“There’s no there there.” ~ Gertrude Stein The same is true with many nonprofit communications strategies. There’s no strategy in the strategy! Watch today’s Facebook video for an explanation and some next steps. Is Your Nonprofit Communications Strategy Missing the Actual Strategy? You have a lot of goals and tactics in your communications plan, but where's…
We’ve rebooted the CALM not BUSY Book Club this week, and I would love for more people to join us! Instead of treating the book club like a traditional reading club, we are focusing on how you apply #CALMnotBUSY in the real world. Each week, I’m posting a challenging scenario based on real stories from…
In previous posts, I’ve shared with you the twelve most common nonprofit marketing and communications goals and the twelve most common nonprofit marketing and communications strategies. Today let’s talk about the types of objectives you should have in your communications plan. Objectives are the SMART steps you take to achieve a strategy, and at Nonprofit Marketing…
If you are on Instagram or Pinterest at all, you can’t help but run into a lot of hygge-inspired photography. (The photo at the top of this post isn’t mine, but the smaller ones below are.) Hygge is the Danish concept of coziness, comfort, warmth, and charm that gets Danes through the long, cold, dark winters. It’s…
Here’s another quick peek at the data coming in for the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report (take the survey here). This data could change, so if you are reading this after mid-January 2019, download the full report. For the first time, we asked about specific communications strategies. Not goals, not tactics, but strategies. Of our…
About 100 people have taken the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Survey to date (we like to hear from 1,000 – take the survey here). One of the new questions we asked is: “Which format is your nonprofit most likely to use for its next annual report? Please pick the primary format, even if you will…
You set goals, like these twelve communications goals for nonprofits, including community engagement, raising awareness of issues, and fundraising. And every day you manage tactical communications channels like email, social media, print marketing, PR and more. But what’s in the middle? What connects that tactical work to the larger goals? The answer is Communications or…
If you aren’t following Marketoonist by Tom Fishburne, you are missing out. His recent cartoons on Digital Transformation are perfect for so many nonprofits. There’s the one about the virtual meeting on digital transformation where the tech doesn’t work and someone asks for a fax. And the one where the boss talks about how important…
I just finished up our two-part webinar series on how to measure the effectiveness of your communications work. (If you missed it, All-Access Pass Holders get access to the recordings). Part of the challenge with answering the “what should we measure” and “what numbers should I pay attention to” questions for nonprofits is that it…
In early November, we’ll open up the survey for the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. We’ll repeat a lot of questions from previous surveys to expand our “trends over time” data. For example, we’ll be asking about communication team salaries, sizes, and budgets communications effectiveness how communicators spend their time communications frequency in different channels…
Nonprofits love Canva for creating quick, good-looking graphics. Don’t you wish there was something just as quick and easy for video? I know I do . . . Yes, I have video editing software, but sometimes it’s overkill and takes too long to work through. I thought there had to be something much easier by…
No doubt, you’ve struggled with some of these situations before: Program staff who are supposed to be reviewing for accuracy instead want to argue with your punctuation choices. Your executive director pulls the plug on an appeal letter right before the package is supposed to go to print because “it doesn’t sound like me.” Five…
