Nancy Schwartz - Articles

Your organization’s messages are your primary point of connection with your base. Even if you’re communicating in a way that’s primarily graphic, that graphic should convey those same, carefully-crafted messages.

What this means for your communications impact is vital: If your messages are off, your organization will fail to engage your base. And, without that engagement, there’s no way you’ll succeed in motivating them to act – give, volunteer, register or advocate.

Get a sense of how nonprofit messaging is working, or not, via these initial findings from our current messaging survey.

The State of the Message

Yikes! Nearly three of four nonprofit communicators say that their messages connect with target audiences only somewhat. This indicates a huge opportunity for improvement in 2010.

This story typifies a frequently-cited reason for the failure to connect:

“Our message is quite memorable given the time to explain or show what happens to the animals reared in factory farms. However, we can’t educate the whole world on a one-to-one basis and people generally don’t know or think about these issues. We need short, sharp statements to get the idea across quickly.”

Your Messaging Wish List

Here is your messaging wish list so far. You’d like your organization’s messaging to be more:

• Clear
• Focused
• Concise
• Engaging
• Unique
• Memorable
• Consistent.

That’s pretty much the standard checklist for effective messaging, which tells me the level of your frustration and of your dissatisfaction with the status quo.

These communicators’ picks on what aspect of their messaging they’d change first are sentiments echoed by many respondents:

“We’ve got to get all staff, board members, volunteers and performers speaking the same message to the community and donors. Problem is they all have their own messages.”

“We do so many different things that it is difficult to put it all under one umbrella. A consistently-used tagline that works for all audiences across programs and channels would help.”

What’s Holding Your Messaging Back – The Usual Suspects

You and your communications colleagues share many of the same barriers to improving messaging. Here’s what’s getting in the way of strengthening your messages, via survey responses to date:

• No time to work on messages
• Not an organizational priority
• Audiences are very diverse
• Concerned about expense
• Not familiar with the process/lack of expertise
• Work is too complex.

Here is more of what we’re hearing from the field:

“One of our biggest barriers is confirming strategic goals for the organization or program, so we know what we’re trying to achieve through messaging. In addition, our leadership lacks understanding of the importance of messaging.”

“Time, time, time! So often my day is spent just trying to get the daily tasks done that I don’t have a moment to slow down, focus and take the time to develop an effective message.”

“Funds are prioritized for fundraising, not marketing. Our leadership doesn’t understand how the two are halves of a whole. How can I build that understanding?”

The Potential for Highly Effective Messaging is Strong

These early survey outtakes draw a clear picture of the need for stronger messaging, and what needs to be conquered to get there. It can be done, and we’re going to work hard to help you do so in 2010!

Till then, keep your eyes and ears open for messaging that works (nonprofit or not) and try to identify the secrets to that success. Doing so will give you a significant jump start on your path to powerful messaging.