A well-conceived communications plan is mission-focused and goal-driven. For nonprofits, it also serves as a cohesive roadmap that can be shared with everyone from the programming team to the development department to ensure a greater synergy between marketing/communications and other facets of the organization. And, it can be an integral asset for ensuring alignment between communications and an organization’s overall strategic plan.
When embarking upon the communications planning process, it’s important to ensure the right parties are at the planning table. While this will undoubtedly look different for every nonprofit, a few folks to consider including are the executive director/CEO, any board members with a marketing/communications background, willing members of the development department and a representative from the HR team.
Now, let’s get started.
Communications Goals: What Is Your Organization Trying to Accomplish?
In many instances, there will be synergy between the goals outlined in a nonprofit’s strategic plan and its communications objectives. Additionally, nonprofits often have educational goals they are looking to achieve in support of everything from recruiting program participants to attracting new donors and funders.
While some, if not many, of the communications goals that are set forth may be positive and proactive, nonprofits often face the need, depending on their mission, to manage negative press and manage damaging misconceptions. Regardless of whether these challenges stem from lack of targeted awareness and education, competitive threats or past crises, reputation management and damage mitigation goals are important and should not be overlooked during the goal-setting process.
Lastly, as you begin setting the goals for your nonprofit communications plan, ensure the objectives you are outlining are appropriately specific and can be measured accordingly. Nearly every nonprofit wants to increase awareness, but setting a specific numeric benchmark for that objective can make the evaluation process a lot clearer.
Target Audiences: Who Are You Talking To?
Primary. Secondary. Tertiary. And, of course, unintended. Taking the time to carefully define your nonprofit’s audiences is an investment in ensuring communications are tailored appropriately and delivered through the mediums most likely to reach each specific audience. And, while identifying who you are talking to can be relatively straight forward, defining unintended audiences can be a bit more complicated.
So, who are we talking about when we say unintended audiences? The answer to this question varies widely depending on the mission, vision and clients of the organization. For example, if you are an organization supporting parents of teens, you want your messaging to resonate with the intended recipient – but you also don’t want to foster negative perceptions of your organization among the teens themselves. Similarly, organizations that deal with addiction, mental illness and other complex needs must delicately balance advocacy, education and compassionate support for those whom they serve directly with the informational needs of other audiences.
Taking the time to understand how messaging may negatively influence an unintended audience’s perception and/or deter them from seeking services from an organization, can only strengthen a nonprofit’s overall communications campaign and optimize its ability to make a positive and lasting impact.
Now that we’ve talked a little bit about unintended audiences, let take a moment to focus on external vs. internal audiences. While external audiences, such as donors, media, community leaders, prospective funders, policy makers, strategic partners, referral sources, and others are important audiences to remain in front of on an ongoing basis, internal audiences should also be prioritized. Staff and board members are brand ambassadors and can be highly influential. Ensuring they are well-informed about what is happening within the organization is key for successful and consistent articulation of mission, vision, values and impact.
Key Message Points: What Are You Telling Them?
With many departments, programs and organizational facets to showcase, establishing a strategic messaging hierarchy can be a complicated process. It is often helpful to identify a set of global message points and then establish audience-specific supporting message points. Remember, every audience’s information needs are unique, and you should lead with the information that is most salient to each.
When crafting your nonprofit’s messaging hierarchy, also consider the following:
- Lead with the “need to know” and follow it with the “nice to know”
- Simplify as much as possible (the shorter and clearer the messages, the easier for spokespersons to relay and key audiences to digest)
- Be mindful of messaging that is best supported by visuals – you won’t always have the benefit of including graphics
- Use data to quantify need, impact, growth, etc., when possible
- Be strategic about setting yourself apart from the competition
- Prioritize repetition (it typically takes someone hearing a message seven times for them to remember it and take action) – but avoid redundancy
While some messaging is foundational or evergreen, other messages are time-sensitive, event-specific or may have a seasonality to them. Documenting all of the known – and anticipated – messaging in one place can help to ensure consistency while preventing key points from unintentionally being overlooked.
Tactics: How Are You Going to Get Your Key Messages Across?
With a nearly limitless list of communication tools to choose from, ensuring your selections are audience-driven is paramount. One also can’t overlook the skills and resources available to execute the program, which may also make certain communication channels more – or less – viable. And, while it can be tempting to adopt the newest social tools and emerging communication mediums, spreading oneself too thin can unintentionally diminish impact.
When developing a list of tactics to execute your communications plan prioritize those which are most popular among target audiences and best suited to the assets and resources available. While video may be an appealing avenue for storytelling, if you have limited bandwidth for production and minimal editing skills, it may not be the most realistic approach.
Implementation Timeline: When is it Going to Happen?
Setting a realistic timeline for executing a nonprofit communications plan is key. Consistency is an integral part of an effective communications program, so implementation timelines must be mindful of resources and bandwidth. They also must consider major events like signature fundraisers, milestone anniversaries, and year end giving campaigns, among other notable events.
When crafting an implementation timeline for your nonprofit communications plan, consider the following:
- Use any data-driven insights available from audience surveys and focus groups to help inform timing (e.g. if donors said quarterly communication is adequate, follow that pattern)
- Build in some wiggle room
- Put placeholders in for items with anticipated, but not confirmed, execution dates so as not to lose sight of them
- Align relevant communication activities with parent organizations, partners and key funders, as needed
- Include extra lead time for approvals, printing, mailing, etc.
While having a communications timeline in place helps to provide a road map, new opportunities arise, priorities change and resources shift. The ability to be agile and pivot when needed is crucial.
Roles & Responsibilities: Putting Messages and Ideas into Action
Transitioning a communications strategy from the planning phase to successful execution requires clarity around who is responsible for what. It also requires a clear understanding of any assets needed, processes to go through and approvals that must be secured. If your organization is celebrating a major milestone anniversary and you need to interview founding board members, track down photos from the early days and create a timeline of historical accomplishments, knowing who is sourcing the content, how long it will take to turn research into marketing, and what the approval process will look like are all vitally important. Not only do they impact the timelines for planning, creation and execution, they involve multiple parties who likely have other responsibilities beyond supporting communications.
Budget
While this isn’t the money for your ad plan or the budget for fundraising campaigns, there are associated costs. Will you be using direct mail for new client acquisition? Is there an SMS tool that could streamline internal communications? Do you need to switch email marketing platforms? Do you want to allocate a nominal budget to boosting Meta posts to help more of the people who are already following you to see your content? These are just a few of the costs you may need to account for.
Evaluation & KPIs: How will Your Measure Success?
First and foremost, don’t wait until the end of the year to measure the impact of your nonprofit’s communication plan for the first time. Measuring impact on an ongoing basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.) can help to ensure time and resources are being allocated to the communication channels that are making the greatest impact on your nonprofit’s communications goals.
If you notice a significant difference in how various communication channels are performing, it is prudent to make slight tweaks to the approach before abandoning a channel entirely. Everything from the type of content to the time it is shared to the visuals that accompany it impact how a communication performs.
A Note About Crisis Communications:
Few like to think about it, let alone talk about it. But we’d be remiss in overlooking this very important aspect of the communications planning process. Taking the time to develop a comprehensive crisis communications plan for your nonprofit is an investment in preparedness and reputation management. From ensuring appropriate protocols for client management are in place to defining a clear process for outbound communications, crisis communications plans can help to bring some level of order to times of discomfort and uncertainty.
At a base level, every nonprofit should be aware of the potential crises it could experience and which are mostly likely to occur. With that knowledge in hand, taking the time to understand the level of damage or disaster associated with each is key.
Developing a comprehensive communications plan for your nonprofit is a powerful step towards ensuring consistency and cohesiveness across all communications. In addition to solidifying key message points, it can help to control the flow of information during volatile times and put protocols in place to help limit the spread of misinformation.
What to Do When Things Don’t Go as Planned
Impactful nonprofit communications are both an art and a science. And, they are most effective when executed in coordination with the diverse activities and events happening within an organization. With that said, even the best plans are subject to change. Whether a press release didn’t resonate with the press or a fundraising campaign didn’t engage as many donors as anticipated, it is better to revisit and refine than to retrack immediately. There are so many factors that impact the effectiveness of a communications campaign – and some of them are beyond an organization’s control.
If your organization is going to repackage a story angle, adjust the timing of fundraising appeal, shift an event timeline, etc. be mindful of controlling as many variables as possible. In order to know what change(s) made an impact, it is helpful to isolate variables. That is to say, if you change the headline on the eblast, send it on a different day of the week, deploy it 10-hours later in the day than you typically do, use different imagery, employ a more accessible design, and broaden the distribution list, it is going to be hard to definitively say what change was most impactful. However, tweaking one variable at a time – such as doing an A/B test with subject lines – can lend itself to a much simpler evaluation process.
Investing resources in building a nonprofit communications plan that is research-informed, audience-centric and aligned with a strategic plan/organizational goals, is time and money well spent. With a clear, comprehensive roadmap in place a nonprofit is well-equipped to maintain trust among existing audiences, grow its share of voice and engage new stakeholders.
