Why Good Communications Matters for Nonprofits
This Communications and Marketing Kit has been compiled by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to help non-profit organizations use communications to achieve their social change goals. The toolkit includes both references and specific, detailed steps necessary to understand options, identify resources, plan, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of strategic communications for your organization. (Underlined text provides direct Internet links to the cited resources.)
For decades, many nonprofit organizations followed the dictum: “Do Good, Maintain a Low Profile, and Others Will Provide.” “Others” often included clients, public supporters, charitable donors, and even the organization’s staff and board members. It was viewed as self-serving, even taboo, for nonprofits to allocate time and resources to promote understanding, goodwill, and support for their mission and objectives.
As nonprofits, we focus most of our attention on the issues and clientele we were created to serve. Too often, we underestimate the value of what we’ve learned from our work—the human stories, research findings, and best professional practices as the raw material of our social change work. Yet this field-tested knowledge can be invaluable when placed in the hands of the public, policymakers, and other nonprofit and government agencies. Improving your group’s ability to communicate can have two-fold benefits: It can inform policies that will help advance your mission, and by increasing your visibility, make your organization more attractive to new members and donors. The incredibly rapid transformation in traditional social structures, lifestyles, and behaviors, advances in computer technology, and the globalization of the economy are just a few of the challenges facing non-profit organizations. Today nonprofit organizations must effectively communicate if they are to increase public awareness, secure public and private funding, and ensure the delivery of their important services. An understanding of communication principles and serious application of proven communication practices can support an organization to achieve these goals.
This toolkit outlines the essential elements for building an effective communications strategy. We hope you will find its content provocative, action-oriented, and a link to the many other publications and Internet resources that can help us all do a better job of communicating about our work and serving the needs of society.
Karen E. Lake
Director of Communication
W.K. Kellogg Foundation