Category: messaging

case for support, communications, fundraising, messaging

It’s not me. It’s you.

It happens time and time again: an organization puts forth messages about why its cause is important but it doesn’t get the kind of response it hoped for. It’s bizarre, right? I mean, obviously the work is important. Why else would someone dedicate so much of her time and effort to a cause if it wasn’t important? Why would anyone dedicate his life to it?

The problem isn’t that your cause isn’t important (because it is). The problem is that there are lots of important causes out there.

There are more than 1.1 million nonprofits in the United States, all of them working on important issues. Donors have lots of options for where to put their support – more than they can actually support – and you’re competing against them. So it’s not just why you’re important, but why you’re more important than those other causes.

Yes, this is a somewhat subjective challenge. After all, what’s important to one person may not be to another. But that’s exactly the point. People are different: different opinions, different values, different interests. And the way to show that you’re more important is to appeal to those opinions, values, and interests. You’re talking about why the problem is important to you when you should be talking about why it’s important to your target audience.

Understanding your target audience is critical to crafting effective messages. You need to speak to their values, their interests, their concerns. We often think we have to prove that our cause is important, but it’s more that we have to prove that our cause is important to them. The question to ask yourself isn’t “Why do I care about this?” but rather “Why do they care?” Then, not only will your messages resonate with your audience, but you’ll stand out from the rest of the pack.

Do your messages speak to your audience’s values? How does your organization adopt your audiences’ perspectives? What have you found works best when crafting messages that target a particular audience?

case for support, communications, logic model, messaging

Why you’re not communicating your impact effectively

When organizations talk about their results, they focus on the direct activities they carry out. They talk about meals served, or students taught, or trees planted. This puts the focus on the work they do – their activities and their projects. These are an organization’s outputs: the products they make or the services they provide.

However, the work they do (the “what”) is done for a reason (the “why”). Organizations don’t serve meals and teach students and plant trees just for kicks. They do those things for some desired impact – to make a difference, to solve a problem, to change a system. And a change in the behavior of a system is called an outcome. So outcomes, not outputs, are our desired impact. And outcomes are why people support the work you do: they believe that what you do will actually make a difference and solve a problem.

If you want to communicate your impact to your supporters, you need to start talking in terms of outcomes (changes in the system) rather than outputs (the products or services you provide). Talking about how you’re changing the way things work in the world will be far more compelling – and it will differentiate you from the many others who are still talking about their outputs. Moreover, learning to talk about the outcomes you’re achieving can start shifting the conversation away from output-focused project-specific support to broader support for your organization. It’s a win-win situation: the supporter gets to hear about their desired impact and the organization can solicit support for their cause instead of a specific output.

Yes, measuring impact can be challenging (another topic for another day) but those who monitor and articulate their impact are more effective at building support for their causes. Why? Because at the end of the day, we care about outcomes. After all, it’s why you produce your outputs.

Does your organization talk about its impact in terms of outputs or outcomes? What would it take to talk about your outcomes? Are there challenges to talking about outcomes?

communications, messaging

Want to communicate effectively? Cut the crap.

In a previous post I discussed the importance of understanding your target audience when trying to communicate with them effectively. Equally important is speaking their language.

I’ve spent much of my career in the environmental nonprofit world, where there is no shortage of complex language, jargon, and acronyms. Not surprising, since it’s a field grounded in the natural sciences, with lots of incredibly smart people who received higher degrees from impressive education institutions. It’s a culture of intelligent individuals trained by academia to study and solve complicated and difficult problems. The problem is that the people whose support they want may not be like them.

Sure, their audiences care about the environment, but they may have different backgrounds, different educational training, and different professions. They may not be comfortable with complicated language that’s difficult to decipher, let alone terminology and acronyms they’ve never seen before. Just as you need to understand the interests and values of your target audience, you also need to understand how to communicate with them. So if you want to communicate to them effectively, you need to cut the crap.

That’s right: cut the crap.

What does that mean? It means exactly what you think it does: be clear, be concise, and cut to the chase. Get to the heart of the matter and use simple language so your audience doesn’t have to decode your message. (Simple language doesn’t mean you have to dumb things down – just that you should use common words and syntax to talk about complicated things.) Don’t make it difficult for your audience to understand you, and don’t distract them away from your primary message.

Scientists are notorious for being poor communicators because they’re too smart for their own good – they know a lot and they have their own culture where certain language and terminology is accepted, even expected. But it’s not just scientists with this problem: every organization has its own culture where certain concepts, terms, and acronyms become commonplace. The problem is that when we speak with “outsiders” we tend to still use the same language we use with our colleagues – the language that we are comfortable with, even if our audience is not. But communications isn’t about us. It’s about them.

So what is an organization to do? The first would be to keep internal language in check. Yes, it’s convenient to use short-hand and acronyms for more efficient communication, but again, the more you use that language, the more you’re training yourselves to speak that way with those outside your organization. The second thing is to cut the crap. Review your written communications and make sure you’re communicating simply, clearly, and concisely. Prepare yourself for verbal communications, whether it’s with a funder, a partner, a donor, or anyone else. Keep things simple and to the point.

It may be difficult for you to do at first, but it won’t be difficult for your audience. And that’s the whole point.