Let the Messaging Journey Begin!

last minuteMessaging is critical to your nonprofit’s ability to captivate and cultivate people who care about your mission. It’s a way of engaging people in your work on an ongoing basis.

As cliche as it may sound, messaging is a journey, not a destination. It isn’t something you do once and then check off your to-do list. Depending on your organization, legs of the journey might include crafting a tagline, developing a messaging framework and coming up with an elevator pitch that makes people say, “How can I learn more?!”  Yet just as a journey through Europe wouldn’t be complete if it consisted only of visiting the Eiffel Tower, your messaging journey isn’t done as soon as you have a snappy tagline.

So many organizations settle for messaging that is mushy, muddled, or mediocre– your mission deserves more! It’s time to embark on your very own messaging journey.

To get you excited about your journey, in December, we will showcase messaging that inspires and informs, that compels action and awe, that makes you want to do something big and bold to make the world a better place. Then, in January, we’ll kick off a Free DIY Messaging Bootcamp. More on that later in the month, but in the meantime, make sure you sign-up for Tune-Up Tuesday Videos coming in January! These will be short (~2-3 minute) videos that are specific and practical, delivered straight to your inbox.

To get the inspiration flowing, here’s a video featuring Scott Harrison, Founder & President of Charity: Water, an organization that brings clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. He talks about the role messaging has played in their ability to grow from an idea to an organization serving more than 1,000,000 people.

Avoiding Messaging Mayhem

Remember the game ‘telephone’ from grade school? The first person would whisper something to the next and it would make its way down the line until it got to the last person who would announce the then mangled sentence. I love that game. But I don’t love it when it happens to nonprofits and it happens a lot.

We talked about this game when I recently spoke at the Washington Food Coalition’s Annual Conference because there was a lot of angst about “losing control of our message” among this great group of folks.

My suggestion was to focus on making it really easy for people passionate about their organizations to spread the word about your organization. That means picking one thing that everyone will focus on. One thing; not your everything.

When it comes to messaging, success isn’t everyone repeating the same one phrase verbatim; success is when your fans can consistently convey the most important and compelling thing about your organization while still making it feel personal.

This is why all organizations benefit from having a simple Messaging Framework. You should see the relief on the faces of staff and volunteers when they know how to talk about the good work you’re doing.

Here is a template that will help you develop a Messaging Framework Template.  It’s simple, straight-forward and will make people jump for joy at the opportunity to learn more about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Do you communicate as effectively as you think?

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Do you communicate as effectively as you think?

X