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How Do You Say That in Nonprofit? 13 Translations

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Let’s say you work at a nonprofit organization.  You want to improve the agency’s communications: writing, speaking, publicity, social media…the works.  You go looking online for expert advice.

The experts seem to be talking a foreign language! Handheld translator

So much of what you find is written for business. You want to do what Katya Andresen suggests in Robin Hood Marketing and “steal” some corporate savvy for your cause–when it applies or when you can adapt it for your own purposes.  To use expertise, though, you have to understand it.

Here are thirteen business terms translated into nonprofit.

  1. Brand.  Reputation, public awareness, visibility.  Your brand is not your logo: it’s the overall impression people have of your organization before and after they’ve met you.
  2. Customer.  In business, the same person pays for a service and benefits from it.  For nonprofits, it’s different.  Funders and donors pay for a service, while clients benefit from it.  When you read “customer,” ask yourself which group the writer means.
  3. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) = Executive Director (ED).
  4. C suite = senior staff.
  5. Return on Investment (ROI) is like what you call “measurable outcomes,” only with some assessment of how much it cost to produce that outcome.
  6. B2B (Business to Business) = communications with your partner organizations, both those you work with now and those you want to collaborate with soon.
  7. B2C (Business to Consumer) =communications with people who use your services.
  8. Entrepreneurial.  Nonprofits call this “innovative.”  In business, it also implies some self-promotion and some degree of risk-taking.  Make sure you’re comfortable with blowing your own horn and trying things that might fail if you’re going to call your agency “entrepreneurial.”
  9. Marketing.  Really, this is just communications with a purpose.  Businesses’ ultimate purpose is to make money.  Your ultimate purpose may be to improve public health, enhance democracy, end hunger or homelessness, or enhance people’s lives through the arts.  Either way, as long as you tailor your communications (outreach, publicity, call it what you will) to a purpose, you’re doing marketing, and you can look for ways to do it better.
  10. Content Marketing.  You may think of this 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 consumer and build your brand.  One of my favorite examples is the Economic Independence Calculator put out by the Crittenton Women’s Union.
  11. Thought leader.  A person or organization that provides valuable insights to others in a particular field, or on a particular topic, so that they become the “go-to” source of ideas in that area.  Becoming a thought leader can reap great benefits for you, but it takes time, patience, and communications skills.
  12. Networking.  Yes, this includes all those meetings where you meet people, talk about what they do and what you do, and try to figure out how you can help each other.  You’re familiar with that.  You may even know how to use LinkedIn for networking online.  But I would say that the nonprofit equivalents of networking are coalition building and community organizing.  When you read about networking, instead of a Chamber of Commerce meeting, picture a community forum.  Instead of passing out business cards, picture knocking on doors and asking neighbors to pursue their interests together.

I have finished my list at twelve because in the nonprofit world, you are an expert.  What’s the thirteenth term YOU’d like to see translated into nonprofit?  Please share the business term that doesn’t quite fit what you do, and if you have a good way to translate it, please share that too!

P.S.  On Twitter, when I see good advice that’s aimed at businesses, sometimes I translate it so it’s more useful to us.  Find it using the hashtag #ispeaknonprofit.

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review

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You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there’s a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Robin Hood Marketing  Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.Andresen, until recently the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn’t let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves–we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.Read the book for the “Robin Hood rules” she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are “focus on getting people to do something specific” and “appeal to your audience’s values, not your own.”

Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They’ll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don’t, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

  • What can we ask people to do that will be “fun, easy, popular, and rewarding”? (for supporters)
  • “Who wins when we win?” (for partners)
  • How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists–they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That’s what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that’s been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately–even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers’ Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual’s behavior, or even a lot of individuals’ behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody’s lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it’s just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That’s selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

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