that all of these things should also be aligned so that the overarching messaging is just as clear. Without that kind of alignment, you risk investing in communications efforts that simply don’t help you. That investment could cost your budget, time and resources. 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 be.
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. You are looking at how you use language, content, visuals, etc. to communicate messaging about your brand. To be transparent, this is not a process you want to rush. So, my suggestion is to do a little bit at a time. Perhaps start with the home base channel for your communications, which is most likely your website, and do a few pages at a time.
4. Develop your key messaging by determining your organization’s positioning, brand identity, and personality
Key messaging represents the messaging I referred to in the previous step. It’s all about the core messaging that your organization must communicate at all times to ensure brand consistency. Key messaging is fundamental because it is the frame through which you should develop your brand positioning and how your organization communicates with its audiences. Without it, you risk inconsistencies with your brand that may take a while to fix.
The way to clarify your key messaging is to 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 they share, work they do and common taglines or messages they communicate.
You want to figure this out by taking your understanding of these components (i.e., the findings from your analysis of brand positioning, personality and identity) and transforming them into messaging that can be repeated and repurposed. This is the key to creating content that resonates and encourages engagement from your audiences. Figure these things out slowly and carefully so that everything that may follow is in alignment with it. If this seems really overwhelming, do a little at a time.
5. Develop a content repository by auditing, updating and strengthening your existing content
This step is a sort of two-in-one step because you’re repeating the first step of this process with the purpose of completing the last step. Except, in this situation, you are focused on content because you have other fundamentals to help you. All nonprofits need content to share messages, ideas and general information with their respective audiences. However, developing a high volume of content is a challenge across the sector. In fact, I would argue that many nonprofit professionals would say that it is a massive pain point due to resource limitations. I want to complicate this notion a bit and mention that creating content can also be a massive pain point due to a lack of strategy. Your content also needs a strategy!
To get there, it’s important to look at what you already have and see if you can reuse it. However, you’ve got to approach this action systematically. Therefore, you want to audit your content against the organizational goals and messaging guidelines you now have, update it against the editorial guidelines you have created and then strengthen it through strategic tactics such as content repurposing. If you keep at this system, you could create a content repository that could help you increase your organization’s content output without straining your resources.
An example of this sort of system is a story bank. A story bank is a systematic way of collecting, building, storing and sharing stories on a consistent basis. 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. Talk to people who use your organization or who are impacted by its work. Also, look at your online reviews, responses to newsletters and comments on your social media channels. 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.
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 else 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. 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.
Jean Boampong is a Nonprofit Copywriter and Strategist based in Toronto, Ontario. She helps nonprofits, charities and social cause businesses build brand consistency through compelling content that communicates impact, strategic communications that enhance marketing tactics and thought leadership that tells the right story. With 10+ years working on the frontlines and behind the scenes in the nonprofit sector, she remains committed to her mission: To drive social good through the power of storytelling. You can find her work, portfolio and services on her website.