• Your staff, volunteers, and donors are your best strategy. These people are on board with your vision. Help them communicate your key messages clearly by making a routine effort to sharpen their saw.
• Establish key phrases / common language: Clarify and simplify the message of your organization into keywords and phrases. Repeating these in your communications will train your community / donor base how to share about your organization in their own spheres of influence on and offline.
• How are you helping your staff, volunteers, and donors to tell the story and get involved? Every communication should help them take their next step of involvement by reinforcing the connection between your org’s vision and their why. How are you leading them to take their next step of involvement?
• Your online content is only as good as the quality of your connection with your audience. This is from an interview with Annie F. Downs on the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. Focus on creating a deep connection with your audience. Don’t just share amazing content…share how that content has impacted you. Shift your thinking from getting people to see how great you are as a communicator to how good a friend you can be to your audience. “When people fall in love with the people of God, they’re going to fall more in love with God.”
• Create a process, goals, and a calendar for every communication channel. Website, Email, Social Media
  • Website: Plan to update the blog, update info, add events/pages
    • Create a form for staff to submit changes to the website so you have all the information you need before you start working on it
  • Email: Frequency, Fundraisers, Stories
    • Create a form for staff to submit announcements for your newsletters so you have all the information you need before you start working on it
    • Calendar out your communications so you can recognize gaps for your team. Comms leaders are responsible to each department, not for each department. How can you take initiative, or what systems can you put in place to help ensure nothing falls through the cracks?
    • Track metrics: follow up with people who consistently open or consistently DON’T open your emails
  • Social Media: Frequency, Messages, Events, Topics/Themes, Birthdays
    • Give your staff the ability to submit stories, ideas for captions, images, etc.
    • Slack channel for stories, google photos album for image submissions
• Digital Communication should never replace face to face (unless you’re in a pandemic). Every chance we get we need to encourage moving our communication to face to face and phone calls. Create a personal follow-up plan for new subscribes, new donors, etc.

EMAIL COMMUNICATION

• Add tags to your email list. Geographic, Interest, & Donation Level tags to your list, so you can send more targeted messages.
• Email Messaging: Communicate what’s important to them, not what’s important to you.
• The Four Cs: Clear, Correct, Consistent, Concise
  • Clear: Will the recipient be able to understand my message?
    • Give them what they need to take action / be informed.
    • Who, what, when, where, why, and how (the call to action).
  • Correct: Did I get all the details right?
    • Check for correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
    • Check dates/times with a calendar to eliminate confusion later on.
  • Consistent: Is my message consistent with other communications?
    • Plan for follow up communications.
  • Concise: Did I say everything I needed to say and nothing more? Is there a shorter way to say the same thing?
    • Read it outloud to yourself to see what it sounds like.
    • Attention spans are less than 20 seconds.
    • Replace long blocks of text with bulleted lists.
• The 1 in 5 Rule: One promotional ask for every five communications.
• Lead with the most important thing. Don’t bury key information under several sentences or paragraphs. Use an inverted pyramid style: keep the most important, foundational information at the top.
• Cut, cut, cut! Avoid redundancy and wordiness. Once you write a piece, see how much you can eliminate without losing meaning.
• Communicate what you want FOR people, not what you want FROM them. We are not giving people to-dos. We’re casting vision for opportunities.
• Don’t load people down with too much at once. Maybe you need to delay communicating one message so another has a better chance of getting through. Or it might mean you only present the first step in a process instead of five action items.
• Time Management. Set a deadline for yourself when drafting an email communication. 
  • Taking longer than you thought? That’s ok! Drafting communications usually helps us clarify the details if we haven’t already.
  • Consider if you’re using the right channel.
  • Have reasonable expectations for your communication. No comm channel is a silver bullet. If it’s a newsletter to a large audience, expect half of your list of people to open the email. BUT, When you follow up you can always reference it with your teams.
• Use Links. You can’t change an email you’ve already sent. If you send the wrong information, or the details change, it can make communication a hassle. When possible, link to pages on your site for information. Links to your website/events page will reduce opportunities for misinformation.

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Engage with your followers: Increase engagement by engaging with your followers on their posts. Don’t expect them to engage with you first.
• Clear hand-offs: Don’t give someone the password to your account and expect them to do what you want.
  • Clarify your audience, goals, metrics, frequency, content direction/categories, hashtags, engagement expectations, etc.
  • Consider purchasing a scheduling app: Buffer, Planoly, Hootsuite
• You don’t need epic photography, just decent: Captions are just as important as the visual component. Have quality standards, but know that even a poor quality pictures can tell your story.
• Post different content: Beware of conditioning your audience to stop paying attention to you by doing the same thing
• Photo vs. Video: FB prioritizes video. Instagram doesn’t.
  • FB vids 3 minutes or longer have a higher organic reach
• FB & Instagram Stories: Be sure to use stories! It is the most used feature on Instagram and can be cross-posted to FB now.
• Encourage staff involvement: content creation, stories, bandwidth, diverse messaging, behind the scenes. Invite trusted people in every department to share your organization’s story. 
  • We have a #stories channel on Slack and on a weekly basis we encourage our staff to share what they’re hearing / testimonies.
  • We encourage staff with writing gifts to contribute once a week or to engage with users by liking posts and leaving comments.
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