In the survey for the upcoming 2021 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, we asked three questions about the impact of the pandemic on your communications work.

A majority of nonprofits said they did more communications planning (63%) and that the level of internal collaboration on the communications workload went up (57%) as a result of the pandemic.

Only 22% said the level of planning stayed the same, while just 15% said they did less planning than a typical year. Similarly, 33% said the level of collaboration was about the same as a typical year, with 11% saying they saw less collaboration as a result of the pandemic.

We also asked about how the pandemic affected the level of control communicators felt they had over their own workload. While we see the additional planning and collaboration as a positive overall, on this question, we saw some bad news.

Thirty-nine percent said the pandemic meant they had less control over their workload, while 41% said it was about the same as typical year. Only 21% of survey participants said the pandemic gave them more control.

We’ll share more reflections from the survey on the impact of the pandemic on nonprofit communicators in a future post.