March 5, 2010
It’s not rare in charity communications, particularly during human disasters where suffering and death is a reality, to be treading a fine line between expressing a vital need for awareness (and hard cash) and maintaining the dignity and pride of the people we support.
Some will tell you: get real – the public needs to see the cold hard truth of disaster, need and struggle. This is a sure route to the money rolling in and lives being saved or improved. Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing stakes out his case against Unicef’s preferred use of positive imagery and empowerment here.
He says: “To me, choosing feel-good fundraising over effective fundraising is immoral. The trade-off is way too steep; lives are at stake. The only reason people respond to [a Unicef advert] is because they’re seeing the real pictures elsewhere.”
Pretty stern and controversial stuff. I’m not so sure I can agree with Jeff here, and I think - in the UK at least – we may be finally reaching a tipping point in the “charity model”. It’s no coincidence that Professional Fundraising magazine and its sister titles have re-launched as ‘Civil Society’ publications, and refer to charities as ‘civil society organisations’. This change in tone echoes the shift in the internal make-up of voluntary organisations (another slightly awkward moniker for our sector).
Scope, for example, can boast an increasing number of disabled staff working throughout the organisation and leading the charity through the informed, lived experiences of actually being disabled. This is a far cry from The Spastics Society of the 1980’s, which arguably personified a more paternal approach to ‘helping’ disabled people, led by non-disabled management. At my own charity Whizz-Kidz, our CEO is a wheelchair user who knows firsthand what it is like to have waited her first seven years for independent mobility. As well as that, we have a ‘Kidz Board’ of 12 incredibly creative and innovative young disabled people, who make decisions on campaigning and the direction of our 600 strong young regional ambassadors.
While I’m on the subject, check out the impact on the lives of the young people we support, as demonstrated by this video depicting some of them consulting with The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the Exhibition Road project. Sure, this isn’t a fundraising ask – but telling related stories and amplifying the authentic voices of our users helps paint a picture as to:
- why what we do is important
- what we support young people to do off their own backs and following their own interests.
My ‘food for thought’ here is that our sector should be trying to innovate fundraising and awareness-raising by working hand-in-hand with the people we support. We should strive to be organisations “of” and not “for”.
Absolutely, the lived-experiences and voices of our (pick a term) service users / clients / beneficiaries should be at the forefront of our messages. But personally I think – and hope – that we are past the stage where we objectify them. Think of your next campaign or appeal. How are you telling your story, and how do you balance creating a public appetite for need versus being authentic and true to those you support? Do you have an advisory panel or focus groups made up of users? We must make their stories our stories to challenge public assumptions about what we can positively achieve if we work together.
Rob Dyson is PR Manager at young people’s mobility charity Whizz-Kidz, and a board member at CharityComms. He founded the Third Sector PR and Communications Network on Facebook, and also tweets from @thirdsectorPR / @robmdyson
February 26, 2010
Lunch at the Cinnamon Club on Wednesday with members of CharityComms - and I don’t even start as the new director until next week. Now that’s what I call a welcome to the sector.
The burning topic for debate was the challenges a new government might bring, particularly one of a Conservative persuasion. Despite the convivial surroundings and excellent opportunity for networking with nearly 50 communications professionals from across the sector, a surprising number of guests applied themselves with vigour to the question under discussion.
I can’t attribute quotes to specific individuals, not through any post-Bullying-Helpline sense of safeguarding privacy, but simply because as a newcomer to the sector I don’t yet know everyone’s names. But whoever those high-powered and articulate diners were, they raised some interesting points:
- While many charities currently work with mature backbench and even maverick MPs willing to challenge party orthodoxy, the 300-odd shiny new MPs starting work in May/June will be very whippable and therefore less susceptible to persuasive argument from charities.
- The Conservatives’ emphasis on localism will make it harder to take the Government to account.
- Hung parliament or no, post-election politics will be temporarily paralysed.
- There is great potential to divide and rule, with charities competing against each other and the private sector for service delivery or research funding.
- Lack of funding from a new government of whichever variety will mean more social division and inequality. The economy will take precedence over environment and development.
So far so negative. But to balance the sense of doom in the dining room, some more positive sparks chipped in:
- Those 300 new MPs will all be looking for a chance to shine brighter than the rest of the crowd, and associating themselves with a specific cause could help them carve out a niche.
- The Tories are making encouraging noises on Gift Aid and have promised to ring-fence international development aid. They have also said they are interested in listening to real people’s voices, which many charities with local groups or community involvement can provide.
- A hung parliament – or an outright winner with a small majority – could provide compelling opportunities for tactical opposition lobbying.
A change in government after 13 years will mean charities will need to tread carefully to avoid the charge of partisanship. Whatever the shade of government, they will need to communicate effectively across the political spectrum. As the new director of CharityComms, I can’t wait to be part of helping charities rise to those challenges – even if the quality of lunch goes downhill from now on.
Vicky Browning is Director of CharityComms
February 26, 2010
You’ve worked for months to create a strong, comprehensive communications strategy and everyone’s signed it off. You’re sitting back, looking at the front page, feeling rather self-satisfied. Then you get an email from a colleague who wants you to put out a release on a new project that’s entirely unrelated to the core focus you all agreed you would stick to.
Developing a communications strategy is often the easiest bit. You consult, you research, you analyse, and you develop a clear set of conclusions that you think will make everyone’s lives ten times easier – not least your own! But then five minutes after it’s been rubber stamped, someone in the organisation wants to communicate something totally different. ‘Yes, I know it’s not in the strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good opportunity’, they say.
They may well be right, and a good strategy has the flexibility built into it to adapt in light of unexpected developments. But at the same time, it has to do the job it was created for – it has to be a constant guiding light, keeping you and the rest of the organisation focused on what really matters, what will make a difference, what will be worth the investment.
When it comes to gaining media coverage (one part, but not the sole focus, of a good communications strategy), many people look for quantity not quality. A decent strategy is there to help you make the case against that, without having to argue the point endlessly. You put the effort in to get it set down on paper and approved by all those who will help make it happen; and then, you place it delicately in front of them if they want to steer away in a different direction.
And yet so often, when we start working with a new charity and we ask about their communications strategy, they – looking slightly embarrassed – reach for a dusty folder sitting high up on a bookshelf somewhere. ‘We did one a while back, but… to be honest…’. The intentions are good, but often people get diverted too quickly, too easily – possibly because they haven’t treated the strategy with quite the right amount of weight and importance from the start. So here are some tips that should help to really make your life easier next time.
1. Know what it will do for you further down the line
Don’t create a strategy for its own sake; create a strategy that will give you something to fall back on and refer to on a regular basis. If you set out just to get it done, it won’t have the lasting impact it can, and should, have.
2. Get buy-in across the whole organisation
It might make it more time-consuming and complex, but getting meaningful input from trustees, chief executive, senior managers and frontline staff will mean this is a strategy for the charity, not just for the communications team, and will make it easier for you to use it in defence of your position further down the line.
3. Build in some flexibility
If the strategy is too rigid, it will get shelved as soon as something even slightly ‘off-plan’ happens. Build in recognition of the fact that things change, and focus on identifying guiding principles, rather than specifics.
4. Involve a third party
Get input from a communications professional outside the organisation, who can provide you with some objective insight. It can help add credibility by avoiding having the strategy labelled as too personal or subjective.
5. And finally… don’t look too far ahead
Five year strategies can be tempting: they mean you won’t have to do another one for ages! But they are rarely realistic, and tend to get shunted to one side after a while, as staff, priorities and budgets change. Commit to a strategic review every year – ideally aligned with the review of organisational objectives, so everything can work in sync.
Kirsty Kitchen is Account Director at Amazon, a communications agency specialising in work for the voluntary and public sectors
February 19, 2010
There are some job titles in the charity sector that make my heart sink. Procurement officer is one of them – but purely because it means we can guarantee a torturous limbo-dancing set of tender obstacles.
But the title that makes me shrug my shoulders with bewilderment is ‘marketing director’. I have no idea what a marketing director is in a charity. In some places, it means fundraising director – they are just too coy to use the term. But marketing director can also mean communications director. And then again, a marketing director can be somebody who is actually a sales director – there to sell services, training or the charity itself.
So why is the word marketing so confusing and meaningless in charities? One reason is that charities can never agree what it is they are marketing: they can be marketing making a donation, marketing the whole organisation or marketing a charity’s services.
Another is that marketing is about understanding what stakeholders want and then delivering it to them. So marketing is always a constrained activity: charities can never actually deliver what their stakeholders want. Donors want to believe their gift will change the world, but without admin or fundraising costs. Smokers want to believe they can go on with impunity and let somebody else find the miracle drug that will stop them getting cancer. Charities can know what their stakeholders want, but can rarely give it to them simply and unambiguously.
So any time somebody uses the term marketing in a charity, the first question should be: ‘marketing what?’.
Simply building the word marketing into a job title is a recipe for ambiguity and tautology. It’s a little bit like creating a job called ‘director of meetings’. Which meetings? Who is at them? My favourite extension of this mad mania for marketing muddle is the lovely double-barrelled job: director of marketing and communications, or director of marketing and fundraising. Take out the marketing and these are sensible job-titles; as they stand, they are like having a ‘director of personnel and human resources’. The only sense it makes is nonsense.
Understanding and delivering to stakeholders is a key task for charities. But it makes far more sense to work out what we should be doing first with marketing in charities, implementing it and then creating the job titles. Starting with the job title is a recipe for complacency and confusion.
Joe Saxton is driver of ideas at nfpSynergy, and founder and chair of CharityComms.
February 17, 2010
ngo.media’s Trina Wallace reports on the latest CharityComms seminar
You can understand their disillusionment.
One minute, potential supporters and donors are told that charities desperately need their hard-earned cash to change lives. The next, they read about the latest charity rebrand, costing thousands of pounds, which appears to have produced, wow, a brand new logo.
Charity communicators know that rebrands aren’t all about flash new logos: they’re about rethinking what your organisation does, questioning what you’ve been doing for years and adapting to the times so you do it better. They’re not glossy makeovers; good rebrands rebuild up from your organisation’s foundations.
That doesn’t happen overnight.
Good rebranding requires an overall brand strategy to bring about change both inside and outside of your organisation. This takes years rather than months.
Mencap are bearing all this in mind following their rebrand in 2008. “Changing how you behave is as important as changing the way you look,” says Lucie Brown, Head of Brand Communications at Mencap. Lucie talked about the charity’s brand strategy at the last CharityComms seminar.
If it means you better communicate what you do, how your charity improves people’s lives and why you need help to do even more good work, it will be obvious that your rebrand is money well spent.
Here are three key top tips on how to do this, based on Lucie’s CharityComms presentation.
1. Paint the whole picture. Following their rebrand, all Mencap’s activities and materials must, using their key messages, refer to other aspects of what the organisation does.
2. There’s no better advocate for your charity than the people you support – tell their story. Mencap staff realised that to live their values and really be the voice of learning disabilities, all communications must include information delivered by someone with a learning disability.
3. You know what you do, but other people might not – don’t use jargon. Lucie and colleagues discovered that most people do not understand what having a learning disability means. As a result, now all Mencap communications must explain, in some way, what a learning disability is as well as the challenges, barriers to inclusion and prejudices faced by people with a learning disability.
Trina Wallace is a writer at ngo.media, the leading editorial, copywriting, publications and training agency working only with charities, socially driven organisations and ethical businesses.
February 12, 2010
So you’ve been asked to write a social media strategy…
Social media – it’s hard to avoid it these days, whether reading about engaging bloggers on Third Sector, why you should invest in social media on this very blog, or even why social websites might be bad for kids brains on Newsnight.
But once you’ve decided that it is worth investing in, and, very importantly, that it fits with your wider communication and marketing strategies, where do you start? It’s a question I’ve been asked a few times recently, and whilst I certainly don’t profess to know the answer, there are a lot of great resources and articles on the web that will help you to form your own ideas.
The first thing to do, before you dive head first into one channel, is find out more about your audience. There’s no point spending all your time on Twitter if your users only like Facebook.
Discovering more about your audience
To find where your audience is and what they’re saying, you’ll want to set up some listening posts with tools like Google alerts and check whether people are talking about you on social sites by using social mention, Addict-o-matic or Samepoint. For delving deeper into this, online marketing guru Dave Chaffey has a great comparison of paid-for and free online reputation management software on his blog.
If you want to profile your audience by the activities they take part in, then research company Forrester’s technographic ladder will help you define and segment them and see where your opportunities are.
Then for a general overview, Trendwatching’s 10 crucial consumer trends for 2010 will give you some interesting ideas of areas you could then focus on and tie your work into.
Case studies and examples to use (or borrow)
Now you know what your audience looks like, you’ll need to set yourselves some objectives and write some guidelines.
Where better to start a social media strategy, than by using someone else’s: Econsultancy has listed 16 social media guidelines used by real companies like IBM and the BBC. This is also handy for demonstrating that you need a strategy in the first place!
If you’re not sure how to pull all your thoughts into one place, these are great to build upon. Another unlikely organisation to share their social media guidelines is the US Air Force – but they have, and it’s a great example.
One of the most popular social media bloggers is Chris Brogan, and he’s compiled a list of social media related case studies if you need more examples, as well as a post on what he would do if he started today that really helps to take a step back and think about what you’re trying to achieve.
Measurement
This is the acid test. You’ve got your strategy, you’re implementing it and people are following you on Twitter, being fans on Facebook and ‘friending’ you on LinkedIn or wherever else you’ve set up shop. But how do you know that you’re being successful. What is all this achieving?
Well, the jury’s still out for many on exactly what is the best thing to measure, but again, you can read what other people are measuring and decide whether it’s appropriate for your audience.
On the Media 140 blog, Damien Austin-Walker, wrote about how they measure their social media strategy. And another of this blog’s contributors, Rob Dyson, shared how he was tracking the social media metrics for his charity Whizz-Kidz – which prompted a great debate in the comments.
If numbers are your thing, ‘conversation agency’ We Are Social shared all the 2009 stats for their blog and linked social media sites recently. It’s a long read, but a very interesting one if you want to know more about what can be measured and how. Would you, or do you, track the same things?
Now that there are tools out there that will help you measure your activities on Twitter or Facebook, the key thing is deciding *what* to track. And for that, you’ll need to think about what’s most relevant to your organisation and your supporters, as well as deciding what it is that you’re trying to achieve.
Jonathan Waddingham is the Digital Strategist at the UK’s leading online fundraising platform JustGiving, and you can say hello to him on Twitter at @jon_bedford.
February 5, 2010
A charity’s ability to communicate well can mean the difference between reaching the people you were established to help, and falling far short of your ambitions.
At Forster we specialise in tailoring communications for older people, young people and traditionally ‘hard-to-reach’ audiences. Here are a few pointers from what we’ve learnt along the way.
Know your audience
Defining your audience purely by age or by interest is no longer enough. Tailor each message for specific sub-groups based on what you know about them. Wherever possible, test your messages with your audiences first. A national campaign may need several spokespeople to ensure you connect with everyone.
Speak your audience’s language
People’s language varies depending on context, adjust the language to suit the medium, ensuring it’s understandable but not dumbed down. For a social media campaign you might use casual language, switching to ‘proper’ English for an educational resource.
Beware the ‘yoof’ speak trap
Don’t turn your audience off by attempting to mimic them. You’ll almost certainly get it wrong. Concise or text-based language can grab young people’s attention but make sure you follow it up with more thorough information on web links.
Understand the language of modern media
Modern media is a complex mix. To communicate effectively tailor the language you use to suit each outlet. Different media channels have different ‘reading age’ levels. It’s generally accepted that the broadsheets cater for a higher reading age, while the tabloids use simpler words and sentence structure for easy comprehension. This varies within any publication – political or business articles typically use more complex language than entertainment features. Tweak your press releases to suit the range of style and language.
Avoid presumptions based on readability though – in reality The Sun reaches more ABC1 readers than any other UK paper. And an online reader might dip into several different newspapers in one day.
Think outside the box
Communication methods extend far beyond traditional media and are more sophisticated – and interactive – than ever. Forster uses social media to place messages at the heart of the audience – our ‘It Doesn’t Have to Happen’ anti-knife crime campaign has nearly 12,000 friends on Bebo.
Don’t assume knowledge
Texting and typing has fuelled an acronym explosion in chat rooms and on Twitter. Acronyms and abbreviations are rife in the third sector as they save time and can prevent RSI (repetitive strain injury) – try typing that a few times – but they can alienate readers too so PWC (proceed with caution). Some are quite culture-specific: only cricket fans recognise lbw, and dating ads bemuse the uninitiated (‘CAP SAM ISO DF FS CD; WAA’ anyone?). Never presume your audience is as familiar with an acronym as you are.
Be web literate
People approach web copy differently from print. Instead of poring over pages, readers quickly ‘scan’ for relevant words and phrases. Use clear headings and bite-size information chunks over long, waffling copy.
Plain English
And finally, good communication isn’t about creating tortured phrases or showing off an impressive vocabulary – it’s about reaching your target audience. “Behind clear communication is clear thinking”, says Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign. We, at Forster, are inclined to agree.
Lisa Mangan, Media Strategist, Forster
January 28, 2010
The digital world is full of exciting opportunities for charities to connect with supporters and achieve real change for good in society.
Whether it’s social networking, Twitter, mobile apps or the next big thing, every day brings new ideas and ways of going digital. Now, I’m a passionate believer in the transformative power that digital technology brings to charities and spend my days helping clients become ever more digitally led in their communications activities. But increasingly one of my roles as a consultant is to help those responsible for digital in charities to focus on the people in their organisation, to ensure the right skills and right level of resource is in place.
Very often the starting point for charities who want to raise their game online is to focus on changing the technology based on the assumption that it’s not possible or necessary to change the people. But good technology is irrelevant if there’s no-one to get the most from it. Even bad technology can deliver spectacular results in the hands of a skilled and creative person.
In our experience, charities seem to go through four stages of development with resourcing their digital activity. They will appoint staff in the following stages:
Stage 1
Volunteer – maybe a volunteer or staff member with other responsibilities.
Stage 2
Webmaster – often a part or full time technical resource with or without a content management system.
Stage 3
Web Editor – usually with a content management system and they’ll have started to employ other team members.
Stage 4
Head of New Media- leading a team of different disciplines.
How far the organisation’s progressed through these different stages often depends on: the size and cause of the charity, the scale of the audience you’re reaching online, the priority given to digital, potential returns from digital and length of time the organisation has been investing in digital.
Each stage has its pros and cons and a charity may well stay at any given stage indefinitely. We’ve been able to help charities make significant progress with digital by moving up a stage or by scaling up within a stage.
Searching on the web, there’s lots of information about technology, but there’s much less information to help charities of any size determine what sort of skills they need to support their digital activities. It’s also hard to find information to help those responsible for websites to make the business case for increasing resources dedicated to digital communications.
I’m always looking for feedback from people in charities as to what digital skills work well, what types of digital team structure are successful and how to scale up. I’ll be exploring these areas at the CharityComms seminar on March 10th and would love to hear from anyone who has strong opinions in this area.
So before you rush to seek the next big digital idea, take a moment to think about whether investing in your people may have a bigger impact in 2010.
Jim Raymond is Operations Director of Baigent Digital, a consultancy and agency specialising in websites, online fundraising and digital strategies for charities.
January 18, 2010
I think we can safely say that choices regarding social media are no longer about “should we or shouldn’t we”, but “how do we use it to best effect?”
Just a few Facebook statistics show how important these channels can be, and this is only one media platform:
- In 2009 Facebook passed 350 million active users
- There are now more than 5.3 billion fans across the various causes and organisations listed
- More than 70% of users are outside of the USA (so the rationale that it’s just the Americans who like this sort of thing no longer holds water)
Attitudes to social media as a mainstream communications tool appear to be changing, as research and ideas company Marketing Sherpa’s latest findings suggest. The chart below shows that a large proportion of organisations are prepared to increase their formal investment in social media in a controlled way. In other words, they’re treating social media like any other communications channel.
So, why are organisations more prepared than they were previously to utilise these channels? I think there are a few reasons but crucially, we can all now see some real-world success being enjoyed by businesses and charities as a result of social media. So, the perceived risk of trying something new isn’t quite so significant.
Secondly, we know that truly successful organisations are integrating their activities across a number of communications channels, targeting key audiences and ensuring their social media activity builds on and reinforces their other communications. This results in their key messages being delivered to a wider audience, as well as encouraging more audience feedback than could ever be achieved prior to the arrival of social media. Thanks to the two-way channel of communication it provides, a relationship is being built with the audience through interactivity and we no longer do all the talking.
Thirdly, we need to make our messages visible and take them straight to our audiences. For the marketers amongst us this is just common sense and has been a core tenet of targeting activity for years. One of my favourite real-world examples is Bullying UK, a charity dedicated to supporting victims of bullying and helping to educate those who have to deal with and prevent these situations. The internet and social media are great channels to reach their typically younger target audiences and you will find their presence on Facebook, Twitter and flickr amongst others. The same key messages are also reinforced through poster campaigns, PR (by targeting relevant forums, journalists and media outlets) and events. They don’t have millions of pounds to invest but by integrating their activity across relevant media, their communications achieve real cut-through.
The conclusion is simple, I think; if social media helps you to reach your key audiences and reinforce your key messages, then just do it. There are now plenty of case studies to minimise risk and plenty of experts to help you make the most of a controlled investment. If nearly half the organisations surveyed by Marketing Sherpa are going to invest, you don’t want to be lagging behind, losing supporters and missing media opportunities.
Kevin Baughen, Bottom Line Ideas
January 13, 2010
Starting 2010 with a splash
Each year the Scout Association runs a winter camp. Normally it’s a bit cold and frosty and lots of young people have a good time but it’s not really newsworthy. This year was different. If you were watching the news on Saturday the 9th January you could hardly miss us. So, what changed? How did this happen and why were the team able to get such great coverage?
On Friday the 8th January it became clear that the UK was almost closed down. Thousands of schools were shut and business was suffering as staff failed to get to work. Here at the Scouts, we realised the media were running short of ideas. Journalists needed to put a new angle on the snow story.
Our media team saw an opportunity and went for it. Our annual winter camp for 2,500 young people was going ahead as planned and participants were attending from all over the UK. Getting people talking about the event would be a great way to build our brand and get Scouting noticed. All we had to do was generate some attention. We had three things going for us:
1. We had enough resources in one place. Our media team members and youth participants were gathered together, allowing us to fully exploit the circumstances.
2. We had a fantastically well organised and very visual event. ‘Schools close but thousands of Scouts camp out in snow’ seemed to surprise most journalists.
3. Our media contacts were likely to be receptive to the story after a fair few days of snow and not a lot else going on.
We knew that the snow had created a pretty unique set of circumstances. So, on Friday morning, after having taken the opportunity to go for it, we called our key media contacts and pitched the story hard. Some journalists told us the event wasn’t what they were looking for and that our camp would be cancelled. Others were surprised the event was still going ahead.
Our big breakthrough finally came when we got BBC Radio 4 interested. The Today programme wanted to run a piece on organisations that were refusing to let the snow stop their activities. Our event fitted their agenda perfectly. Initially they wanted to speak to Bear Grylls, but he was filming in the Sahara so that wasn’t an option. However, on Saturday morning, we quickly set them up an interview with the camp organiser. Within an hour of the programme, we had a series of broadcasters and newspapers sending journalists and photographers to the event- cited conveniently close to London- to gather the story. The BBC even sent an OB TV truck, a radio OB team and a helicopter! Whilst the media entourage were en route we were busy setting up guests, broadcast points and story lines.
What were the outcomes? Well, many and varied but we got some excellent TV coverage. The BBC reported the event 12 times on TV and included our story in the prime time early evening and late news slots. Better still, the Scout camp became the leading news item on the hour, every hour, for 6 hours back-to-back. Radio and print coverage soon followed, helping to build our adventure-based brand both locally and nationally. The best bit was the editorial in the Telegraph. The worst bit? My feet have only just thawed out.
Simon Carter, Assistant Director- Media Relations, The Scout Association
