What happens when control of your nonprofit's message (frankly, always an illusion) passes from your organization, and the traditional media, to your audiences? Well you better figure it out quick, because it's happening right now.
Every nonprofit I know has centered its communications strategy around a brand (whether defined as such, or not), expressed through a graphic identity and a narrative one -- positioning and key messages. We've trained our leaders and staff members to keep on message, and ensured that our print and online content does so as well.
That's the right way to start. But it's only a start -- now more than ever.
The shift is all about decentralization. In the past, your audiences have gathered their news from you (via direct communications) and the media (your conduit). Not that message control was completely in your hands. Journalists and letters to the editor often reframe, or even dispute, your messages. But that could be addressed, as long as you tracked (and responded to) coverage.
Now these approaches are being superceded by what's happening at the edges of increasingly ubiquitous networks. As your audiences combine powerful online tools and innovative "social networking" approaches (peer-to-peer information sharing), they create online content on your nonprofit and its programs. While the audiences for this content are still relatively small, it is likely they will become mainstream. For many 18-30 year olds, they already are.
Two Key Alternative Info Sources
Here are the two core genres of alternative news and information sites that have evolved outside of traditional media, and, in many cases are driven by a self-defined community.
- Aggregators:
- o Sites such as Google News and Huffington Post are aggregating news produced by nonprofits and traditional media, and repackaging it by topic or point of view.
- o Alert services such as Google and Yahoo Alerts deliver links to online content on user-defined words and phrases, directly to users' email boxes.
- o Blog readers (I use Bloglines) that allow your audiences to easily aggregate content from a variety of sources (but mostly blogs at this point).
- o I use Bloglines to track bloggers who write in the marketing and nonprofit marketing arena, so that I can keep up, and join the conversation with a comment when it makes sense.
- o Email mailing lists that enable any self-defined group of individuals to discuss your organization, and to post this conversation online. Our block (Owen Drive) has an active mailing list where neighbors talk fast and furious on everything from school board elections to the forced eviction of old-time small businesses at the local strip mall.
- Participatory Communities - Think Idealist.Org, TechSoup, Nonprofit Blog Exchange...
Broadband networks, wireless access and new online- publishing tools all contribute to the emergence of audience-generated news, information and opinion. Blogs and message boards are the most visible form right now, serving to connect folks with common interests and sometimes perspectives. Email and IM (instant messaging) also accelerate audience-to-audience information flow.
Picture: - o A program participant blogging about the strong facilitator, or the sloppy handouts.
- o A frustrated online advocate complaining about the glitch in your nonprofit's system that prevented him from easily registering his protest on your key issue of the moment.
- o A satisfied donor with the information she receives about your nonprofit's new programs, and related use of recent gifts, shares that information on a community bulletin board.
What's happened is that audiences -- starting with teens through 30s -- have become dissatisfied with traditional media and are becoming more active participants in the exchange of news and ideas. So the dissemination model of marketing and communications is transformed to conversation.
- Why Your Nonprofit Should Care
Very simply...
- 1. Your audiences are now participating in shaping the way your nonprofit is perceived via joining in blog and message board conversations, among others.
- 2. Their content may be viewed as being just as valid as yours is, and is just as easily found via online search engines and links.
- 3. As a result, your nonprofit has less control than ever before -- on how the organization is perceived.
- 4. Your communications model has to change.
- What You Should Do About It
Lots. Scan. Listen. Participate.
Source: http://www.nancyschwartz.com/nonprofits_losing_message_control.html
About the Author
Nancy E. Schwartz helps nonprofits succeed through effective marketing and communications. As President of Nancy Schwartz & Company (http://www.nancyschwartz.com/), Nancy and her team provide marketing planning and implementation services to organizations as varied as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, and Wake County (NC) Health Services.
Subscribe to her free e-newsletter "Getting Attention", (http://www.nancyschwartz.com/getting_attention.html) and read her blog at http://www.gettingattention.org/ for more insights, ideas and great tips on attracting the attention your organization deserves.
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