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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Are You as Good a Communicator as Shakespeare’s Fools?

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The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be
a fool.
-Touchstone, As You Like It, V.1.2217

Happy April Fool’s Day!  In Shakespeare’s plays, fools are the great communicators.  They manage to say what no one else has the courage or the insight to say.  They get heard when men of sense get ignored.

fools shakespeareAre you as good a communicator as one of Shakespeare’s fools? Take this quiz to find out.

  1. The fools can say what they want because they have official positions at court.  What is your position with your audience?  Do they welcome what you have to say?
  2. The fools are truth tellers, fearlessly making fun of one and all.  Do your audiences know they can count on you for the truth?
  3. The fools keep an eye out for when they are tiring their listeners.  Do you know when your audience is ready to hear from you?
  4. The fools use humor and unexpected turns of the phrase to win their masters’ attention.  Take another look at your writing.  Are you always serious?  Can people predict what you’re going to say before they open the letter or the post? Or are you surprising and delighting them with your communications?

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.
-Feste, Twelfth Night,  I.5.328

(This post was first published on April Fool’s Day 2016. As You Like It was first published in 1623)

Use Content You Didn’t Write, and Add Value

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gift

You can share a lot more content with your donors and supporters if you don't have to write it all. Click To Tweet

Giving your donors content that matters to them is a generous gift. It’s also a way to make them value their relationship with your nonprofit even more.

When you share information that make them feel better, or smarter, or more well informed, you are priming your donors to read the next thing you send them–even if the next thing is an appeal for their support! And you are making them more likely to be generous in their turn.

But how do you come up with that content? Day after day, week after week, in your blog, your social media, and your newsletter?

Partly, you adopt an environmental philosophy: “reuse and recycle.” The same idea can turn into a blog post, a newsletter article, a video, and multiple posts or tweets on social media.

But partly, you realize that you can make good use of content that other people have created.

Working with Guest Authors

You might have noticed that I’ve had the pleasure of hosting a bunch of guest posts in the last few months:

And you will see more guest posts mixed in among my own inimitable prose in the months ahead! That’s not just to make my life easier (although it certainly helps). I host guest authors because they have something valuable to share with you, the readers of this blog.

How can your nonprofit work with guest authors to inform, entertain, and delight your donors? Here’s my advice:

  1. Have a strong sense of your audience, and make sure your guest authors are speaking to that audience. (If they aren’t yet, show them how you do it!)
  2. Promote their guest posts on your social media, and ask them to do the same, on theirs.
  3. Develop a working relationship with the guest author, so they are interested in sending you more good content in the future.

Collecting Content from the Web

Besides the people who write guest posts for you, where else can you get news, advice, perspectives, and information that your donors and supporters will love?

Answer: online.

You can approach the task of collecting content for your audience from the internet in two complementary ways. You can search for keywords you know will interest them, and you can monitor other sites that routinely post the right stuff.

For keyword search, please don’t spend your time manually checking for your keywords over and over. Automate it!

I recommend you set up a Google Alert  for a few keywords related to your donor’s interests. Have Google send you a daily digest by email. Then, you can look at the articles when you have the time and choose the ones that really hit the spot. Schedule them using something like Hootsuite or Buffer, or the tool of your choice.

For monitoring sites you like, the best tool I have found is Feedspot. I add blogs and websites I know produce valuable content for my audience. Then, from time to time, Feedspot suggests other, similar sites.

Again, if you use a tool like this, it’s convenient (because you can look through a list of posts all in the same email), efficient (because it takes much less time than visiting all those sites), and encouraging. Yes, you will be more likely to communicate regularly with your donors if you know it will be easy!

Adding Value and Making It Your Own

Now the work of communicating with your donors consistently has become much simpler. Congratulations! But please make sure that when you curate other people’s work, you a) give credit where credit is due, and b) put your own twist on what you share.

You can give credit by naming the original source and linking back to their site.

You can make it your own by adding something to what they wrote–ideally, something that your organization is in a special position to say. Let me give an example here.

One of my clients is an organization dedicated to helping Black women find the resources that they need to heal, advance, and organize. They work on a variety of issues, because their focus is not the issue but the person affected. Because of that:

  • When they share an article about navigating the medical establishment, they add an intro about the particular barriers Black women face, and strategies to surmount those barriers.
  • When they post items related to Mother’s Day, they relate them to Black women raising children.
  • When they direct their constituents to information about harm reduction, or environmental racism, or policy initiatives, they choose sources that take the experience of Black women into account–and they add thoughts based on their own expertise.

If you get into the routine of choosing content with your audience in mind, and putting it in the context that matters most to them, your readers…

…then those readers (including your donors!) will welcome every email, every blog or social media post, every video,  every newsletter you send their way. Each bit of content will be a gift you send them. And they will reciprocate with their own generosity.

Donor Communications Training: Speaking with One Voice

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Guest post by Matt Hugg

choir in one voice

You know a great chorus when you hear it. Just think of the background chorus of your favorite musical group, or the power of a well-practiced holiday chorale.

You even know a great chorus when you see it – live, on television, or YouTube – even when the sound is turned off.

A great chorus sounds like one voice. A great chorus looks like a single organism, swaying with the music. If you look closely, even their mouths look synchronized!

You know so much about what a great chorus looks like that when you hear a bad one, it stands out! Uncoordinated. Off-key. Ill-timed. What if the chorus and the lead singer were singing different songs? Disaster!

What if you rated your nonprofit communications like a chorus?

Would the chorus be fully in sync with the lead, providing the perfect backup and coordination of movement?

Or would the lead and the chorus be uncoordinated, enough for the audience to notice, where they would say “nice, but not really professional”?

Or would it be a communications collision, with each member of the chorus singing a different tune, and the lead trying to shout over the cacophony in a hopeless effort to be heard?

Why should you care? Here are two important reasons that nonprofits can’t afford to forget to sing with a single voice: Money and Mission.

Communication Leads to Money

Businesses know this intuitively: Communicating well with customers in advertising, whether it’s in print, social media, email, radio, television, or wherever they deliver their “buy now” message, leads to money.

In nonprofits, it’s not so straightforward.

In business, the consumer of the goods or services is usually the same one who provides the money to buy the goods or services. For nonprofits, this one “customer” becomes two.

In a typical nonprofit, the people served are different than those who pay. In most nonprofits, a “mission recipient,” whether you call that person a client, student, patient, or constituent, will not pay the full price of goods or services received.

Instead, the cost of your mission delivery is supplemented in whole or part by the second “customer” in the equation. The second entity is the one with the money, whether that’s a donor, a government source, an insurance company, or a grant-giving foundation.

If your message isn’t clear and straightforward, speaking to the needs of your funders, you won’t get the money you need to serve your mission.

This isn’t just your fundraiser’s job.

Whether they’re people, foundations, businesses, or government entities, they have connections into your organization. A foundation director might hear from their neighbor about how well their gift was received. However, perhaps a business owner never got a thank you note for donated products solicited by one of your program directors. These scenarios can play a huge role in the success of your fundraising efforts.

Well-coordinated communication puts your best foot forward, regardless of whether you’re there or not.

Communication Leads to Clients

As a nonprofit, you exist to solve a problem in your community, region, or world. If nobody thinks you can solve the problem, you fail, regardless of your balance sheet.

It starts with trust. People show up to use the services of organizations they trust. The key to trust is consistency – in actions and in words. It’s simple: does your program staff do what your communications say they do?

If you promise childcare from 7 AM to 7 PM, but the staff never gets to the work until 7:30, it doesn’t matter what your social media advertising says: you broke their trust.

If the executive director promises a pregnant mother that your newborn infant program will be ready by the time she delivers, and it doesn’t materialize for another year, you broke her trust.

All this brings us back to money and mission.

Money leads to mission. Without funding, you can’t have a mission. The mission leads to money. Without delivering a mission that people want, you’ll never get funded.

Donor Communications Training

Where does nonprofit training come in? Here are five suggestions:

  1. Start with addressing a common fear. In How to Blow Your Credibility as a Presenter, Guila Muir gives great advice on how to start a presentation and build confidence – so the audience can focus on the important message.
  2. Don’t forget about the design. From ideation to sketching and final product, Symone Fogg will guide you through her process of how ideas are brought to life in Strategy of Design.
  3. Your website counts, a lot. Check out 5 Facts: What Constituents Want from Nonprofit Websites.
  4. Humans learn from stories. Make sure you see 3 Ways to Get Better Results from Your Stories.
  5. And how about some humor? See these great nonprofit humor videos as examples of consistent, and inconsistent, communications.

You Can Learn to Sing with One Voice

Getting your nonprofit to sing with a single voice isn’t optional if you want to be a well-funded nonprofit with a popular mission.

It’s also not easy. Just like a chorus, you need regular practice and training on voicing your message and coordinating everyone’s moves. But there’s good news. It’s totally possible for you to do this, especially with the number of available resources made to help organizations just like yours.

 

Matt Hugg is an author and instructor in nonprofit management in the US and abroad. He is president and founder of Nonprofit.Courses (https://nonprofit.courses), an on-demand, eLearning educational resource for nonprofit leaders, staff, board members and volunteers, with hundreds of courses in nearly every aspect of nonprofit work. He’s the author of The Guide to Nonprofit Consulting, and Philanders Family Values, Fun Scenarios for Practical Fundraising Education for Boards, Staff and Volunteers, and a contributing author to The Healthcare Nonprofit: Keys to Effective Management.Matt Hugg is an author and instructor in nonprofit management in the US and abroad. He is president and founder of Nonprofit.Courses (https://nonprofit.courses), an on-demand, eLearning educational resource for nonprofit leaders, staff, board members and volunteers, with hundreds of courses in nearly every aspect of nonprofit work.

He’s the author of The Guide to Nonprofit Consulting, and Philanders Family Values, Fun Scenarios for Practical Fundraising Education for Boards, Staff and Volunteers, and a contributing author to The Healthcare Nonprofit: Keys to Effective Management.

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