Building nonprofit communications capacity, Part 3: what we needOver the last few days, I’ve been blogging about a session I facilitated for Maytree last week on building nonprofitcommunications capacity. Duringthe session, after I shared my ideas about building capacity, I used the rest of our time to glean insights from the participants in the room, on the webcast and following on Twitter.

I first asked participants to answer the question: “What would you be able to accomplish with greater communications capacity?”

The vision that unfolded in their responses was one of:

  • Greater visibility for the nonprofits for which they work
  • Deeper impact and engagement with their communities
  • More support and stability for the organization
  • Better communications
  • Better conditions for communicators

The next step in moving toward this vision for the future was to uncover what participants felt they needed to have in place to get there. So I asked the next question…

 

What would help you to get closer to your vision? What needs to be in place?

Here are the participants’ responses – as many as I was able to capture – in their words:

 

Supportive organizational culture and buy-in

  • Trust

  • Openness to change (to be able to let go of old things and bring in new)
  • Transparency
  • Clarity
  • Agreement of staff on strategy or message and getting buy in
  • A culture that allows an efficient forum for discussion
  • Making communications a higher priority
  • More autonomy>freedom to do what you need
  • Buy in from others – agreement on priorities
  • Organization understands need for time and to set time aside for communications

 

Integration and alignment

  • Agreed upon road map and bench marks
  • Clear internal communications to allow consistent external communications
  • Have members of the organization included in communicating
  • Budget tied to strategy and action plans, calendar
  • Have communications integrated in long range planning
  • Conversation with the whole group
  • Mechanism for engaging with your audience – educated colleagues and collaboration to collect stakeholder information

 

Strategic thinking and planning

  • Ability to see both ways re: matching resources and need
  • Marriage of big picture with details
  • Clear communications plan
  • Understanding of your audience (know them, what’s important to them, ask them, listen to them)
  • Targets/goals
  • Strategic communications plan
  • Include risk management and crisis planning (reduce crisis)
  • Tools to assess priorities

 

External partnerships and collaboration

  • Working with other associations
  • Ability to get ideas out to other sectors
  • External identification of partnerships to strengthen internal capacity
  • Complementary activities (a relationship needs to be in place)

 

Human resources

  • Organizational stability: staff and volunteers
  • Tech team
  • Clear roles
  • More employees
  • Communications committee
  • More resources (more money to hire more staff or pay for more time)

 

Structure, content, policies and guidelines

  • Content
  • More control over communications produced by other staff
  • Plans and guidelines in place including visual identity, brand guide
  • Clear responsibilities for tasks
  • Have a communications plan template to have other (non-comms) people in your organization do the planning, you help with implementing
  • Key message development
  • Structure
  • Plan for continuity of message and spokesperson

 

Technology

  • Usable database
  • Pre-established systems for data management

 

Professional development

  • Wider breadth of skills sets
  • Time for learning new skills

 

Better habits

  • Being proactive versus reactive
  • Less distractions for more productivity
  • Knowing when to effectively say no

 

Personal outlook, attitude and approach

  • Experiment
  • Take risks
  • Make communications fun
  • Stay on plan or negotiate change
  • Willingness to experiment and take risks
  • Courage to be authentic (identifying misconceptions and improving understanding)
  • Passion

 

Based on pervious research and conversations, I had predicted skill development, time and resources as the top three needs that would be identified. But this group really seemed to crave more support of, buy-in to and alignment with communications within their nonprofit organizations.

In the next post in this series, coming tomorrow, I’ll share the steps participants felt they could take to build their own capacity to communicate.

 

 

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