3 Ways To Communicate For Change
It’s that time again - newsletter month! The dreaded invitation to submit your update comes clattering into your inbox. You click, you open, ‘deadline one week from today’…that’s enough time to think of something, surely. Except you don’t. You forget. The endless awful cycle begins.
Reminder, after reminder flows in until finally ping, the newsletter gracefully arrives without your input. You open with a slight feeling of guilt and read casually the updates from other teams, personnel and project leads. You take nuggets of potentially helpful information, and on you go with your work, with your life…until the next invitation to submit your update - unaware of the potential frustration that exists in the team that created it.
This experience isn’t uncommon, but behind these invitations are people dedicated to telling your story. For large or medium sized products-based businesses, the benefits of telling the world what you do and why may seem obvious, particularly if there is a healthy budget to go alongside it. For not-for-profits (NFPs) and others working in the third sector, circumstances are almost certainly tighter - less money, less resources and less time with communications functions sitting with 1 or 2 people, or in a lot of cases, shared among the small team, and the purpose sometimes ambiguous. Third sector organisations are on the front lines of providing help and support to animals, people or places in need and can often times be the difference between thriving or simply surviving. So how should third sector organisations leverage communications to create a positive impact?
Establish a goal and set the direction
Creating an overall objective and understanding the steps that you need to take to get there can enable you to create content that’s not only informative but persuasive - what do you want? Make sure that your goals can be measured too so that you’ve got an ability to track how well you’ve done.
Understand the emotional context of your arguments
Communication professionals often are not understood - it seems like anyone can write a blog or a tweet. The truth is the best communications staff are those that understand emotionally what will connect you to your desired audience - and that doesn’t necessary mean facts! Science and evidence is often crucial to what we want to achieve - facts are ok to make a point, but it might not make someone change their minds and it might not be enough to make them do anything about it. Understand what your desired audience wants, tell a story, engage emotionally and set a call to action.
Reach out and Engage with Different Audiences - Make Sure you Understand Your Platforms
We’ve already said that we need to be able to answer ‘who’ when thinking about our target audiences. But we also need to ask ‘what’, what do they want to know, see or be involved in? Answering this question can be tricky, particularly if you don’t know that audience well. You can be find out more through market research, surveys, and interviews, for example. Decide when you want to use blog articles, infographics or email.
Lastly, the questions is ‘where’ are they? You can post your content on your website, your Facebook page or in a newsletter. But which one will bring you contact with your audience? Ask yourself what kind of traffic you get on each of these platforms, what’s the demographic? Consider the personal nature of Facebook, the glossy and perfect images of Instagram, the more authentic posts seen on Tiktok.
Don’t just learn about your audience, learn about the theater you’re in.
