What are the biggest mistakes nonprofits make when trying to tell their organizations’ stories?

1. They look at their organizations from their point of view rather than the view of the audience.
2. They don’t get their story straight.
3. They tell the wrong story to the wrong audience.
4. They don’t answer the question , “SO WHAT?”

Mistake #1: Nonprofits look at their organizations from their point of view rather than the view of the audience.
Nonprofit professionals tend look at their organizations from their point of view rather than the view of the audience(s) they are trying to connect with. (You do not want to just “reach” your audience – you want to connect with them.)

There are several ways this happens. How can this be avoided?

• Don’t talk about the organization, talk about the people.
• Think from the perspective of your audience. And remember, something “new” to you or the organization is not necessarily “news” to someone else.
• Don’t use jargon, institutional sounding language and try to avoid the use of acronyms (don’t fall into the “alphabet soup” mentality.
• Ask yourself the tough question… “How is what I am trying to communicate relevant to what is currently happening in the community, in the world?”
• Make it simple – the first step is to get their attention, especially with new audiences. Think of it like a first date. Would you tell your life story on a first date?
• SHIFT YOUR MESSAGING MINDSET. Are you guilty of “megaphone mission” marketing? Are you talking about how great you are rather than trying to empower your audience?

Mistake #2: Nonprofits don’t get their story straight.

If someone came to your organization and talked with 10 people separately (the executive director, staff, volunteers and board members) and asked the question “What does your organization do and why should I care?” – would all of the answers be the same? Or, at least be close to the same?

Forget the neat-looking brochure or a website that can do cool tricks. The most important (and FIRST) thing your nonprofit organization needs is a paragraph of strong, powerful (and empowering) language that everyone uses consistently. This is NOT your mission statement. Use this language/description across all mediums. Make sure it is readily available to staff and volunteers – and even “train” them (make it part of what is expected of them… just like any other rules or procedures at your organization).

Make messaging more important. A big part of the issue with not “getting your story straight” is not having messaging in place – it is the foundation that all communication is built from. Approach your messaging like you would a program or service that your nonprofit offers. Get the entire organization involved. You can start this messaging through simple exercises like creating a “word wall.” Separately, have people within your organization write down five words (individual words) that describe your organization. Then, build your language around these words. Use them consistently in your messaging. This can also help you create a tagline or creative campaign for your agency.

Find the right words. Line up what words were the most common among those who responded. Where are the matches? These are most likely the words you need to focus on. Or, sometimes this exercise can uncover where there are mistakes in thinking or how your own staff might be counter to what you are trying to communicate. A key part of messaging and storytelling is making sure that it is not just the marketing department (or person, of half-time person) who is invested in it.

Questions to ask when trying to develop messaging:

• When someone hears your organization’s name, what do you want them to assume about you?
• When someone hears your organization’s name, what do you NOT want them to assume?
• What is the biggest misunderstanding people have about your organization?
• What direction is your organization moving? Where will it be in 5 years, 10 years?

MISTAKE #3: Nonprofits tell the wrong story to the wrong audience.

Just like you have different programs and services, you have different audiences you are trying to reach. Communication is much more effective when you are speaking directly to a specific audience.

Find your audiences… break down who you are trying to connect with. Each of them will connect with your organization in a different way. But, keep it consistent – use similar language and be consistent with your organization’s brand.

Remember, some audiences need more information, while others need less. The same message does not work with multiple audiences. Now, this does not mean you have to develop 20 different versions of a brochure. Rather, it means to identify who your core audiences are (usually 2-4 categories) and determine the best way to reach them, and what they need to know to become engaged.

Pick your battles. Nonprofits need to understand that they are not going to win everyone over. Trying to get all audiences to listen and care is exhausting and impossible. Many nonprofits waste a lot of time and resources trying to be the most popular kid in the class. Do not fall into this wasteful pattern. Yes, you want to get your story out there, but you need to let go of the audiences that are not going to listen, and focus on the ones who are.

• Communicate to those who are already vested in your cause.
• Identify the audiences that are the most likely to listen and care. Then build on that.

But, there are two extremes here that nonprofits tend to fall into. Don’t just preach to the choir. Don’t limit your communication to this audience. Communicating with only those people and organizations who are already cheering for you does not help grow your organization. One of the most mistakes nonprofits make is continuing to ask the same people for support and money over and over. Your donors and volunteers need you to grow your support base. Reaching out and connecting with new audiences is crucial.

MISTAKE #4: They don’t answer the question , “SO WHAT?”

You are deeply committed to your organization’s mission.
You develop best practices in the field, employ clinical professional, you measure results.
You spend hours and hours in long-range strategic planning meetings.

SO WHAT.

The truth is, the average person you are trying to reach does not care about any of this.
What they need to know is how the work you are doing is connected to them. They don’t even know this is what they need to know… they are not yet engaged. Your job is to reach out and connect with them in a way that empowers them to care. Storytelling is definitely a way to do this.

How can this be avoided?

• Tell stories about your CAUSE, not about your organization.
• Make stories simple rather than complex. Focus on positive outcomes.
• Use consistent messaging to answer the “So what?” question.
• Start with your internal audience first and build upon that.

With these great guidelines, you can shift your organization’s messaging mindset and help further your mission.

By Robert Egger
Founder and President of the DC Central Kitchen
Co-Chair of the Nonprofit Congress

Over the next few weeks, newspapers around the country will be full of predictable, seasonal articles about nonprofit organizations.

Readers will be offered timely tips on how to support organizations that bring holiday cheer to the most-vulnerable Americans and dozens of tax-savvy ways to support good causes before year’s end. Roundups of the big news of 2006 will most certainly include Warren Buffett’s $37-billion donation to charity as one of the most significant events of the year.

But by New Year’s Day, charitable organizations will all but disappear from the newspaper pages, except for an occasional feel-good article about a local cause or an investigative report uncovering a nonprofit scandal.

It’s time for change. Nonprofit leaders must now make a solid case for newspapers to cover charitable organizations with the same sophistication accorded to business and government. After all, when nonprofit assets are bundled together they become as large as the seventh biggest economy in the world; what’s more, one of every 10 Americans works for a nonprofit organization.

Perhaps most remarkable, Americans donate more than $200-billion to charity a year without the benefit of the kind of regular, in-depth analysis or subjective review that would allow them to invest their money with some hope of impact or social return on investment.

Too many kind-hearted, generous, and intelligent Americans make charitable choices based on feelings — what looks, sounds, or feels good. They have come to believe that the nonprofit world, which is being relied on more and more to hold our communities together, can run vibrant organizations and provide top-drawer services based on random checks in the mail or through the endless pursuit of grants, contracts, or gifts. Perhaps most dangerous, they have come to believe that a nonprofit group’s ability to keep the nation’s creativity vibrant, its communities safe, and its citizens healthy and engaged can be achieved with little or no administrative overhead.

The public needs hard news and newspapers to explain to them why it is so damaging to think that any organization can be effective in dealing with major social issues if it doesn’t have money to spend and the overhead required to spend it with vision and audacity.

To make a real difference — and reward the public’s faith in nonprofit groups — charities need to attract the best staff members, and that can’t be done unless organizations spend part of their budgets on living wages and decent benefit and retirement packages to retain workers.

In particular, as nonprofit groups try to capture the interest of young people who are leaving college and the baby boomers who are retiring from the business world, they need to make a major push to attract the workers who are now poised to usher in a new era of organizational effectiveness and sustainability.

Good journalistic coverage of the nonprofit sector would also help the public understand that nonprofit groups, just like businesses, need to spend money on research and development efforts and that they will sometimes make mistakes as they develop strategies that could lead to crucial breakthroughs in how they serve society.

To demonstrate why nonprofit groups deserve the confidence of Americans, many nonprofit leaders have suggested that now is the time for ad campaigns designed to raise public awareness of charitable organizations.

But the information gap that has led to the loss of confidence in charities will not be solved through advertising drives. It can only be solved by pushing newspapers to produce informed, in-depth articles about nonprofit groups on their business pages and to put them there every day.

The idea should be easy to promote, especially at a time when newspapers are losing readers and ad revenue in epic proportions. The situation is so dire that several major newspaper companies have hired consultants or assigned their own reporters to try to determine what readers are looking for, and how to draw them back to subscribing.

One clear way for newspapers to bring back readers is for them to do a better job of covering the nonprofit organizations that are working across the country to solve problems that readers care deeply about. Americans are tired of hearing just about the problems — they want to know what is being done about them, not just by business or government, but by charities and foundations.

What’s more, the tens of millions of people who work for nonprofit organizations would like to read more about the issues that are germane to their daily efforts. And on any given day, hundreds of thousands of people are looking for an organization where they can volunteer — so they would like the equivalent of a restaurant or movie review and timetable as they figure out how best to use their free time.

Another reason newspapers have a self-interest in covering nonprofit organizations is the potential for generating more advertising. In 2006, corporate America is expected to spend $1.34-billion on marketing ventures that benefit charity. If newspapers published more news about nonprofit organizations, businesses that want to show they care about the community will show up in droves wanting to be sure their ads appear next to such coverage.

I have met with numerous editors over the last two years, seeking to make this point. In meeting after meeting I have come to a startling conclusion: The reason nonprofit groups do not get coverage is that newspapers simply do not know how to cover them.

Newspapers look at nonprofit groups and see charity, and subsequently envision an “annual guide to giving” as the height of coverage and something of a philanthropic gesture for the newspaper to publish.

Nonprofit groups need to help newspapers understand that they want tough coverage about important issues, not fluffy, feel-good stories. With better coverage of the nonprofit world, new or weaker groups would learn how they can strengthen, expand, and grow, and those that are not well-run or whose time has passed will be replaced for the right reasons.

With the help of nonprofit leaders, newspaper editors and reporters can learn to produce articles that help readers determine which groups will really bring about social change and which groups are so slovenly organized or focused on their own egos that they will never do anybody any good.

As the nonprofit world evolves, innovative financial and social experiments are being developed, and they demand deeper, more consistent coverage of whether these efforts point the way to the future. Social enterprise, volunteer “time banks,” small loans offered by microfinance organizations, and other innovations will require new measurements of how dollars and labor are mobilized to help social causes.

Maybe nonprofit groups should collaborate to develop our own Nasdaq or other measurement tools and then offer them to newspapers to publish alongside reports of how the stock market is doing and which companies are winners or losers.

The nonprofit equivalent would show which groups are making a real social impact and give investors the tools they need to reward boldness and achievement rather than continue today’s survival of the cleverest approach, in which many of the best charitable programs can’t attract the resources they need and poorly managed efforts garner plenty of donations by using cheap gimmicks or “cause du jour” marketing to lure ill-informed donors.

Without the regular flow of ideas, information, and analysis that newspapers provide about business and government, the nonprofit world will continue to operate in a state of chaos and competition. With more information will come an environment where good work is rewarded, fraud or failure is exposed and expunged, and everyone will be better prepared to invest their time, energy, and ideas with confidence.

So, here’s what nonprofit leaders should resolve to do as soon as this year’s holiday coverage has come to an end. Enlist the head of your local Chamber of Commerce or Board of Trade, a few of your region’s best-known philanthropists, as well as members of nonprofit boards and the people who are served by your local charities to make an appointment to visit the publisher or editors of your local newspaper. Make the case that strong nonprofit organizations are essential: They are good for business, which is good for the community, which is good for all.

But let them know one thing for certain: Today’s nonprofit world isn’t about charity, and its leaders mean business.

Robert Egger is president of the D.C. Central Kitchen, a leader of the Nonprofit Congress, and author of Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient, and Rewarding for All (HarperCollins)

1. Do you have a member on your board of directors that is a marketing professional that will lead the committee and hold its members accountable?

2. Will your committee be a working committee or serve to make recommendations to staff (if the latter, do you have the internal capacity to fulfill those recommendations?)

3. Who will recruit members, what is there understanding of marketing, and what is their motivation for who they will ask?

4. Do you have a staff member with the time and expertise to take ownership of the committee? How many staff members will have to attend the meetings and how often (and do they already have full schedules?)

5. Is there already a results-oriented organizational or departmental plan that is in place for the committee to use as a foundation, or will they be starting from scratch?