Can you help me answer this question?

“My name is Matt Silva, and I work for a nonprofit based in San Francisco called EARN. At EARN, we give low-income working families the power to create prosperity for generations. I’m a member of EARN’s first-ever communications team, and we’re thinking strategically about what roles and functions we’ll need to fill for the coming year.

I was wondering if you’d be willing to share any insights or resources into how best to setup a communications team at a nonprofit. We love the best practices you’ve shared, and are now looking for information related to the actual positions a nonprofit communications team should fill, and what each of those roles should be doing.

Right now, we’re two full-time people with a half-time Director (she shares her time with Development). I think what we’re finding is that, like most organizations, PR, branding, marketing, and online engagement (including social media) will all be important functions for us. Perhaps a better way to frame my question is this: what skill sets do you think a two- to three-person team should have?

Any help would be much appreciated.”

Great question, Matt, and one I know a lot of you have opinions about! Here’s my take . . .

Naturally, the actual structure of a communications team is going to vary based not only on the needs and goals of the organization, but on what actual team members are good at and what they themselves enjoy doing.

Here’s one way to approach your questions. I’ve listed what I consider to be three essential skills/roles for a marketing team for long-term, sustainable success.

I’m not talking about tactical skills/roles (who can best engage supporters on Facebook, who writes the best newsletter headlines), but rather what you as a team need to accomplish.

As you noted, everyone on the team will be responsible for all of these at some basic level, but I believe that each of these items is so important that they demand someone to be assigned as the “lead” staff person. How you mix and match these into specific job descriptions depends on the actual people involved.

Continuously Learning about Your Supporters

Someone should be responsible for actively seeking and capturing information about your target audiences and then regularly sharing the trends with the team. This is absolutely essential to getting your messages right and picking the right communications channels.

This can include everything from what we often call “listening” in social media, to doing surveys and focus groups throughout the year, to making sure that your databases are set up to easily segment your mailing lists, to watching analytics on your website, email marketing, Facebook, etc.

While another team member may be closer to Facebook Insights on a daily basis, for example, the lead for this particular role would be the person who looks for the trends over time, and compares those to data from other sources. Because this person will be putting different pieces of the puzzle together, he or she may also be the best one to identify ways to tap into your social capital (e.g. who are your biggest fans, and how can you better tap into their networks).

Ensuring Your Messaging is Both Consistent and Responsive

While you should decide as a team what your key messages and calls to action are during any given period (e.g. over a campaign or story arc of a few weeks or months), it’s helpful to have someone tasked with keeping the team “on message” but — and equally importantly — watching for good times to redirect your messaging so that you can highly responsive to breaking news or hot conversations in your space.

It’s a delicate balancing act: Communicating consistently over time so that your core messages and calls to action get through, but being flexible enough to respond to what’s happening around you (including newsjacking, which I’ll talk about in a later post). It’s too easy for individuals to stray off message, and to miss real-time opportunities to connect to what people are already talking about, which is why I think it’s best to give someone this responsibility directly.

Managing the Content Creation and Delivery Process

Everyone on the team will be creating content, and probably delivering the content too (posting to Twitter, setting up bulk email messages, giving in-person presentations). But one person needs to be responsible for the bird’s eye view of the process and the editorial calendar to ensure that the what, when, who, where, how and why of communications makes sense to the people on the receiving end.

Are your supporters or clients getting the right messages at the right times in the right places over weeks and months? Communications teams often get so caught up (and head down) in producing and sending out all the stuff on the day’s or week’s to-do list that they fail to see how it all fits together over time. Providing that focus — and helping other team members adjust as needed — should be someone’s specific responsibility.

These three roles are highly interrelated, which is why I think it’s good to distribute them among different staff. It will force more strategic conversations to take place regularly, as you are feeding each other information and holding each other accountable.

What Do You Think?

What do you think of Matt’s question and my answer? I’m also happy to create a more specific tactical list of job responsibilities if that would be helpful. But I do believe these roles are incredibly important and often overlooked. Failure to address these responsibilities leads to overworked, and under-performing, teams.

Please add your voice to the comments . . . if you reading this in your inbox or feed reader, click over to the blog to participate in the conversation.

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I’ve always thought it would be fun to organize a virtual book club, but it sounded like too much work. And I know there are other nonprofit book clubs out there. So, I’m going to do it the lazy way.

When I am reading a book that I think nonprofit marketers and fundraisers would enjoy, I’ll let you know. If you want to read it too, you can let me know. Then when I finish the book (or when enough of you have said, “Hey, we finished the book already. Read faster!”), I’ll organize a Twitter chat or conference call about it.

Sound like a (loose-knit) plan?

Here is the first book selection: Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality (Amazon link) by Scott Belsky.

Scott’s premise is that great ideas aren’t enough. Creativity isn’t enough. It’s all about the execution. And that execution is about much more than time management and having your act together (like some people would have you believe.)

His formula for making ideas happen = Ideas + Organization + Communal Forces + Leadership Capability. It’s those last two that I’m most interested in, and that I think can be most powerful in getting some really creative stuff to happen with your nonprofit marketing.

That, and the second paragraph of the intro, are what makes me think this is a good book for you:

“This book aims to take pie-in-the-sky notions of how the creative process unfolds and bring them down to earth. Creative people are known for winging it: improvising and action on intuition is, in some way, the haloed essence of what we do and who we are. However, when we closely analyze how the most successful and productive creatives, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople truly make ideas happen, it turns out the ‘having the idea’ is just a small part of the process, perhaps only 1 percent of the journey.”

I just read the sample on my Kindle on the plane yesterday and downloaded the whole book, so I’m only one chapter in.

Want to read with me?

Leave a comment on this blog post or tweet me or leave a comment on Facebook or email me.

P.S. If you want to read a great book that embraces “winging it” decision-making, check out Little Bets (Amazon link). I reviewed it here.

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Are you giving yourself time away from your work problems so that you can solve them more creatively? Yes, you need to stop thinking about them in order to actually get anything creative to happen.

It’s true. And that means you need to build downtime into your work day. Unfortunately, that’s harder and harder to come by because of all the devices we carry around and the availability of wireless hotspots that make us feel like we need to be connected. That’s the message in this article I highly recommend called What Happened To Downtime? The Extinction Of Deep Thinking And Sacred Space.

I’m a prime example, right now. I often like to stare out the window on planes and get some of that problem solving done while in flight.

But today, I’m behind on a few things. So here I sit in 16F on my way to the Philanthropy Midwest conference, connected to the wireless on the plane, working through the to-do list. But I won’t be tomorrow night on the way home. I’m reserving that for staring into space and seeing what kind of bright ideas pop as a result.

How can you build more space for deep and creative thinking into your work life? Share your ideas in the comments.

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Geri Stengel

Where will your organization find its next communications, marketing, or development director? In this guest post by Geri Stengel, get some tips on how to use LinkedIn to find the right candidates. Looking for a new job? Take note too!   ~Kivi

Guest Post by Geri Stengel, President of Ventureneer

Two recent studies caught my attention because they point out a looming problem for nonprofits.

Idealist.org’s Bouncing Back? found that 42% of nonprofits are planning to hire staff, from program services staff to marketing, from fundraising to IT. Nonprofit HR Solutions found that few nonprofits put aside money for hiring, which fits with another sad fact found by Idealist: most nonprofits don’t have a dedicated HR staff.

For those engaged in nonprofit marketing, it’s noteworthy that fundraising and communication staff rank high in both need and difficulty to recruit. The increasing importance of online marketing may increase the need for marketing staff to maintain social media visibility.

Recruitment needed at all levels and no budget to do so: Now that’s a problem.

But I’m happy to report that a solution is at hand: social recruiting, especially LinkedIn. Believe it or not, LinkedIn can reduce the time and money needed to fill any position from communications to IT, from front-line service delivery staff to experienced social media staff.

LinkedIn Recruiter is the platform’s primary recruiting tool. Using it is a two-part process. 

The first part is finding candidates for the jobs you need to fill.

The LinkedIn database allows you to search for people with the skills and experience you want as well as interest in your mission. You can fine-tune that search by geographic area, by education level, positions held or size of organization. Looking for someone who has experience using Facebook and YouTube as marketing tools? Use those keywords as your search terms.

Recruiter expands your reach, allows you to pinpoint exactly what you are looking for, gives you tools to track the progress of contacts and interviews, and the ability to contact candidates easily through LinkedIn. You’ll even get links to passive candidates, those not actively looking for a new position but who may be ideal for the positions.

In other words, it’s a lot like hiring a search firm but is costs much less. LinkedIn has a whole section devoted to Nonprofit Solutions and will be giving discounts on recruiting tools to eligible nonprofits.

Part two of social recruiting using LinkedIn is how you look to the candidates.

It’s not just about recruiting the best candidates. You also want to ensure that the person you want wants you. You must put your best foot forward, especially if you are recruiting management level staff.

Candidates will want access to information about your company, its leaders, and its mission. Make that information easy to find, vibrant, and inviting.

Start with a profile for the organization. Encourage your top staff and board members to keep their profiles up to date and personal. The personality and accomplishments of your organization will be important as candidates decide whether to respond to your invitation for an interview.

If those studies I mentioned give you pause, take an hour out on Oct. 13 to learn more about LinkedIn’s social recruiting tools in Ventureneer’s free webinar How to Use LinkedIn for Nonprofit Staff Recruitment. It’s the first step in avoiding a recruiting crisis in 2012.

Geri Stengel is founder and president of Ventureneer.com, which connects nonprofit execs, social entrepreneurs, and socially responsible small business owners with the knowledge they need to make the world a better place and to thrive as sustainable organizations. Her blog, Vistas, provides insights, strategies, techniques, and solutions that help values-driven businesses realize their social-change missions.

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It’s a big nonprofit world, and it can get a little overwhelming and intense, especially if you work in a small nonprofit.

That’s why I was really intrigued when Darian Rodriguez Heyman, former Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation, told me he was bringing together 50 of the sector’s leading experts to create the newly released guide book, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals (Amazon). I gladly agreed to write the chapter on nonprofit newsletters.

This book is a comprehensive, incredibly useful how-to manual and resource guide that features practical insights and tips, and provides easy to implement solutions for organizations seeking to meet mission and maximize impact. Darian says you can think of it as “your compass for the social sector.”

I think it’s a great companion to my book for those of you who want a bigger perspective on nonprofit management, beyond marketing. Everything you need to launch, lead, and effectively grow your nonprofit is in this book, with chapters on individual, corporate, and foundation fundraising; marketing and social media; board and volunteer engagement; lobbying and advocacy; and more.

Contributors include names you’ll recognize from our field including Beth Kanter and Katya Andresen. All of us were told to write in a no-nonsense, “by practitioners-for practitioners” style, so if you appreciate my writing, I think you’ll really appreciate this book. I know I can’t wait to read a bunch of the chapters myself!

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Join Nancy Schwartz and me for a free webinar on setting your marketing goals.

When Nancy Schwartz and I first put our heads together on how to team up to help nonprofits strengthen their marketing impact, marketing planning was at the top of our list.

We want to help you see how, by simply taking a little time to set some clear marketing goals, you can drastically increase your impact and build leadership support for your marketing plan. Good goals are the first crucial step towards an ambitious but fully-doable marketing plan.

To help you see what we mean, we’ve decided to host a free 30-minute webinar where you’ll learn how to set the big-picture marketing goals that get you where you want to go.

Setting Your Marketing Goals to Increase Your Impact

A Free Webinar with Kivi Leroux Miller and Nancy Schwartz

Monday, May 2, 2011
3:00 – 3:30 pm ET (12:00 – 12:30 pm PT)

We’ve heard so many of you say that your marketing isn’t all it could be. And worse, you don’t know where to start to fix it. You’re frustrated by how hard you’re working without generating the results you expect and your organization needs.  So we’ve decided to show you exactly where to start, with setting your goals, in this free 30-minute webinar. Here is your chance to stop spinning your wheels and to change your course.

You’ll leave the webinar with

• Sharply-defined marketing goals ideal for sharing with leadership and colleagues to build support and understanding, and increasing your marketing budget.
• A clear destination for your marketing work going forward, so you can prioritize quickly and effectively.
• Understanding of your next steps — how to build out your marketing plan from your defined goals.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.

Last week, Nancy Schwartz, Katya Andresen, Sarah Durham and I hosted a meetup for nonprofit marketing and fundraising folks attending the Nonprofit Technology Conference in DC. This is our third year hosting the event, and it’s getting bigger every year.  (Note to NTEN: Give us a bigger room, and one NOT next to others, because when 300 people are networking, it’s LOUD.)

Sketches from the Meetup by Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer

This year, our theme was dealing with competing priorities and finding the right balance when there’s always too much to do. We decided to ask participants to introduce themselves to two people they didn’t know, and then to work together on two assignments:

1) Writing down a tip or tool they use to make their work lives more manageable.

2) Writing down a question about juggling marketing priorities.

We then came back together and worked through both the tips and the questions. Katya did a great job creating a summary of the workshop on the fly:

Here are some other summaries of the event from Katya Andresen, Nancy Schwartz, and Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer (who also sketched the four of us!), and Twitter.

P.S. Here are some of our upcoming webinars at Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com . . . if this post appealed to you, check out April 12 in particular!

March 24: Telling Powerful Stories about Everyday People

March 30: Storytelling for Fundraisers

April 7: Rethinking Your Nonprofit Newsletter: Making It More Relevant for Today

April 12: Time and Sanity Savers for the Overwhelmed Nonprofit Marketer

April 28: Making the Ask: Getting People to Give, Volunteer and More

May 5: Integrating Your Online and Offline Marketing into One Plan that Works

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.

Is your collection of Nonprofit Marketing Guide e-books complete?

When you register for a free membership with our Learning Center, you can download all four of these e-books at no charge:

2011 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report . . . and What It All Means for Your Good Cause

This 22-page report reveals what 780 nonprofits think are the most important (and least important) communications tools for 2011, what scares and excites them, how often they will email and direct mail supporters and more.

25 Metaphors Nonprofits Can Use to Get Their Messages Across – and the Decrepit Dozen to Avoid

This e-book will help you make complicated or foreign messages feel simple and familiar to your supporters by showing you how to use metaphors in your messaging. It includes a simple five-step approach to working with metaphors, including a list of nearly 20 questions you can use to explore a metaphor more fully.

The First 100 Days of Your New Nonprofit Marketing Job

This e-book describes the 100 tasks that you should try to complete within 100 days of starting your new nonprofit marketing job.

The Nonprofit Email Marketing Guide: Seven Steps to Better Email Fundraising and Communications

This e-book, which I wrote for Network for Good, includes everything you need to know to start producing great email communications for your supporters.

Get your free membership today to get access to these e-books.

P.S. Here’s what’s coming up next in our weekly webinar series . . .

January 27: Writing to Raise More Money

February 3: Writing Thank-You Notes That Inspire Future Gifts

February 8: The New & Improved Nonprofit Annual Report

February 16: Social Media Fear Factor: Getting Over What’s Holding You Back

See the Full Webinar Schedule through Mid-March

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I woke up this morning and saw a tweet from Drew at Throwing Light, asking me if I ever deal with information overload. In his own post today, Drew talks about how he blames all the blogs he wants to read for his recent creative slump and explains what he did to overcome. Since I was debating what I wanted to blog about today, I’m seizing this chance to answer Drew’s question. It’s such a common question from nonprofits too that I have several slides on it in my social media presentations.

The first step is to accept that there is waaaaay more good information out there than you can possibly absorb. The second step is to realize that there is no great public punishment coming your way if you don’t absorb it. In fact, as Drew learned, if you try to absorb it all, your punishment is much more likely to be self-inflicted, like Drew’s creative slump.

Then what?

For me, it comes down to two strategies: the Lists and the Lottery.

The Lists

Spend a little time upfront creating lists that help you see the people who history tells you are most likely to having something good to say in the future. I use a custom page at Alltop to keep track of my favorite blogs. I use multiple lists within Twitter and Facebook (both public and private), and columns within Hootsuite (partner link), to parcel out various people and topics. Within those lists, I have a few must-reads (or my primary lists) and everything else (the secondary lists).

Now, list-making in and of itself can consume enormous amounts of time if you let it. Don’t. As you happen across various people who make you pause or think or laugh, add them to a list. Also add people who are good sorters of information themselves. A person may not have all that much original to say themselves, but if they are a good curator or editor, they are just as valuable to me, because they bring really good stuff to my attention that I would have missed otherwise. Don’t feel like you have to categorize every single person you follow on Twitter. That was an early mistake of mine, and I’ve let that go.

I look at these lists first thing in the morning, along with my email box, not because I think it’s the single most important thing to do in the morning, but because it’s an easy task for my sleepy brain to accomplish. I’m not a morning person. I also do it on my Droid X, which is helpful in two ways: first, because I’m usually still slumped in the big comfy chair in my living room, and two because that little screen forces me to look at just one thing at a time — no dozen tabs open at once like on the PC.

I try to take another peek at the must-reads twice more during the day, usually as a mental break in between blocks of my own work. This is where my tagging strategy becomes really important, because I don’t want to get sucked into having to absorb everything at the first moment I see it. This time is meant to be a break, not a whole task itself.

When I do come across something like a blog post that piques my interest, I rarely read the whole thing right then. Instead, I usually tag it. I’m transitioning from Delicious to Diigo for this, but the idea is that I somehow label it so that when I really am ready to think about that topic in more depth, I can go back and actually read it then and think about it.

The Lottery

This is where those secondary lists come in. If I have a few minutes here and there during the day, I go look at those other lists that are interesting, but not musts. I think of it as playing the lottery. Sometimes this skimming produces nothing; other times it produces really great stuff. Others like Beth Kanter call this leaving room for serendipity (which does sound a lot nicer than playing the lottery).  Beth says she’ll be blogging a lot this year about social media time management, so keep Beth on one of your lists!

This is not a perfect process. I’m sure I do, in fact, miss some stuff I wish I had seen. And sure enough, I still end up seeing a lot of things that are completely useless. But overall, I feel like I am seeing enough to keep up with the people and topics that I want to keep up with, and just enough of everything else to allow for some pleasant surprises.

Most importantly, this process lets me get stuff done. I believe I strongly benefit from reading what others are thinking and doing. This morning, and this blog post, are a perfect example. If Drew hadn’t tweeted me about his post, I wouldn’t have written this one today.

You also need to do exactly what Drew did, which is to find that thing — whatever it is — that sets your mind free for awhile. For Drew it was taking pictures of snow-covered statues in downtown Philadelphia. For me it’s often curling up on the couch with a pen and paper in my hand. It’s extremely rare for me to get a brilliant idea at the computer. They almost always come when I’m curled up comfortably somewhere, taking a hot shower, or working out. I know that about myself, so when I’m stuck, I do one of those three things.

It’s your turn. How do you deal with information overload, and what do you do to ensure that you don’t let it bury your own creativity? Please share in the comments.

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The end of one year and the start of another is always a good time to reflect on what’s important, and what’s not.  Sam Davidson has a new book out that will help you do this, while also making you laugh. It’s called 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need (Amazon). I especially loved the sections on “stuff from SkyMall” and “anything belonging to an ex.”

If you don’t know Sam, he is a writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer who believes that the world needs more passionate people. He co-founded Cool People Care and Proof Branding, and lives in Nashville with his wife and young daughter. Sam is also frequently asked to talk with nonprofits about connecting with Generation Y (he’s done a webinar or two for us).  This Gen Xer thinks he’s pretty savvy and wise for his age, and this book proves it.

Sam was kind enough to put a twist on the book title by providing three things that nonprofits don’t need.

A Guest Post by Sam Davidson

Nonprofits are sometimes led to believe that more is better. Certainly, more volunteers, more donors, and more clients served are generally good things. But, when does “more” go too far and become too much? What are nonprofits clamoring to get that they can actually do without?

Here are three things that nonprofits don’t need. Eliminate these items in 2011 and allow yourself to better focus on the work at hand and further your organization’s mission:

1) Bad Advice

Nonprofits, like any organization, can become insular after a while. As such, you need an outside opinion on what you do. Everything from strategic planning to marketing to staff development should be evaluated from time to time by the right person. Don’t fall victim to hiring your board chair’s out-of-work son as a favor (unless he’s got the credentials to give you what you need). And don’t give in to the temptation to rely on the cheapest service provider for any given project. Do your research. See who’s at the top of their game and find out from other organizations how great this consultant is (or isn’t). A few hours researching will be well worth it and you’ll get no bad advice in 2011.

2) Gimmicks

Rest assured, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter are not gimmicks. But using them can be. If 2011 is the year you finally fully embrace all of the new media opportunities in front of you, do so strategically. Using any communications tool haphazardly is a bad idea to begin with. It pays (literally) to be deliberate with how, when, and what you tweet. You’ll have more success if you blog consistently and with a clear purpose. Likewise, if you’re trying to create buzz, contests and promotions can work, but only for a time. Make sure that any stunts or PR events have a strategic tie in to your mission. Anyone can create a diversion; successful organizations create connections with donors, volunteers, staff, and clients. Be intentional in all of your 2011 communications.

3) Solitude

Collaboration continues to pay off for those nonprofits that work with other nonprofits. Whether it’s coming together to pool and share resources or officially merging to better attack a societal problem, partnerships should continue to rise in 2011. Before embarking on an ambitious project – whether it’s a 5k or a capital campaign – see who you can join forces with. Leverage your community’s desire to do good by offering a unique opportunity to help more than just your nonprofit. Teaming up will allow you to save money and to reap better financial rewards. You can’t be territorial, of course, but you may find you won’t need to be. Getting creative with collaboration in the sector and with private businesses could raise your profile and your bottom line.

What else do nonprofits not need? What stood in your way as an organization in 2010 that you want to get rid of in 2011? Share your story in the comments below.

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