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The past few years have been rough. You’ve been weathering the storm for years now with no idea what’s coming next. It’s tempting to give in to the thought that you simply can’t plan your communications for next year because what’s the point? Everything you’ve planned lately has gone totally off-course, and you still feel like you’re in survival mode.
Of course, that’s all on top of the typical challenges you face year to year in communications. Mindy Morgan Avitia, associate director of brand marketing at Mighty Citizen, provided strategy during her session “Building a Comms Plan When Everything Keeps Changing,” during AFP ICON, the annual global conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals this week in San Diego.
Abandoning the ship on your communications plan isn’t the course.
Plans allow you to clearly lay out what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. In other words, it’s your strategy and tactics — and you have to have both in planning. If you focus on tactics without connecting them to an overall communication strategy, you waste time and energy pursuing tactics that aren’t returning enough organizational value, she told participants in the room.
Malleable to the constant change nonprofits face, your communication plan can become a powerful tool as you navigate them. It just needs to be set up for that flexibility.
Plans should be shared with your boss(es), key stakeholders (including board members or committees), and team members from other departments. Your communications plan provides a correlation between communications goals and overall organizational goals. This shows the true value of communications as a revenue-generator and not just a cost.
The organization’s leadership must see how your communication goals help reach strategic goals. That’s why an organization invests in marketing and communications: to see a return. Make sure they see it. A written plan keeps you on track, helps you say “no” to unexpected diversions, and helps you make the case for your budget.
A flexible, adaptable nonprofit communications plan has:
- The Executive Summary
- The Organization
- Market Analysis
- Audiences
- Goals
- The Executive Summary: This is a short a short, summarized version of your communications plan. This can be shared with leadership inside your organization and with any board or committee members, as needed. The main objective is to briefly list and describe:
- The Organization: This is where you talk about who you are and what value you provide. This section includes: Organizational Overview;’ Vision Statement; Mission Statement; Products/Services; Communications Personnel; and, Budget.
- Market Analysis: When writing your communication plan, there’s nothing more important than understanding your target audience(s). This includes: Industry Research And Trends; Market Position; Unique Value Proposition; and, Competitors (or similar-missioned orgs).
- Audiences: Here you’ll define your current audience demographics and the different ways you segment your audiences. You might want to build communication objectives and key messages just for audience segments. Your messaging depends on their specific needs.
- Goals: It might seem strange identifying your strategic communications goals at the end of your communication plan — but it’s for a good reason. You need to really think through your organization, your place in the market, and your audiences before you can set realistic and strategic goals.
Think big here. What are the top three initiatives you need to do this year to get closer to your vision? These goals should be strategic and ladder up to your organization’s overall goals.
Check the status of your plan at least once a month. Checking in with your plan forces you to ask whether you’re where you should be and whether any strategic updates are needed based on business objectives or (let’s be real) curveballs. Every month, monitor your metrics and update your progress. Share your metrics from the communications plan with your internal communications team so everyone stays up to date on the current communications strategy.
Here’s the fun part. Once the plan is set up, it’s time to execute. But what happens when funding is unexpectedly cut or better, unexpectedly arrives? Maybe something in the news deeply affects your mission, and this plan needs to adapt and shift focus.
That’s where tools like Google’s NotebookLM can come in handy. Yes, it’s AI. And yes, rightfully, people can be a bit more cautious about new tech. But this proprietary tool from Google is unique because it only pulls from what you feed it.
If you feed it only your communications plan, your organization’s strategic goals, and your current program funding allocations, then it will only look at the information you provide. If something big happens that requires major shifts in the plan, you can prompt it for advice.
