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Interpreting Business Advice into Nonprofit Language

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ImagePerhaps you’ve already noticed: most articles about communication are written for businesses.  They use a business vocabulary.  The writers assume you’re looking to make a profit.

A nonprofit professional reading these articles can feel like a deaf person attending an event with no interpreters.

Good new: with a little practice, you can do your own interpreting.

How You Say that in Nonprofit

For practice, let’s take a look at an article that American Express recently published.  It’s entitled “5 Common Brand Messaging Mistakes Marketers Make.”  That  title may be a puzzle already.

  • What’s a nonprofit’s “brand”?  Your brand is not your logo: it’s the overall impression people have of your organization before and after they’ve met you.  Think “reputation, public awareness, visibility.”
  • “Messaging” is not just anything you say.  It’s your deliberate attempt to shape your reputation.
  • “Marketers”: that means you!  Marketing really just means communications with a purpose.  If you put out a newsletter, send an email, or give a talk and you’re trying to win support for your agency, you’re marketing!

So, for a nonprofit audience, the title of this article could be “5 Ways of Communicating that Don’t Work (and What You Can Do Instead).”  Now, doesn’t that make you more likely to read it?

Please do read the article and comment about it below.

Click on that link. When you get beyond the title of the article: what makes sense from a nonprofit perspective? What needs interpreting?  We can puzzle it out together. You start!

 

Nonprofits DO Marketing and PR! 6 Ways to Do Them Well

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marketing, ads, PR

Your nonprofit’s good work won’t speak for itself.

Maybe you take a quiet satisfaction in a job well done.  Good for you!  But if you’re the only one who knows what a great job your organization did, you’re cheating yourself.

  • Who will volunteer for your organization if they don’t know what it does?
  • Who will donate if they don’t know what a difference it makes?
  • Who will help you change the world if they don’t know how?
  • Who will speak up for you if they’ve never heard from you?

Beyond “Outreach”

Most of us know that we have to market ourselves.  We just don’t like the label.  “Marketing” sounds too commercial.  Its cousin, “public relations,” sounds too slick.  So we talk about “outreach” instead, or “visibility.”

And that’s getting in our way.

“Outreach” is just too broad.  It lets us keep on thinking as if there’s some general public out there waiting to hear from us.  That’s a waste of a nonprofit’s time and resources.

We need our communications to reach specific groups of people, with clearly defined messages that they want to hear.  Better yet, we want those constituencies to seek us out, to be glad to hear from us, to let us know what’s on their minds, and to ask, “How can I help?”

Marketing and Public Relations for a Good Cause

Marketing and public relations don’t mean what we think they mean.  I want to quote a great article by Heidi Cohen:

Marketing is everything a brand, business or organization does to sell its goods, services and values.

Public Relations…builds honest, open and transparent bridges of communication between a brand, business or organization and its constituent communities. Deborah Weinstein )

You “sell” your services to two sets of “customers”: the clients who benefit from them and the donors, funders, and volunteers who contribute to them.  You “sell” them when you talk or write about them, when you answer the phone, sign your email, post to Twitter and Facebook.  But you also sell them in every interaction “because if your customer service sucks, nothing else that you say matters.”  (B.L. Ochman)

You build bridges and win the trust of your constituent communities “by community-building and tapping the power of positive third party, word-of-mouth, endorsement/ testimony/ tribute to create affiliation, loyalty and advocacy for your goods, services and/ or ideas,” as Deborah Weinstein says.

Ways to Do Better

You’re in the marketing and public relations business.  Isn’t it worth doing them well?

Here are six ways you can improve your nonprofit’s marketing and PR.

  1. It’s Not About You. Get to know and love your audience and give them what they need.
  2. Have a Strategy.  Understand what you hope each audience will give you in return and how you will move them toward doing so.
  3. Everybody In.  Market to yourselves first.  Make sure staff, Board, and volunteers get it about your organization and represent it well.
  4. Change the Way People Behave.  Social marketing works better than a new program sometimes.
  5. Attract (instead of reaching out).  Content marketing builds your reputation and makes people come to you.
  6. Take Care of Your Friends.  Build loyalty among your donors, volunteers, and supporters.

How Do You Say That in Nonprofit? The “Buying Cycle”, Heads, and Hearts

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People decide to buy products from companies.  People–maybe the same people–decide to give money to organizations.  What can nonprofits learn from the business “buying cycle” that will help us to create loyal supporters?

According to Catherine Sherlock, one thing we can learn is when to appeal to people’s hearts and when to their heads.

Catherine Sherlock

Catherine Sherlock

She says, “The idea that people buy solely on emotion is old-school selling… Under old-school selling, people felt manipulated—which is why they started turning to the Internet and to friends for answers rather than engaging with salespeople.”

Nonprofits don’t want to manipulate people into supporting us.  We do want people to know what we do, and love it, and give money to keep us doing it.  In other words, we want their hearts and their heads at the same time.  How do we appeal to both?

 

Content Marketing: Giving Nonprofit Donors What They Want

Content marketing is a buzzword right now, but if you’re like many nonprofit organizations, you may have a hazy idea what it means.  You may think of it as just “publication.”  Unless you’re publishing anonymously, though, what you write, or post, or video will shape the perception of your organization.  Content marketing means putting content out strategically in ways that benefit the audience and help them get to know and love your agency.

Now, when people see your content, they may have just heard of you for the first time, or they may know you quite well.  If you ran into a longtime donor or volunteer on the street, wouldn’t you greet them very differently from someone you just met?  You also need different messages–different information and different emotional tone–when you’re “meeting” people through your writing or social media.

Catherine Sherlock tells us that when businesses build relationships with customers, they go through a set of stages, a “buying cycle.”  Nonprofits go through a similar set of stages with our supporters.

buying cy

Catherine Sherlock explains the buying cycle (marketingprofs.com)

    • Awareness: They don’t know who you are.  You have to give them a reason to pay attention and find out.  Short, emotional content works best.  “Funny, weird, and inspirational are what tends to get shared on social media.”
    • Interest: They’re beginning to recognize a need for your services.  They want to know who you are.  This is a great time to tell stories that show your organization’s personality and your values in action.  Remember, though, your purpose is not to brag: it’s to deepen their interest and begin to build trust.
    • Evaluation: They’re seriously considering your program or service—and comparing you with your competition.   “At this stage, provide people with good, solid materials that enable people to substantiate their early feelings of security and trust.”
    • Purchase:  For nonprofits, this is the moment when the donor clicks the “donate” button or mails the check.  “People’s fears about making a wrong decision often re-emerge at the point of taking action and handing over money. So, reinforce the feelings that you used to gain their attention in the Awareness stage, and ensure the actual purchase process is painless.”   (That means you make it easy for the donor to give, and thank them and remind them what a difference they are making both during and after the donation.)
  • Loyalty:  In the nonprofit world, we sometimes talk of donor “retention,” and the “stewardship” it takes to keep our donors’ support over the long haul.  Businesses talk about loyalty, instead.  I prefer that, because it makes it clear that their continued attention and support is a further gift our donors give to us.  We can and should work to deserve their loyalty, and that means appealing both to emotion and to reason.  We can “maintain that sense of safety and trust that [we] established in earlier stages” and “provide information that proves” we are worthy of their trust.

The Right Audience at the Right Time

Now that you understand the cycle,  you can see that appeals to reason and emotion go hand in hand.   You will want to stress one more than the other at different stages, but mostly you will find the best way to combine them.  This raises the question: how can nonprofits catch their supporters at the right time in the relationship to send them the message that will fit them?

First off, you have to know your audience.

Then, if your nonprofit is big enough (or has a big enough communications budget), you may be able to do a lot of research and to capture the results in a constituent relationship management (CRM) database, so that you can send different messages to supporters at each stage of the cycle.

If you’re smaller, or if time or money are tight, you can still segment your list.  At a minimum, target different messages to new prospects, first-time givers, and established supporters.

Finally, think about what that audience wants to hear.  At this stage of the relationship, do they want you to grab their attention, or to help them trust you, or to reassure them that their trust is justified?  Are they ready for you to convince them or to touch their hearts, and how?

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