Communications work is complicated enough as it is. When you aren’t exactly sure who is responsible for what, it gets even more complicated. You can get clarity on important elements of your work processes, like who needs to be consulted and who has the final decision, using a simple roles and responsibilities framework. One popular model is…
That’s the exact question I got at a conference last week, and it’s one I get quite often. You or your team are regularly producing content — in this case, an email newsletter — that you know isn’t any good. Can you stop? Yes, please, for everyone’s sake, stop producing your crappy newsletter. Now…
Patrick Lencioni wisely points out in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (Amazon) that two of the greatest causes for lack of commitment to a project are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty. We often see these two factors hurting the chances for successful collaborations in nonprofit communications. Think about…
If your nonprofit is still doing an e-newsletter over here and doing social media over there, as if they were two totally different projects, you are working way too hard. It’s time to integrate and optimize your e-newsletter and social media strategies. Think about it: for most nonprofits, email and social media are the two…
According to research by Teresa Amabile from the Harvard Business School, your best work days likely include making progress – even if it is just a small win — on work you consider meaningful or important. Amabile calls this the “progress principle.” When she compared her research participants’ best and worst days (defined by…
Communications is a creative and constantly changing field with many different options and choices. Communications team are usually understaffed. Too many ideas and not enough resources to implement them: It’s a perfect storm that can sink your communications strategy if you aren’t careful. Whether those good ideas come flowing in from program staff, board members,…
I’m working on finishing my next book, which will be called “CALM not BUSY: Managing Your Nonprofit’s Communications for Great Results.” It will be out in late May. I’d love to include YOU in the book! I need stories and anecdotes for specific sections in the book. If you can help with any of these…
What questions do you have about nonprofit email marketing? On April 5, 2017 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm Eastern, I’ll answer 30 questions on nonprofit email marketing in 30 minutes during our next free webinar (registration link coming soon!). Now I just need the questions! Got one? Head on over to our Events Chat Page…
We are having some fun with a new quiz tool we are trying, courtesy of Interact. Want to find out your top strength as a nonprofit communications director? Take the Quiz!
In brand-new research for the 2017 edition of the Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, we discovered that four types of communications teams are most prevalent in our sector. While those teams are equally distributed, that’s really where the similarities end. Only two of the team models — Integrated and Centralized — performed well on the…
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…
In their book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (Amazon), Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt define simple rules as “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information.” They help us simplify complex systems and decisions so that we can move more quickly…
