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…
We are getting ready for our next Nonprofit Marketing Accelerator – Updating Your Community: Integrating E-Newsletters and Social Media. But before we start integrating your email newsletter with your other communications channels, you first need to answer what is probably the most important question: Does your newsletter have a clear purpose . . . a motivating…
Kristina and I are on the verge of deleting about 10,000 people from our email list here at Nonprofit Marketing Guide. It’s the same exercise we went through last year when we removed about 15,000 people. Since then, several people have asked me to help them better explain why this actually makes sense, especially from a…
Do you wonder if other nonprofit communicators are spending as much time on certain tasks as you? Check out the results from the 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report and see for yourself. Today we are sharing the third and final infographic from the report (here’s the first on communications team size, budget, and salaries and the second…
I’m teaching about editorial calendars a lot this month, and here’s one of the key lessons: Stay strategic while also making room for the unexpected. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. But you do know that something is going to come up that you’ll have to deal with. So you need…
Kathy Powell shared this post with me on Sunday — before Super Bowl LI. It was a heartbreaker for Falcons fans like Kathy. But let’s go back to a more hopeful time Sunday afternoon, when Kathy took some time from pre-game prep to share some ways she saw Atlanta nonprofits capitalize on their team’s success. ~Kivi…
Do you have a hard time getting strategic direction for your communications work out of your management team? Don’t worry – you aren’t alone. It’s a common predicament for communications staff. Your executive director or management team may be too busy to focus on it, or might not understand communications strategy themselves. But that guidance…
Much of our 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report is about effectiveness. For communicators, there are lots of different ways to talk about effectiveness — what it looks like, how to measure it, and how to get more of it out of your team. Today we are sharing our second infographic from the report (here’s the…
You have too much content to create, too many communications channels to manage and too little time for any of it, right? The urgent overtakes the important. Priorities get lost in the chaos. You can’t get everyone on the same page. You are not alone. In fact, this is very common in nonprofits. So what are you going to do…
Will the way an arts organization approaches its communications work vary significantly from a social service agency? Over the seven years that we’ve done the Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, we’ve seen few significant differences between nonprofits with different missions. For example, in this year’s report across the 10 mission categories, there are no significant differences…
