Communicate!

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How to Get Your Great Staff and Volunteers to Stay

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Engaged at work

How can you keep staff and volunteers excited to come to work?

A guest post by Sybil F. Stershic, Quality Service Marketing

True or False?

1. Mission matters in a nonprofit organization.
2. The people behind the mission – a nonprofit’s employees and volunteers – also matter.
3. Employees’ and volunteers’ passion for the mission ensure their commitment to a nonprofit organization.

The first two statements are true. While the third statement may be true in an ideal world, the reality is, while passion is critical, it’s not enough. Here’s why.

Every nonprofit will attract employees and volunteers who share a special affinity for its mission. People typically don’t work for a nonprofit for the money or glory. But a noble mission doesn’t guarantee a great workplace. If employees’ and volunteers’ work is not respected, and if they’re not given the tools needed to do their work, they’re not going to stay.

Bottom line: once engaged doesn’t mean always engaged.

The good news is, keeping staff and volunteers (including board members) engaged doesn’t involve anything complicated. It does require an intentional and ongoing application of internal marketing – a strategic blend of marketing, human resources, and management to ensure people have the resources and reinforcement they need to do their work. (Don’t be concerned with the “marketing” term as you don’t need to be a marketer to apply this approach.)

How to engage employees and volunteers with internal marketing

Internal marketing basically connects employees and volunteers on three fundamental levels:

• To the overall organization – to ensure everyone who works in the nonprofit understands its mission and goals, where they fit within the organization, and what’s expected of them in helping it achieve its goals.

• To the people the organization serves and those it works with in the process (such as donors, community influencers, advocates, etc.) – so staff and volunteers know who is important to the nonprofit and how to serve them.

• To fellow volunteers and employees – so they understand their individual and collective impact on the mission, along with how best to work together.

You can build these connections through a range of organizational activities that include but aren’t limited to: new staff and volunteer orientation; training; team building; and group meetings to share important information on new programs, policies, strategic plans, funding and organizational updates.

Nothing truly extraordinary – just whatever it takes to provide the necessary tools, attention, and reinforcement that enable the people behind the mission to do their best and know that their work is valued.

Even though I advocate “internal marketing” as a framework for engagement, it doesn’t matter what you call your approach to engage the people who work in your organization, as long as you are intentional and proactive in your efforts.

Remember, an inspiring mission may attract talented employees and volunteers to work with your nonprofit, but it takes much more to get them to stay. People need to feel they matter as much as their work.
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Sybil F. Stershic, author of the award-winning Share of Mind, Share of Heart: Marketing Tools of Engagement for Nonprofits, is a respected thought leader, speaker, and facilitator who specializes in engaging employees with internal marketing. Active as a volunteer leader in many organizations, Sybil is a former chairman of the American Marketing Association. For more information, please visit her website and blog at Quality Service Marketing.

How to Measure Results–and How Not To

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Should you measure the results of your blog and social media?  Why?

In the for-profit sector, the answer seems obvious. “Executives and business owners sleep, eat, and breathe ROI,” or Return on Investment, according to Nichole Kelly.

But nonprofit organizations exist for different purposes and calculate value differently. If your small nonprofit is using social media, what is worth measuring, and what is not?

Your Goals Should Set Your Measures

What’s not worth measuring are the “vanity metrics” of followers, likes, and views. Sure, you can keep track of them because it’s so easy to do so.  But they tell you nothing.  As Julia Campbell points out, nonprofits don’t count their success by how many times they are mentioned.

Donations, email sign ups and event attendance are signs of success because they help you obtain the support you need to do your job.  Reputation helps you get things done more easily, at less cost.  And advocacy helps you make social change, which may be the reason you exist in the first place.

Julia suggest you take the following steps to measure the real value of your social media:

  1. Pick a specific project. “The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to measure your efforts.”
  2. Choose objectives. What do you want to see happen as a result of your blog, post, or tweet?
  3. Only then, choose your metrics.  Make sure you’re measuring what matters to you.  Don’t bother measuring anything else.

 

Your Measures Should Live Within Your Means

Here’s a question I haven’t heard anybody ask: what is the ROI of measurement?

Certainly, you must make some well-planned attempt to figure out what you’re getting from your social media.  But let’s be real.  For many small nonprofits, it’s a stretch to DO the social media.  Carrying out a methodologically sophisticated measurement of results may be a waste of precious time and money.

Consider harvesting some of these low-hanging fruit:

  • Listen for signs that people are paying attention to what you post. Are they commenting or sharing them online? Are they mentioning them to you? Is the conversation changing because of your efforts?
  • Ask people what they think.  When they come to your office or to your events, take a minute to ask.  If you can, send a survey or hold a focus group.
  • Read studies about what works.  Adapt best practices to your own situation.

 

Your Measures Should Be Humble

Aristotle said it thousands of years ago: “Our measures cannot be more precise than the phenomena we are trying to measure.”  Be cautious about reading too much meaning into a small statistical change.  You’ll need to follow your social media results for months to be sure that what you’re seeing is real and meaningful.

Einstein said it best: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”  How do you measure the value of building relationships with the next generation?  By and large, Millennials use social media all the time, and if you don’t, you will have a hard time reaching them.  Even if you can’t measure it, investing in social media now is like planting a tree.  It will bear its fruit in the future.

Targeting Audiences is Out. Engage Your Community.

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If you read the Communicate! blog regularly, you know that I have learned a lot from Kivi Leroux Miller.  That’s why when I opened her new book, Content Marketing for Nonprofits, I was stunned to see that the first section of the first chapter is entitled “The End of the Target Audience.”

What? Here I am, doing my best to persuade the groups I work with that they have to communicate with a specific audience in mind.  I say:

  • There’s no such thing as the general public. You’ve got to focus on a particular group and tailor your approach to them.
  • Just blogging, or being on Facebook or Twitter, won’t guarantee that anybody reads you–any more than opening a bank account guarantees that anybody makes donations.
  • Go where your audience is, and tell them what they want and need to learn.

Kivi knows this.  She taught me some of it.  So why “the end of the target audience”?

“Target” is the wrong word

Think about it: would you want to be somebody’s target?

Targeting means blasting a message at someone.  It may be the right message.  It may be a clever message.  It may be visually and emotionally appealing.  But it’s all still one-way.  It’s like hitting on someone you want to date.  Targeting is no way to build a relationship.

Instead of targeting a group, Kivi suggests we attract them.  Nonprofits should use our communications to make the people we want to reach, want to get to know us.  They should seek us out because we meet their needs and make them feel good about themselves.

“Audience” is the wrong word too

Audiences listen.  We want the people we reach to ACT.  If we succeed in making ours their favorite nonprofit, they will give up to two-thirds of their charitable donations to our organization.

More than that: they will endorse, advocate, join, volunteer, spread the word, and talk about the organization in unsolicited and unpredictable ways and places that make a bigger impact than anything we say about ourselves.  They will write and blog and tweet about us, becoming co-producers of the content we call our own.  Our most loyal supporters will get us other supporters we had no chance to reach on our own.

It’s a mental shift worth making.  Identifying the groups we want on our side is still vital.  But once we identify them, let’s work on engaging with them as a community. 

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