5 Strategies to Guard Your To-Do List from What Doesn’t Belong
Today I presented the first in a two-part webinar series on streamlining your communications workflow. We focused on five strategies for managing what happens to ideas, suggestions, and other potential assignments BEFORE they make it on to your to-do list. After talking about each strategy, I polled participants about how easy they thought it would be to implement. Let’s go from easiest to hardest. Using a Creative Brief We...
My Five Rules for Repurposing Your Content #npcomm Style
Repurposing your content is essential to your success. You don’t have enough time to create original content constantly, and your community needs to hear your messages and calls to action in clear and consistent ways over and over anyway. Repurposing content makes sense, and it works! I like simple rules. So I created five of them to help guide your repurposing strategy. To make them even easier to remember, they are all...
Simple Rules, Part II: How to Get Better #NpComm Work Done Faster
Yesterday I introduced you to some of the concepts from Donald Sull’s and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt’s Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (Amazon). We looked at three kinds of simple rules that provide frameworks for making better decisions: Boundary Rules, Prioritizing Rules and Stopping Rules. Today, let’s look at three more, this time related to work processes, or how to do things better. They are...
Getting Other People to Meet Your Deadlines
It’s a common frustration for nonprofit communications directors who are trying to work collaboratively with staff: getting people to meet their deadlines. This is a hard first step, but one that’s essential: If you want someone to meet your deadlines, they have to believe it’s important to do so. And that means that they understand the strategic role of communications for your organization, and how great communications are essential...
How to Streamline Your Review Process and Publish Faster
Getting great results from your communications work is often contingent on timing. It needs to get out the door or online quickly to be relevant. But a painful review and approval process can cripple your creative work, no matter how good it is. We’ve all been there . . . You missed a great opportunity to comment on breaking news and get your organization quoted in a major paper, because you couldn’t get the talking points approved in...
Creative Brief Questions: What’s Included in Yours?
A creative brief is a quick worksheet that you fill out before you get started on any significant piece of communications work. You can also use a creative brief as a mini-strategy for how you’ll use a particular social media channel (e.g. how is what we do on Facebook different from Twitter?). Using a creative brief forces you to consider important questions before you get started. It’s also a wonderful collaboration tool...