Strategic Communications for Nonprofits

A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the Media

Kathy Bonk, Emily Tynes, Henry Griggs, Phil Sparks

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780470181546
• eBook ISBN: 9780470443286
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

This is a new edition of Strategic Communications for Nonprofits, which was first published in 1999. It is an up-dated, nuts-and-bolts guide to helping nonprofits design and implement successful communications strategies. The bookoffers a unique combination ofstep-by-step guidance on effective media relations andassistance in constructingand developing an overall communications strategy aimed atcreating social or policy change. It first explains the basic principles of a strategic communications strategy that will define the target audiences you need to reach and tells how to develop the messages and messengers you use to reach them. The book then goes on to address specific issues like earning good media coverage, building partnerships to increase available resources, handling a crisis, and more. This second edition builds on the earlier work and includes new case studies, new trends in media and branding, ethnic media issues, and trends in technology.

Chapter 1
The Basics of Strategic Communications

How can we get people talking about the real problems in our society?

What does it take to get coverage of important issues in newspapers and on the nightly news?

What is the best way to protect and expand our organization’s communications budget?

People responsible for communications in nonprofit groups often find themselves asking questions like these, and more:

How can I build relationships with reporters?

What can be done about coverage of political campaigns that focuses on personalities instead of issues?

How can we get coverage of our group and issues that translates into more members and fundraising success?

One way to start answering these questions is to have a sound, well-planned communications strategy. Such a strategy goes far beyond the basics of public relations, which typically have included media lists, regular press releases, and occasional events. You also need to have an understanding of your target audiences, changes in the news industry, and how issues move through the media “food chain.” New technologies, the Internet, and trends affecting journalism are dramatically changing the nature of media.

Strategic communications do include media outreach, but not as a standalone activity; rather, they must be integrated into other organizational functions, such as fundraising and membership building. Being strategic is not simply reacting to events, but anticipating and creating them. When successfully integrated into other management functions, strategic communications are tools for organizational leaders to use in both day-to-day operations and long-range planning for the growth and success of the entire operation.

Still, many nonprofit organizations operate as if e-mailing press releases and reaction statements, and holding press conferences now and then were sufficient ways to rally public support. They are not enough by themselves.

Good media coverage is a prized commodity, and it is built on a foundation of strong working relationships with key journalists and pursued through a well thought out plan of action. Such a plan typically includes carefully crafting messages, targeting reporters on a story-by-story basis, and receiving strategic guidance from polls and market research, which can be surprisingly affordable. Other important elements include building teams, framing messages, telling stories that will resonate with target audiences, training spokespeople, developing and marketing appropriate written materials, identifying opportunities to make news, and creating a system for evaluating progress.

A Built-in Advantage

Perhaps the first strategic insight for nonprofit communications is that there is a built-in advantage simply in being a nonprofit: what you are “pitching” to a reporter is meant to make a better world, not a bigger profit or an enhanced bottom line, and that approach often means a better story for journalists to cover. It is true that a group largely focused on advocacy in the state legislature or Congress may not be in quite the same position as, for example, a local homeless shelter or social service organization that is seen as purely charitable and does not engage in lobbying. But in most cases, nonprofits may have a foot in the door with journalists because of the special role nonprofits play in society.

Nonprofits may also be in a better position to provide personal stories and appeals to conscience and emotion than for-profit businesses. Finding good real-life stories in the ranks of your members, volunteers, or partners is important for a strategic communications plan, whether your work is strictly charitable, wholly directed at policy change, or someplace in between. For many audiences within the general public, and as a general trend in an age of information overload, personal stories are the ones that really matter. Reporters are always looking to “put a face” on their stories. But as we outline in Chapter Four on developing messages, focusing too intently on a personal story or “portrait” can leave people with the sense that “it’s their problem (and not mine).”

Lori Dorfman of the Berkeley Media Studies Group has compared so-called portrait and landscape stories in the media, observing that often change comes from the “fuller and broader perspective” on a situation.

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Good Communications Affect Your Whole Organization

Many of the same stories and appeals that make for good media outreach have equal value in fundraising and membership recruitment activity. For instance, a group might place a newspaper article that focuses on one family as representative of a larger problem or trend. The article could then be posted on the group’s Web site along with a short video interview with the people quoted in the newspaper. That link could also be sent to television reporters and producers, as evidence that the story passed muster with the newspaper and that the subject could do a good television interview. This might lead to a segment on the local television news, which could itself be posted on the Web site. Throughout this process, a savvy communications director is also e-mailing messages to potential members or donors to demonstrate your group’s general impact and media smarts while asking for funds to expand media activities.

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Working Collaboratively

Many nonprofits with a goal of changing public policy or raising awareness seek to enhance their clout by engaging in ongoing collaborative relationships or ongoing coalitions that strategize, advertise, and sometimes lobby together. Of course, for-profit businesses also collaborate and work in coalitions, but nonprofits are different in this respect too because they aren’t driven by commercial competitiveness; they tend to collaborate with groups that complement their group’s goals and culture.

With the rise of advocacy activities, strategists working with nonprofits have developed and refined a collaborative model for change-oriented groups that is centered on the development of a communications strategy, but goes far beyond simply planning media outreach. One element of the collaborative model is that groups must find common ground in the message they want to bring to the public, and the process of determining that message can itself build a working team. When partner organizations can weave their resources and perspectives into a collaborative strategy based on shared values, they benefit through better fundraising and constituent recruitment too.

Solid public opinion research and analysis of news trends on complex issues are keys to bringing and keeping such groups together. From a shared knowledge base, groups can work as partners to shape key messages and to cultivate skilled and credible messengers. Through such collaboration, groups with limited resources can influence the news media, help bring neglected issues forward, and reframe public understanding in ways that lead to better policies.

Building Media Skills

Another positive trend for nonprofits is that grantmakers and the foundation world have begun offering media training and skill building for their grantees. Major foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, are trendsetters in this arena. For example, in the Midwest, the Chicago-based Community Media Workshop, a nonprofit brainchild of journalists and media relations experts, is helping community groups connect with media to promote news that matters. This workshop has trained thousands of spokespeople and media strategists on evolving trends, offering practical tips for a modest cost. Others based on this model are springing up across the United States and around the world.

Academia is also responding to the demands for communications strategists. Columbia University in New York City has a master’s degree program in strategic communications, and American University in Washington operates the Institute for Strategic Communication for Nonprofits, to name just two. Nearly all schools of communications have courses on strategic communications built on many of the strategies outlined in the following chapters. In addition, cognitive linguists in colleges and universities are providing important insights into how brain research combined with an understanding of language development can guide framing and messaging activities.

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All these trends in journalism, philanthropy, academia, and technology can help identify and enhance channels of believable information, making the case for a larger investment and more sophisticated approach to strategic communications.

Organizational Values

The strategic communications programs that work best are firmly rooted in an organization’s values and purpose. Your communications plan should support your organization’s goals and mission statement. Communication is a tool, not an end in itself; neither a tail wagging the dog nor a quick fix for organizational challenges but, rather, one factor in your success.

Our work in the world of nonprofit communications has demonstrated time and again that public awareness of a nonprofit’s activities and positions on issues is only one part of the picture. Good communications can also change attitudes both inside and outside an organization and enhance the prospects for success of almost any program or initiative you undertake. That’s because a successful communications strategy ensures that ongoing activities are aligned to support the organization’s long-term goals, its mission and values.

The funding community understands the importance of values-based messaging. For example, Alan Jenkins, a top executive from the Ford Foundation, founded the Opportunity Agenda based on the lessons from numerous grantees. His group now provides critical insights into the core American values around the concept of “opportunity,” which encompasses fairness, equality, freedom, and civil liberties.

Such a strategic approach for nonprofits can lead to significant social change, increase an organization’s membership, and move its financial bottom line well into the black, all at the same time. Conversely, nonprofits and public agencies that fail to understand the importance of building media strategies on the foundation of their mission and values make their overall work harder and less believable.

Even a small start-up organization can influence public opinion and public policy with a well-planned, well-executed communications strategy.

• Five years after its founding, the tiny but media-savvy International Campaign to Ban Land Mines won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.
• In 2007, a group called Numbers USA organized a populist revolt that derailed immigration legislation backed by the White House and top congressional leaders. Part of the group’s strategy consisted of organizing the sending of one million faxes to Congress, but numbers don’t tell the whole story. The messages contained in those faxes were successful in large part because they focused on policy questions and were scrubbed of all xenophobic language.
• A cover story in Ms. magazine, combined with the support of a handful of groups working to end sweatshop factory conditions in the Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory in the South Pacific), was able to turn around a decade of abuse by convincing Congress to apply U.S. labor standards and laws to employers there.

Why Nonprofits Resist Effective Communications Tools

Not every group will be able or willing, or will even have the need, to conduct a full-blown strategic communications plan. But prepa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Content
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About CCMC: Communications Strategies for Policy Change
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Basics of Strategic Communications
• Chapter 2: Elements of a Strategic Communications Plan
• Chapter 3: Conducting Research and Targeting Audiences
• Chapter 4: Framing and Developing Messages
• Chapter 5: Navigating a Changing Industry
• Chapter 6: Making the Most of Your Resources
• Chapter 7: Earning Good Media Coverage
• Chapter 8: Responding to a Media Crisis and Managing Backlash
• Chapter 9: Selecting and Training Spokespeople
• Chapter 10: Capitalizing on the Power of Partnerships
• Chapter 11: Chapters Online: Graphics, Advertising, and Evaluation
• Resources
• Index
• End User License Agreement