The voice of your non-profit should be speaking clearly, consistently and explicitly to those who need to hear it. To achieve this, you need your strategy, your goals and your methodologies to be fully developed and properly communicated.
Ensuring that all your communications are fully in line with your top-level strategy can be challenging but the risk of a mismatch between your voice and your actions can also have serious consequences. It can result in a confusing mix of messages that do not resonate, do not convince, and do not compel your audiences. In that situation, we see charities struggling to retain their supporters, gain new followers and, in general, fail to engage people.
The importance of integration and dialogue between the communications team and the higher level of governance who presides over the organization’s strategic development is frequently overlooked. It is often true that communication specialists have little appetite for intricate logframes and complex implementation strategic papers while strategy discussion and decision are made in different sectors of the organization.
The good news is that, if you are in this situation, you have some untapped potential to unleash. The tell-tale signs are there and you can spot them quite easily to test if your strategy and your communications are aligned. Here are three easy steps.
Imagine stopping at a shop window on the high street and not fully being able to comprehend what they are offering customers. In rare cases it can be “teasing” but, in most circumstances, it would be just confusing, and you would just move on to the next outlet. A good shop window does not trick or confuse you, it invites you in with a clear call to action, “come and get it”!
So, start looking at your website. You can ask this same question: what do we offer, what can we promise to deliver? What is the call to action for those who land on these pages? If you cannot find an immediate answer, then it’s likely that those who are visiting have no clue either. Then, check different charity websites where there is a clear feeling, a simple message, and an obvious invite to action. For example, The Commonwealth Education Trust is a strong international charity that puts across a range of visual and verbal messages fully integrated to its mission and, at the same time, gives the visitor a sense of empowerment by offering to join its compelling cause. Do you have something to learn?
Finally, just check your overall website traffic trend over time to see if the data suggests that visitor numbers are increasing, or decreasing and draw your conclusions.
Take a look at your mission and strategy and the wording it uses to describe your visioning, you goals, and objectives and the actions the organization is putting in place to deliver those goals. Then revert to the communications strategy and the assets it’s generating. Are those outputs bringing to life the aims and ambitions of our higher thinking in a way that’s made relevant to your target audiences? If these two areas seem to be talking about even slightly different concepts, that is another clear indicator of where things are going wrong.
As a result of all your collateral, events, creative content and stories, what impact have they all had on people? Has that impact been measured and if so are those all the right ways to measure success? If brand awareness of your charity increased in your target territories, if the research shows that trustworthiness towards your brand has shot up due to the way you handled the pandemic, and if donations increased due to the strength of your campaigns, then you are doing a great job.
If you don’t know the answers to these outcome questions, or the impact has been decreasing, then there are some big lessons and insights we can help you gather about how to improve the ways you talk to people. That is the key differentiator for our agency, because here, at Raise Partners, we are a collection of professionals who bring together senior expertise in organisational strategic development and high level creative power.
We would love to go through your vision, logframes, SWAT and PESTEL, and establish a dialogue with the leadership team to help you to determine what really matters for your communications. We then apply expert creative power to help you turn around your communications and make sure it’s 100% aligned to your strategy while reaching out clearly to those who need to hear about it.
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