The essence of your organization is what makes it unique. Messaging that captures that essence is vital to motivating audiences to buy your services, champion your cause, volunteer time, or make a donation. This “Minute with Messaging” podcast explains the importance of Essence Messagingsm in articulating the purpose, ideology, and culture of your organization.
Organizations, particularly nonprofits, are very good at communicating statistics. But facts and figures are not enough to motivate action, let alone inspire donors and increase funding.
Instead, you want to focus on the unique essence of your organization: the philosophies that shape what it does, why it does what it does and how that benefits the clients it serves. Otherwise, you’re just pushing out a lot of information.
Articulating your organization’s purpose, ideology and even culture, is what we call Essence MessagingSM.
To better understand this strategy, I’ve broken down its key elements into four steps.
Step 1 is defining the why of your organization or specific initiative that you’re promoting.
Organizations often make the mistake of limiting their communications to telling audiences what they do (all the services and programs they offer) and ignoring why they do what they do, when it’s the why that motivates action. As Simon Sinek says in his book, “Start with Why”, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
To begin formulating the why of your organization, examine its purpose. What need was it created to meet? What does it believe? You’re not likely to find the answer in the global language of a mission statement, but the why is certainly the mission your organization was founded on.
I’m Kelli Newman and this has been a “Minute with Messaging.” For information on how your organization can benefit from Newman & Newman strategies, call me directly at 281-589-0750.
