As nonprofits grow, it’s natural for them to expand their programs, develop new services and increase the geographic reach of who they serve. Their growth may be deliberately planned, or erratic and primarily driven by funding opportunities. Regardless, it’s not unusual for an organization’s passion, the why of its purpose, to get lost in reciting an inventory of what they do. When that happens, they’re just pushing out a lot of information with very little impact.
In this episode of Minute with Messaging™, we’re continuing our exploration of the five Messaging Milestones every nonprofit, regardless of size or age, must successfully navigate throughout their life span. Today we’re examining the challenges and necessary strategies for the milestone we’ve named Lost in Logistics.
Restoring the emotion of your organization’s why is critical to mastering this milestone and motivating target audiences to act. In fact, scientific research has proved that we are neurobiologically dependent on emotion for making the decision to take action – a fundamental objective of what you want your messaging to achieve.
Now, when I mention emotion, I hope your only thought isn’t bringing people to tears. While that has its place, pride, joy and enthusiasm are all valuable emotions for inspiring audiences to want to be a part of what you do. The key is that any emotion must be absolutely genuine. Audiences know when they’re being played and will resent you for it.
Please meet Lauren Reitsema, President of the Center for Relationship Education. Headquartered in Denver, the CRE instructs counselors, therapists, clergy and other professional and community leaders from around the country in its proprietary relationship skills curriculum – so that for each leader certified through its training, hundreds of lives benefit.
Lauren: You know, you say relationship, skills, training, which are the three tag words that really own in on our what’s and our why. They sound simple. They’re 3 specific words, but those 3 words took us a long time to land on. And what you find in Any type of communication, whether it’s written or verbal or even in conversations over coffee with a friend is it actually takes more intentional resource and skill to edit to something very digestible than it is to share all of it.
Kelli: We often describe what Newman and Newman does is untangle that metaphorical gold chain that can get tangled up over years of added services and broader geographic reach. And of course, we had the great pleasure of working with the CRE on doing that. How beneficial was it to you to have that fresh outside view of experts to update your messaging?
Lauren: It felt like an additional thing that we were already doing and there was a cost to it and we had a little bit of this curiosity of what’s the investment. Any impact gonna be. And then as we started the process, what we loved about it was it actually was that it was not actually duplicating efforts, but it was clarifying efforts because one it offered objective advice. I remember presenting the outcome to our board of directors, which it was yesterday. And the immediate response was I feel like I’m reading the heart of your brand with a brand-new script.
Kelli: It’s so understandable that people jump to the things that they offer because they think that that’s what’s going to be compelling to folks. But why is it important? What are those needs that have been missing in our community that the CRE is so uniquely poised to meet? What did re injecting the emotion? Of series messaging mean from your perspective.
Lauren: We wanted people to credential us. We wanted that wow factor, but we also lost our way a little bit in feeling to the heart of why the wow even is important and we found that when we could tell our success stories from the appeal of people feeling connected again and really speaking to the emotion of the human space that that’s when the credentialing took on it and even broader, perspective. So, we’re absolutely sincere and authentic in our heart to say what we do is compelling and it’s working and it’s necessary. Because man, we’re living in a world that’s feeling really disconnected and CRE can help.
Kelli: Some nonprofits may have either eliminated or significantly reduced their emotion to be taken seriously in their mind. And that is just that that’s working against them.
Lauren: It’s a real mindset struggle sometimes because there’s a perception whether it’s lived spoken or just perceived internally that because you have a 501(c)(3) attached to your brand at your less excellent or less profitable or less impactful. We’ve learned it’s the opposite. You wow people with your professionalism and your creative ingenuity to be able to stretch a dollar and surprise people with how corporate you feel, but then remind them that their investment is going right back to the heart.
My thanks to Lauren for sharing her experience of reclaiming the CRE’s significance through compelling messaging. It’s a valuable lesson for nonprofits that have lost the impact of their purpose in a long list of services and the importance of clearly communicating their Why.
I’m Kelli Newman and this has been a Minute with Messaging™. To learn how your organization can benefit from Newman & Newman’s marketing communication strategies, I invite you to contact me, or any other of our team leaders at NEWMAnandNEWMANinc.com.
