Raise Your Voice

by Brian Sooy

  Purpose, character, culture, and voice should be the filter for all aspects of communications (i.e., messaging, design, storytelling, touch points, and technology). They are the key to building trust; acknowledging them ensures the voice of your cause, the stories told by your organization, and the perceptions of the audience are aligned.

  Here’s a refresher on mission-driven design. Begin making your cause more approachable by answering these questions about the organization:

  What is the cause (e.g., education, hunger, etc.)?

  What is your organization’s purpose? Why does your organization exist? What is your organization on a mission to do; if this is your mission, then what exactly does the organization do? Purpose must be guided by mission. (e.g., make education affordable, end hunger)

  What is your organization’s character? Do your organization’s character qualities and values flow from its purpose? What character qualities guide the organization? What values are implied by the character qualities? How do these qualities appeal to the heart of your audience? (e.g., compassion, leadership, gratefulness, innovative, etc.)

  What is your organization’s culture? Does your organization’s internal culture and external behavior align with its values? What are its motivations? How does it speak to the audience’s mind? (e.g., are the organization’s motivations consistent with its character and purpose?)

  What is your organization’s voice? Does your organization speak effectively for the cause? Do your communications, activities, and interactions express the culture and character? Do all communications consistently speak with one voice? How will the organization speak? What is the tone of the communications?

  KEY INSIGHTS

  Be human. The perception of your cause is based on personal, human-focused principles that clearly articulate the cause, purpose, character and culture. Mission-driven design is the scope of strategy and communication tools with which you will reach your audience.

  MISSION-DRIVEN DESIGN IS A CATALYST

  With the clarity of clearly articulated core principles, mission-driven design becomes a catalyst that connects your cause with advocates, donors, volunteers, and the community. Through visual communications, interactive experiences, and relational touch points, design helps engage your stakeholders in meaningful conversations. Visual design supports consistency and creates familiarity.

  Familiarity creates context, nurtures continuity and supports a culture of trust. Imagine a range of touch points that attract, inform, inspire, and engage your audience, combined with messaging that makes the case for why your cause is meaningful. These touch points include your website, publications, electronic communications, printed materials, visual identity framework, and social media. Your audience becomes familiar with your cause through consistency in experience.

  A dialog with your audience through relational touch points shows that you know and understand the community, and know how to reach out to them. Continuity is created through the discipline of a consistent practice of applying your visual standards (design) and tone of voice.

  As your audience sees, hears, and experiences your communication touch points, they will continue to associate your organization as the voice of the cause. When you are familiar to them, they are more likely to accept your messaging and welcome you into their lives (especially if you’ve shown you understand what motivates their interest in your cause). Your audience will begin to identify with your organization and seek opportunities to become a part of your community.

  Design, in all formats and media, makes your stories visible. Design engages your stakeholders powerfully, from marketing and outreach to relationship building experiences and interactions.

  Now do you understand that all communications are donor communications, and must be donor-focused? How would you change your communication plan with that idea as the cornerstone?

  Along with context, there must be continuity – a single voice and perspective from which your organization speaks – in championing your cause. Each interaction is an opportunity to create a lasting impression of your cause.

  The next impression you make on an individual is only as good as the last impression you made; each interaction builds upon the previous one. Continuity through experience helps you build meaningful relationships, inspire trust, and motivate supporters to believe in and love your cause.

  KEY INSIGHTS

  Design and communications should speak to the motivation of your supporters –appealing to the mind, but speaking to the heart. Last impressions are just as important as first impressions. How you communicate makes what you communicate more powerful. How a cause is perceived is directly related to the personal interactions and experiences that individuals have with your organization.

  TWEET IT

  Our values and actions will align with the reasons that motivate our followers to believe in our cause. #beMeaningful #causemanifesto

  Part Two: Chapter Four

  Objective insights are the knowledge, information, statistics, and observations that prove your organization is having an impact. The data you collect is just that – data.

  Face it – numbers have the power to persuade and inform. Data can be your friend, and what better way to welcome a friend than to embrace her? She will help you tell your story in ways that cannot be argued against, and show you and others the results of your hard work.

  WHAT’S ON THE LABEL SHOULD REFLECT WHAT’S IN THE BOTTLE

  Think of your favorite product – a beverage, a household item, a food item – and what the package looks like and what’s inside the package that it represents.

  Whether it’s a bottle, a label, or a bag, the outside of the package represents what’s inside. Packaging is designed to create a perception of credibility and trust for what’s inside. If the label on the package doesn’t represent the contents, the buyer will be disappointed. The purpose of the packaging design is to convey trust.

  Stakeholders and prospective supporters are increasingly scrutinizing the causes and organizations they support or are considering supporting. They investigate personal and relational perspectives – do they know any of the volunteers or board members? They look at independent, impersonal, and objective perspectives – financial reports, independent reviews, and what they see in news media. They read guidestar.org and charitynavigator.org for objective evaluations and ratings.

  They want to be familiar with the cause and organizations they support. How have you packaged it?

  Every audience perceives causes and organizations in a different way, filtering their interpretation and reception of its identity, messaging, and mission. Using all of your available data and information will help you create messaging that informs, speak to impact, and progress toward outcomes.

  Think of it this way: You understand your organization’s character, purpose, mission, and culture. Your goal is to help your audience understand it in the same way you do in order to create a connection.

  DATA IS AN OBJECTIVE, IMPARTIAL INDICATOR OF AN ORGANIZATION’S PURPOSE

  What statistical data is relevant to your story? What is the best way of sharing that information with your stakeholders, so they understand and experience how effective you are in advancing the cause? What must you communicate in order to create advocacy and support for the outcomes you’re seeking to achieve?

  In the same way an organization must manage to outcomes, mission-driven design choices show you’re communicating about how you are achieving those outcomes.

  Have you seen Dan Pallotta’s thought-provoking TED talk? The way we think about charity is dead wrong (http://ow.ly/qI5Pm) challenges the thinking behind funding for communications and marketing in the context of program delivery and overhead.

  Pallotta remarks: “Too many nonprofits are rewarded for how little they spend – not for what they get done.” He suggests that we start rewarding charities for their goals and accomplishments, and that marketing and communication are an essential programming expense. Dat
a and information are tools that you can use to prove what you get done.

  Data and information – from the numbers on an organization’s Form 990, to social media messages, to research and reports from initiatives – matters. Some of the data you should be interested in is qualitative: internal and external feedback, observations, and insights based on circumstances or experiences. Some of the data you should be interested in is quantitative: numbers and statistics; budgets, revenues and expenses; polling data; and program metrics.

  Whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, paying attention to data (you can also call it information) means you’re listening. When you’re listening, that means you’re paying attention to the outcomes and results of your purpose and mission.

  Information is knowledge that can help guide and give insight to mission-driven design choices and communications. Data can be the foundation of a very compelling story.

  VOLUNTEER INSIGHTS – EXPERIENCE IS DATA

  A volunteer’s experiences will reflect the culture, quality of communications, and value placed on their service.

  The tendency in any organization is to look at activities from the inside out, but the problem with this is you can’t see or experience it as an outsider does. In essence, you can’t see the label if you’re on the inside of the bottle.

  Volunteers not only perceive an organization from an outside perspective; but, because of the nature of what they do, they also form a perception based on their internal volunteer experience. This is why it’s so critical that the external behavior and character of an organization accurately reflect the internal experience.

  Volunteers help advance the cause and are part of the narrative of the organization. They are participants in achieving the cause.

  Volunteers are ambassadors for the cause and contributors to the mission of the nonprofit organization.

  How effectively an organization communicates with volunteers indicates the level of respect it has for them.

  Volunteering is as much about the cause as it is about the feeling one gets while serving.

  A volunteer believes their contribution is meaningful and that it adds value to their life.

  OUTSIDE OBSERVATIONS

  From independent reviews of your nonprofit’s performance, to suggestions for monitoring how your organization and the cause it represents is perceived, here are several outside perspectives to which you should pay close attention:

  Charity Navigator: charitynavigator.org

  GuideStar: guidestar.org

  Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance Standards for Charity Accountability: bbb.org/charity-reviews

  Social media: Not only should an organization have a plan for social media, it should be monitoring its engagement on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms. Hootsuite, Twitonomy, and other social media management tools are essential resources for management and monitoring.

  Klout: klout.com

  TV and newspapers: Media reports will be more accurate when the board and the executive leadership can articulate the nature of the cause, and the mission of the organization.

  KEY INSIGHTS

  Paying attention to data means you’re listening. When you’re listening, that means you’re paying attention to the outcomes and results of your purpose and mission.

  TWEET IT

  Data will help us tell our story and gain greater knowledge and insight into the outcomes of our mission. #beInsightful #causemanifesto

  Part Two: Chapter Five

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE INSPIRING?

  Words inspire us. How they are designed and how they are delivered can make them more meaningful and more powerful. The right words, shared at the right time, give meaning to individuals and groups who have an affinity for your cause. Words create an expectation of reality; anticipation for what is promised, hope for what is to come.

  To be inspiring is to cast a vision for what the future will be, and how that future will be realized through the mission of your organization.

  Words are powerful elements of alignment: key themes and messaging must be carefully selected and crafted to create a memorable perception of your organization and the cause it represents. The words and phrases that are chosen (such as the positioning statement, the tag line and words that represent the values, character, and attributes of the cause) are the phrases that you want your followers and advocates to share and to use in conversation about the cause. Ambassadors should know what to say, and how to say it inspirationally.

  Words – combined with powerful typography and memorable imagery – evoke meaning, motivate people to action, and become a catalyst that leads to changed thinking in the minds (and hearts) of those you’re seeking to engage.

  Changed thinking leads to changed behavior. Change the perception of the cause (how your supporters think about it), and you’ll change the behavior of the supporter.

  Consider the example of an independent economic development organization that represents a Midwest county. Our research revealed (and was validated by post-visit surveys), that site selectors characterized the county as a lazy, backwards, rust-belt region of the country. To project a positive perception of the county (and after research into what site selectors are looking for in a locale), we chose the phrases “welcoming, hard working, forward thinking, progressive, and vibrant.”

  Herein lies the power of words: as the economic development organization integrated these positive phrases into their marketing and presentations, perceptions began to change. This was most evident when the post-visit surveys show that site selectors were now beginning to use those same words in their descriptions of the county and how they described their visit.

  Every interaction – words that are read, spoken, or heard – must be positive and encourage participation in the future that is promised and the change to which your organization aspires. Inspiring words convey hope.

  Even your visual identity must be inspiring. It should represent what you aspire to become and the community that you are inviting your supporters to belong to.

  To inspire is to stir the heart and challenge the mind of a follower. When an individual understands that their values align with your organization’s values and the cause it represents, their participation gives them more than an opportunity to be involved. It gives them a story to share, a point of connection, and personal meaning.

  Your organization must be inspiring, because people want a cause to believe in. Choose your words well and they will motivate people to follow, donate to, advocate for, and believe in your cause. Inspire them, and they will be motivated and engaged. Inspire them and they will become more than advocates and donors – they will become believers in the cause.

  Does your board orientation include a session to inspire the new directors?

  The first place to instill the sense of inspiration is in the board of directors – those individuals who have committed, first and foremost, to the success of the organization. They must be the ambassadors that believe whole-heartedly in your cause. Does your board orientation include a session to inspire the new directors to inspire others?

  Why are believers important? Volunteers and donors will give of their time and money, advocates will be engaged in promoting the cause – but believers will give and serve sacrificially. Believers become ambassadors, who will represent your organization wherever they are, because their values align with the cause. Believers will follow wherever the organization leads, and will support your cause when you’ve inspired them to action. Your inspiration gives them meaning because they are part of the change and impact.

  The world is watching, and it is asking: “Do you want me to follow? Inspire me!”

  KEY INSIGHTS

  Design inspires. It makes your mission visible, and connects the cause with the heart and mind. Mission-driven design is personal, human-focused design. It enables your organization to share many messages with one voice, for one purpose, about one cause, in a manner that is most meaningful t
o the donor.

  TWEET IT

  Share stories that speak to the mind and appeal to the heart. #beInspiring #causemanifesto

  Part Two: Chapter Six

  Have you ever had this kind of conversation?

  “Hello, how are you?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  And that’s where it ends? It’s as if you wanted to play catch, and threw somebody a ball – only to have the person hold the ball and not throw it back.

  Being engaging isn’t always about sharing the great things you’re doing. Sometimes you need to ask your audience what they think, in order to find the points of interest where they want to have a conversation with your organization. People are always interested in talking about themselves!

  When was the last time you asked your audience:

  “What do you expect of us?”

  “What is your experience with us like?”

  “Why do you support our cause?”

  Have you contacted your major funders recently and asked them “Are you satisfied with the impact of your investment?” Have you asked them how they are doing?

  What do you think might change if you asked your major donors these questions and discussed these statements?

  What is the most effective way we can communicate with you?