Your Fail-Proof Guide to Nonprofit Communication Planning Part One: Jumpstart Your Strategy
Do we really need a plan?
We hear it all the time from our nonprofit clients and partners: “We know there's a need for nonprofit communication planning, but...we don’t know where to start...we have to prioritize other things…we need to be in “go” mode.” And, we hear you. We know you're on the ground in your communities, putting your time and energy into leading important conversations and making real change.
We also know that thoughtful planning up front will save you a lot of time and could lead to a whole lot of wins. By not proactively planning, you could be missing an invaluable opportunity to make sure you're reaching your nonprofit PR goals, while also making your work more efficient! In short, yes, we all need a plan.
Your nonprofit communications plan can set you up for long-term success by helping you:
Clarify who you're trying to reach and why
Determine what success looks like and how you’ll track progress
Consider all the ways you can best reach your most important audiences
Since it’s always our goal at Forthright to help make our nonprofit clients’ and partners’ lives easier, we decided to create an actionable guide to nonprofit communication planning. In this three-part series, we’re sharing all of our secrets. We promise you'll walk away eager to plan and ready for success!
Today’s first installment, Jumpstart Your Strategy, takes a closer look at the beginnings (and essentials!) of any communications effort: defining goals and identifying audiences.
To get us started, below is an overview that shows how all the pieces of a strong communications plan fit together and gives you foundational, guiding questions--usable for any campaign. If you’re ever not sure where to start or need to level-set, consider this your go-to reference to *jumpstart* your thinking.
With these five key planning elements in mind, let’s move right into the never-to-be-skipped first pieces, Goals and Audiences!
STEP ONE: Define your goals
At Forthright, we always kick off every planning conversation by clearly defining our goals--no exceptions. Goals create clarity and buy-in for any busy nonprofit--grounding the many moving, collaborative parts of a campaign in realistic objectives, easily understood and gauged by the whole organization. By defining your goals, you’ll answer the questions of what you hope to achieve through your efforts and how you’ll know you’ve succeeded.
This initial decision-making helps make sure your organization is channeling your time and resources into where it matters most, on tactics that actually help you reach your specific nonprofit PR goals. Skipping this step would be like going to the grocery store without a list in mind, meandering through the aisles and leaving without the key ingredients to make your dinner a success. After all, you wouldn’t want to leave the store without the chicken for your award-worthy barbecue recipe!
Sign up for our email newsletter to receive all of our best ideas, straight to your inbox
How to set SMARTIE goals
We understand that as nonprofit professionals committed to advancing your organization's mission, you have organizational and nonprofit PR goals, both big and small. We encourage our clients to identify Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely, Inclusive and Equitable goals: also known as SMARTIE goals.
Why? As a part of a nonprofit team, you're used to outcomes-driven work, and this is no different. Establishing SMARTIE goals empowers you to prioritize your time and communicate with intention. A SMARTIE goal is more likely to succeed because it helps you understand what needs to be achieved, and also offers a way to measure and point to your impact for funders and constituents.
SPECIFIC: A way to ensure your goals are specific is to apply the five W’s (who, what, when, where, why).
MEASURABLE: Goals should always have metrics so you can track your progress. This might mean, for example, tracking open-rates from a newsletter campaign, engagement on social or collecting feedback from partners.
ACHIEVABLE: Setting a realistic goal means you are considering factors such as your organization’s budget, capacity and skillset. How much time and resources can you dedicate to achieving your goal?
RELEVANT: Align your communications goals with your broader organizational goals and think about how your goal aligns to your overall mission.
TIMELY: Make sure you are allocating enough time to achieve your goal without it being so far away that you risk losing focus. Timely goals allow you to hold everyone accountable and help to keep everyone motivated!
INCLUSIVE: By working inclusivity into your goals, you can ensure you’re considering and respecting traditionally marginalized and underrepresented populations in your goal setting.
EQUITABLE: Consider how you can work equity into your goals. For example, are you seeking to address systemic injustice or inequity with your communications?
SMARTIE goal example
Non-SMARTIE goal: Our organization, The Best Nonprofit, will increase awareness about our new program, Working Families.
SMARTIE goal: Ensure the board, existing and potential funders are receiving at least one message per month that shares updates about The Best Nonprofit’s decision-making and points to Working Families’ progress, while empowering these audiences to share feedback and questions.
Ultimately, this first goal-setting step gives you the “why” behind your work, aligning your organization’s efforts toward a real-world vision for success and change.
STEP TWO: Identify your audiences
Once you’ve narrowed down your SMARTIE goals, you’ll need to understand the target audiences you need to make change happen.
We know that in nonprofit PR communication, there are many specific audiences you’re trying to engage with different values and relationships to your work. This can include existing funders, potential donors, peers and partner organizations; community advocates and organizers; policymakers and more.
With such a wide range of possible constituents, it may be tempting to default to "general public” as an audience, but the truth is, there is no such thing as the general public when it comes to strategic nonprofit PR communication.
Instead, when it comes to identifying your most important audiences, the overarching question to answer is, “Who does success rely on and what do we want them to think, do or feel?” You can also consider the following guiding questions to help you determine who you’re trying to engage and what you’ll empower them to do.
Who are the decision makers? Who has the power to say yes or no to our issue? Can we reach them directly?
If we can’t directly reach the person who has the power to say yes or no to our idea (ie: if you somehow don’t have a direct line to President Biden), who has the ear of the person with the yes or no power (can you target a cabinet member or senior leader in the administration instead)? Do we have access to them? If not, how can we get it?
If your campaign includes a media component, who are you trying to reach by speaking through the media?
Who is impacted by your project and how will you make sure they’re meaningfully included?
Meet audiences where they are and empower them to act
Once you’ve identified your most important audiences, you can then dig in to their main priorities and values, as well as any barriers that might prevent them from taking the action you need them to take. You’ll want to think through what matters most to each audience and how you can best tap into that value to move them to act. This includes careful consideration of how your audiences can be most easily reached.
For example, if you’re trying to increase your donor base among millennial parents in your community, you’ll need to consider meeting them where they are, literally and figuratively. Research shows you can reach millennial parents through specific online engagement, and you’ll want to speak to the values that this audience cares most about, like demonstrating impact.
For additional support in building out your priority audiences, check out our free Audience Profile resource, which will help you build strong target audiences.
Now that you’ve completed goal-setting and identifying audiences, you’re almost halfway through the main steps of planning!
Feeling ready to start your campaign? We hope that you’ll consider using this additional Forthright resource to launch your nonprofit communication planning with goals and audiences!
Next, in Part Two of our series, we’ll look at one of our favorite parts of any communications effort, often considered the piece de resistance of nonprofit communication planning, core messages: the language that gives your campaign a clear, consistent voice and speaks to the hearts and minds of your most important audiences.
