How to Create a Nonprofit Communications Strategy
What is a content strategy? Like, specifically? In this post, I want to show you an overview of how to bring together lots of individual items to create an annual Communications Calendar. Most of your strategy gets embodied in that calendar.
Before we begin, I want to point out that there are far more robust ways to approach this task. After you have done this once or twice, you’ll notice how important “clarity on goals” is. This blog post doesn’t spend much time on that! The approach laid out below moves quickly from Strategy to Implementation, for a few reasons.
First, the process below helps nonprofits understand what strategic framework exists. What does effective communication look like? If you’ve never done strategic communications work before, all of this seems overwhelming. The process below (creating an Editorial Calendar) helps organize scary amounts of information and decisions.
Second, the process below is a starting point. When your organization does this the first year, things will improve. The second time you do this, you’ll be more empowered to focus on goals with various audiences. The way that question connects to your Editorial Calendar is where a lot of the strategy is found.
The following are items you want to pull together.
Gather this data, then use it to plan a content/editorial calendar.
Your Branding Guide
Clarity on general and time-based goals (what do you want to happen with your various audiences?)
Big events from the upcoming year
Big fundraising pushes from your development/fundraising team
What communications channels will you use this year? Social Media (which ones?), Email, print direct mail, etc.
If you can get these items together, you can start creating a calendar.
Here is one approach to creating the calendar, strategically:
Try to plan a year in advance.
Put events you can’t control in first. Back to school, major holidays, etc.
Put organizational events in next (such as annual, recurring events, fundraising pushes, etc). Ensure these events actually further your organizational goals; don’t simply do the event because you always have.
Now, you can start planning the rest of your content based on your goals for the year.
A Few More Tips
The strategy comes from comparing your goals to your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. If that seems overwhelming, or too technical, let’s use an example.
For example, if you do an annual Fundraising Dinner, that is an opportunity. We’ll assume the dinner is a reasonable way to approach a goal your organization has (maybe it’s an effective fundraiser).
It’s easy to see that you want to have great communications at that dinner, asking for donations. You also want great communications beforehand to increase attendance at that dinner. Better, you want to increase attendance by the appropriate audience at that dinner.
Therefore, a significant portion of your communication to that audience before the dinner will be invitations and reminders about that dinner. That implies you might communicate less about other things to that audience, making space for reminders about the dinner. These sorts of decisions are where much of the strategy is implemented, but they often don’t become clear until you’ve started to assemble your calendar.
All else being equal, balance communications content types throughout the year. However, if there’s another reason to do something strategic (like supporting a fundraising campaign), then prioritize that.
Mark the dates, platforms and content strategy for each individual piece of content you’ll create. Doing this all at once (mostly) will let you balance all the goals your organization has.
You don’t need to write specific copy for social media posts 9 months from now at this time. You do need to make general notes like “AUG: Facebook posts 2x weekly showing ACME Community Center Expertise with Unhoused Neighbors.” Include notes on the intended audience for each piece of content. Once you have the calendar completed at this level of detail, you can begin working on specific content (with time, you’ll have more robust Creative Briefs, etc. But that’s for later).
If your nonprofit’s communications are not organized right now, this list and group of tips will help you improve dramatically. There will be room to grow beyond that, but this is a great starting place for most nonprofits.
