Building nonprofit communications capacity, Part 5: lessons learnedWhat happens when you bring together a room full of people who have a shared interest in and desire to build communications capacity for nonprofits? You get many, many good ideas.

Over the last few days, I’ve been blogging about a session I delivered last week for Maytree called Five Good Ideas About Building Nonprofit Communications Capacity. I walked away from the session with a huge bundle of papers absolutely filled with amazing insights and ideas from participants. In fact, there were far more insights offered during the session than we could possibly have shared back to the group within our time frame, so I committed to finding a way to bring them all together and share them. That sharing has taken the form of this blog series.

What does nonprofit communications capacity mean?

I opened the session by sharing what I had already researched and learned from nonprofit communicators on the topic of building communications capacity. For people working in the sector, capacity can mean (or be affected by):

  • Time
  • Human resources (staff and volunteers)
  • Budgets/funding
  • Skills, knowledge and expertise
  • Partners
  • Strategy
  • Tools
  • The degree of our external engagement with key stakeholders
  • The number of communications channels a nonprofit is using
  • The quality of our communications
  • Our ability to be nimble and responsive
  • The organization’s ability to understand, support and buy in to the importance of marketing communications
  • Planning
  • Prioritization
  • Message definition and consistency

 

My ideas

Next, I shared my observations about what nonprofit communicators  need to move toward a place of more meaningful connections and relationships, clear messaging, more visible, sustainable organizations and greater impact. I suspected that these needs would be the same for participants in the room: more skill development, time and resources (see below to find out where I was wrong).

Based on my observations and assumptions, I offered my Five Good Ideas:

  • Think smaller
  • Stop doing one ‘old’ thing, try one ‘new’
  • Leverage more of what you already have
  • Invest in yourself
  • Schedule productivity

 

Wisdom from the group

And then, I turned to the group to unearth more insights and ideas. I’ve been sharing these on the blog over the last few days, capturing:

I encourage you to have a look at posts two to four in this series to benefit from the wisdom shared by the group.

 

My takeaways

I came to the session with both knowledge and assumptions and was pleased to learn much, much more from the group.

 

Inspiring visions

My biggest inspiration came from the visions shared in the workshop, which included:

  • Opportunities for public to contribute to social change
  • Better informed, more educated, engaged citizens
  • Voice for those who don’t always have a voice
  • Better engagement of new, key groups
  • Policy change

These are just a few among many others, and every aspiration for the future highlighted the very important role of nonprofit communicators.

 

Surprising needs

I really expected skill development, time and resources to be the most common needs identified by participants. But this was not the case in this group of strategic-thinking, collaborative communicators. While my predictions were mentioned, I was intrigued to discover so many participants feeling the need for:

  • Supportive organizational culture and buy-in
  • Integration and alignment, and
  • Strategic thinking and planning

Nonprofit communications clearly needs a seat at the strategic planning table!

 

Dozens of ideas

Something I did predict was that the group would be able to develop and discover a wealth of ideas that they could take with them to start building their capacity to communicate right away. The group did not disappoint, offering steps to take in many areas including:

  • Reviewing or auditing existing communications
  • Reviewing/improving personal performance
  • Being strategic
  • Focussing on productivity
  • Prioritizing
  • Being efficient with available time
  • Collaborating internally
  • Working with available human resources
  • Focussing on goals, outcomes
  • Listening
  • Getting organized
  • Cleaning up communications
  • Being accountable
  • Investing in professional development
  • Advocating for financial resources

With all of these ideas in hand, I closed the session by challenging participants to take action immediately. To firmly take capacity building into their own hands.

 

The challenge

I challenged participants to commit to three ideas or actions that resonated. And if you want to build your capacity to communicate, I challenge you to do the same. From the many ideas offered, choose:

  • One idea that you can implement today
  • One idea that you can implement this week, and
  • One idea that you can implement this month

Will you take the challenge? If so, please share your commitment in the comments!

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