A friend recently did some pro bono work for a nonprofit. Since she had no experience in the social sector but had tonnes of it in the communications space, she decided to lend these skills to the nonprofit. After all, she thought, if the organisation is doing good work, it must have great stories to tell. It’s just a matter of helping them identify the stories and putting them out on appropriate platforms.
Turns out it was easier said than done.
As they get sucked into the business of running programmes, managing people and raising funds, most nonprofits, especially the smaller ones, often let communications drop lower down in their list of priorities. Thus, countless stories that could have helped stakeholders understand and appreciate their work, go untold.
Related article: Communications 101: Talking about your nonprofit
While the best time to start is right at the beginning, it’s never too late to put your nonprofit’s communications in order. Whether you are a new non-profit or a small non-profit stretched for resources, there are a few basic things you must check off the list to succeed with your communications.
Count communications in
Factor in adequate resources for communications when you work on your business plan, fundraising budgets and hiring strategy. Whether you decide to create an in-house team or hire external resources, make sure you create a place for communications—and an important one—in your organisation. Let it not be an afterthought.
Related article: If a report is published and no one reads it, did it really happen?
Have a plan
Once you have decided to allocate resources, have a plan in place. The best way to go about it would be to link your communications to the programme goals. So if you have a certain set of goals for a given timeframe, your communications strategy must be designed to help you to achieve those goals.
Here are a few things to consider:
Give time and thought
It is easy to delegate the communications responsibility to a team member/ consultant and let them figure out what next while you get back into programme mode. Not committing time and thought to your communications translates into sub-optimal efforts and poor results.
[quote]Not committing time and thought to your communications translates into sub-optimal efforts and poor results.[/quote]
Be there for your communications team when they need your guidance. Create an organisational culture that enables meaningful cross-functional conversations. Encourage your programme, fundraising, research and M&E teams to appreciate the role of communication in your programme’s success so that they get into the habit of sharing important insights with the story-tellers in your organisation.
It is important to put in place processes for transfer of knowledge to your communications team. It is worth scheduling periodical offline sessions that demystify the programme achievements so as to allow the communicators to create compelling, customised content for various stakeholder groups.
Build the story inside
All your employees know your mission statement, but how many really understand it? Invest time to educate your employees on what you are out to achieve. Let them know the impact their work can have on the community. And let them have a clear, consistent answer to that frequently asked question: “But what exactly do you do?”
That report your research team put together recently—it would be a great idea if you can spare someone from your team to interpret the key insights trapped in numbers and jargon, to make the report truly accessible. The closer your employees feel to the organisation’s mission and achievements, the stronger will be their engagement with the programme and their motivation to excel.
To sum up, if you acknowledge its importance to your organisation and are willing to dedicate some time and plenty of commitment, communications need not be the challenge it appears to be. And it can work wonders for you.