Communications Strategy For Nonprofits – Having worked in the nonprofit sector for 4 years and trained over 250 nonprofit organizations on different aspects of social media, I realize the challenge most nonprofit organizations have communicating the work they do on social media and telling compelling stories is not about not having a solid social media strategy but a communication strategy.
This article is part of a series I will be posting for a month in collaboration with my friend, Umar Abdullahi . We challenged each other to become better writers and will be posting our articles together once a week. Check out his latest blog post here
Nonprofit organizations do a lot of work, I can tell you this for a fact, most even have as much as 4 projects if not more they work on at the same time and they need to communicate them to attract funding, volunteers and of course reach their target audience.
Most nonprofits heads do not treat their organizations like a business, because they think they are not set up to make profit. If you are not set up to make profit, the least you can do is tell your stories in compelling ways to attract the right set of volunteers, your audience, and most importantly funding.
Thanks to new media, nonprofits can now tell their stories without spending a fortune on traditional media like newspapers, television, radio etc. All they now need to tell their stories is setting up accounts on various social media accounts
Every time I have an opportunity to train or facilitate a training with non-profit organizations, the first thing I tell them to do is develop a communications strategy and I also let them know all the work they do is not complete if they are unable to tell their impact stories in more compelling ways.
Here are 4 tips to help you tell your impact stories in more compelling ways on social media:
1. Have a communications strategy: According to Wikihow.com, A communications strategy, or plan, is a document that expresses the goals and methods of an organization’s outreach activities, including what an organization wishes to share with the public and whom the organization is trying to reach. Don’t just start posting on social media without a clear objective of what you want to achieve, what do you want your audience to do, see or think when they see your post? This is the most important part of your outreach, if you get this wrong every other thing fails.
2. Have a content calendar: I know the workload is never ending for staff of non-profit organizations. While working in the sector, my work as Digital Communications Manager had me doing the work of about 3 people, it wasn’t easy but I had to do what I had to do to produce the desired results. But, see, a content calendar will help you plan your weekly content ahead of time, all you need to then do is copy and paste. Who also says you have to post every day? Know what works for you and implement
3. Social Media Platform: What social media platform works best for you and your audience? Choose and focus on it. There is this mindset that you have to be active on all your social media platforms, it’s really important you are, but trust me it is not compulsory. If your audience is on Facebook for instance, focus on creating and sharing the best kind of content on that platform, master it and continue to evolve, there are also tools that can help you automate your updates across platforms, I will share more on the eBook I am co-authoring with my organization, Hexal Place. Anticipate!
4. Content: All your communications strategy and content calendar will be useless if your content is dead. Your content needs to be very appealing. You need to share emotive pictures, videos that show the work you do, infographics that sure details of your work, lives you have touched, money spent etc.
I can go on and on about all the things you should do in this blog post, but I will have to stop here, I will be sharing more in our soon to be released eBook.
If you are also looking to revamp or create a communications strategy for your non-profit organization, don’t hesitate to reach out to me, our consultation fees are quite affordable ?