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…
Here at Nonprofit Marketing Guide, we believe that cultural competency is an important element of good nonprofit communications. Today, contributing writer Antionette Kerr takes a look at several ways you can improve LGBTQ inclusion in your organization and its communications. ~Kivi When people think about cultural competency, they tend to talk in terms of race,…
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…
We’ll release the 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report on Tuesday, January 17 and I’m so excited to share it! We’ve uncovered some really interesting trends that I think will go a long way in continuing to build the effectiveness of communications teams. But for today, here’s a little data niblet to hold you over until…
Contributing Writer Antionette Kerr will be blogging this year for us on several topics, including cultural competency in nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Working effectively cross-culturally is an especially important topic for people working in nonprofit communications. Many of your co-workers and community members will be looking to you for guidance when they have questions of…
I know many of you are working on your 2017 budgets now, so rather than make you wait until mid-January to get the budget information from our 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, I’m sharing it with you today. I hope you can use this data to make the case for increasing your budget! Here’s how…
For the second year in a row, we are asking nonprofit communications directors and coordinators to share their salaries with us, so we can provide some benchmarks for you in your conversations about your own compensation. The salary question is part of the 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report Survey, which closes on Friday, December 2. …
If you look at the preliminary results from our 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report Survey, email marketing, print marketing, the website/blog and social media marketing are almost identical in the rankings for how much time nonprofit staff are spending on them. This chart shows a weighted average where 2 is “a limited amount of time” and 3…
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…
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…
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…
