Assessing Your Communication Goals

Resource
Message Matters: Succeeding at the Crossroads of Mission and Market

Contents
Organizations Communicate for a Reason. What's Yours?
Does Your Organization Need a Strategic Message?
    Tool #1: Organizational needs assessment
Readying Your Organization for Strategic Message Development
    Tool #2: Organizational readiness assessment
    Tool #3: Message matrix

Additional Resources

 

From Becky Andrews, Marketing Manager, Fieldstone Alliance:

IN THE last issue of Tools, we discussed five keys to creating motivating messages. Such messages are essential to running a nonprofit effectively. But truly strategic message development often takes the organization deeper into its own goals and motivations—and even to the heart of organizational strategy. As we developed our newest book, Message Matters: Succeeding at the Crossroads of Mission and Market, we had many conversations and a daylong site visit with its author, Rebecca K. Leet, who has been consulting with nonprofits on strategy for more than twenty years.

Organizations Communicate for a Reason. What's Yours?
Rebecca pointed out that organizations would often invite her to help develop more strategic communications, only to discover that they lacked real agreement over program goals, client goals, and even basic organizational strategy. "Identifying the action that the organization desires is usually the most difficult part of strategic message development," says Rebecca.

An organization must be very clear about what it desires in order to create a message that moves an audience to action. Nonprofits can easily come up with a long list of desires. Choosing one action over another can be a challenge. Many organizations are reluctant to choose.

This is why true message development is, in fact, a strategic process. It requires an organization to make choices that are often difficult—and to articulate those choices without hedging.

Difficult as these challenges may be, clear and considered decision making is a prerequisite for strategic message development. Before you begin the process of creating a strategic message, you may need to take a step back and think about these two questions:

1. How can your organization clarify just what it needs from a strategic message development process?
2. And, once clear about what it needs, how can your organization ready itself to undertake the development of a core message that fully captures the intersection of your goals with what your market actually wants?

This issue, we provide three tools (from Message Matters) which will help you answer these questions.

Does Your Organization Need a Strategic Message?
The leaders of the organization (or program) should explore the following questions before beginning work on a strategic message. The accumulation of answers of yes or no is less important than the discussion itself, which helps gauge whether the organization is ready to take this task on, and helps determine how much the organization already knows about its goals, its approach to communication, and its constituents’ desires.

Tool #1: Organizational needs assessment

1. Are we satisfied with how well people listen to us when we talk about our organization or program?
2. Does everyone in our organization explain the overarching goal of the organization or program in the same way?
3. Do we know who our target audiences are?
4. Does everyone in the organization agree on the goal of the program or project we wish to communicate about?
5. Can the group articulate the action we wish to have happen as a result of talking to stakeholders?
6. When someone asks us to describe the purpose or the essence of the organization or program, can we do so effectively in less than thirty seconds?
7. When we describe what we do or what our goal is, do people look at us blankly or with confusion when we are done?
8. Can we talk about our program or project using only language that our next door neighbor would understand?
9. Do we know what audiences we need to reach to achieve the goal of our organization or project?
10. Do we know the desires of our audiences and what desires of theirs will be met if they take the action we want?

Readying Your Organization for Strategic Message Development
Asking all the members of an organization—board, staff, volunteers—to stay "on message" is difficult. People will disagree vehemently about language, goals, target audiences—basically, everything they possibly can disagree about. Therefore, leadership must prepare the organization, both to develop the message and later to repeat it continually. As an executive, board committee, or communications department gets to work, it must discuss the following questions. The organization should not move ahead with strategic message development until it can answer yes to every question.

Tool #2: Organizational readiness assessment

1. Will we involve an interdisciplinary team in the message development process?
2. Will the team include our organization’s or program’s leadership?
3. Will we use the strategic message that is developed for a sustained period of time?
4. Will we be disciplined about how we use the message, for example, refraining from changing it due to boredom?
5. Will we commit to stating an organizational expectation that everyone in the organization, including board and volunteers, will learn to use the strategic message?
6. Will we refrain from telling our audiences what they should want or do?
7. Will we practice linking what we want them to do with something they desire?

The questions are, of course, leading…but that is the point. The top rung of the organization must spearhead the use of steady, repeated messages that successfully capture what the organization wants, what its audiences desire, and what actions will fulfill the intersection of those interests. If top leadership can’t get behind a strategic message, it will fail.

Tool #3: Message matrix
Once you're ready to start crafting your messages, download this interactive PDF and you'll have a handy form to fill in.

 

Additional Resources

Rebecca Leet & Associates
www.LeetAssociates.com
This link takes you to short examples of situations in which Rebecca Leet & Associates has helped clients develop messages.

“Building Internal Support for Communications: Reasons to Communicate”
http://www.comnetwork.org/Fall2003/presentations/internal_support.pdf
This free 4-page PDF provides further support for those considering strategic communications.

Fieldstone Alliance
Fieldstone Alliance’s consulting team has extensive experience helping foundations, nonprofits, and networks develop clear vision and strategy and create strategic and business plans to inform their messages and guide their work. We know how to infuse organizations with strategic thinking and capacity for nimble action. For more information, contact Gordon Goodwin at 651.556.4502 or ggoodwin@FieldstoneAlliance.org.

Spin Project Tutorials
http://www.spinproject.org/article.php?list=type&type=22
SPIN Project online tutorials are free and offer concrete advice on various aspects of strategic communications. Topics include writing for communications, working with PR consultants, online communications, and much more.

Strategic Communications Toolkit
http://www.benton.org/publibrary/toolkits/stratcommtool.html
The Strategic Communications Toolkit, in the archives of the Benton Foundation, is aimed specifically at digital communications technology. When you reach the home page for the toolkit, you will find various links that can help your organization plan and implement a communications technology strategy.

“Strategic Communications Audits”
http://www.mediaevaluationproject.org/WorkingPaper1.pdf
This 11-page online PDF, prepared for the Communications Consortium Media Center by Julia Coffman, describes five basic steps in an assessment of a nonprofit organization’s communications capacity and performance.

All the Best,

Becky Andrews
Fieldstone Alliance

October 3, 2007

 

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