In any organization, communication is vital, and nonprofits are no exception. Healthy communication builds trust, promotes transparency and helps organizations retain and recruit supporters, volunteers and staff members.
When building a communication strategy for your organization, it's essential to ensure you're always connecting back to your mission. Strong nonprofit communications create and nurture an emotional connection with supporters, reminding them why they volunteer or donate to your cause.
Communication also promotes transparency with donors and volunteers. By recording and regularly communicating the impact of their contributions, you can encourage long-term engagement and ensure you're meeting reporting requirements from donors and grantors.
With a robust nonprofit CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform like GivePulse, your organization can streamline much of this work, so your communications are regular, consistent and impactful.
Here are five ways your nonprofit can build and maintain an effective communication strategy.
1. Consider Your Audience
To communicate effectively, you need to identify who your audience is. Depending on your model, your nonprofit audiences may include:
- Donors
- Members
- Volunteers
- Staff
- Board members
- For-profit partners
Each audience will need tailored communications. Your staff and board members need to hear organizational updates. Your volunteers need to know when they're scheduled to work. Your donors need a record of their gift and may require regular updates on how the donation is being used, depending on the gift agreement.
To ensure you're not missing anything, start by listing each audience your nonprofit needs to connect with. Then, create sublists of everything they need to hear from you, from practical reminders to fun and engaging touchpoints. Remember, communication is most effective when it is proactive and thoughtful, so getting the foundation right will set you up for long-term success.
2. Use a Multi-Channel Approach
Depending on your audience, you'll find that some channels are more effective than others. To ensure you're meeting everyone where they're at, use a range of platforms, from social media and email to print.
To streamline this process, GivePulse allows nonprofits to communicate and message specific individuals, groups and people through on-platform messaging, listservs, email and SMS.
Our customizable templates help you configure the emails you want to send out, so they are consistent with the tone and verbiage of your organization. And if there are standard reminders and messages you need to share, like registration confirmations or gift receipts, you can use automated emails, so you never miss a prompt.
3. Maintain a Regular Cadence
Along with using multiple channels, regular communication helps build and maintain strong relationships. Consider sharing monthly updates with each audience outside of transactional communications like shift reminders and gift receipts.
Make sure you're sharing stories of your nonprofit's impact and the ways that donors and volunteers are helping to advance your cause. A regular newsletter, or even a short personal email, can go a long way in making your supporters feel connected and valued. You can also promote upcoming opportunities, like volunteer drives and events to help supporters learn about new ways to engage.
4. Provide Opportunities for Feedback
Communication is a two-way street. Along with communicating to your constituents, ensure you're providing channels to collect regular feedback. Your volunteers, donors and board members are some of your strongest advocates, and they want to see your nonprofit succeed. Make sure you're tapping into their experience and expertise to gain insight into how you can improve.
GivePulse allows nonprofits to create and share surveys to gather and manage feedback. These can be great tools to send out after events and volunteer opportunities or as part of an annual review process. Make sure you follow up to let respondents know how you applied their feedback, too, so your supporters feel valued and heard.
5. Use a Nonprofit CRM
Effective communication fosters solid and long-lasting relationships between your organization and your staff, donors and volunteers. But it's important to stay consistent. Missing critical opportunities for engagement can create retention issues for nonprofit organizations and make supporters feel disconnected from your cause.
By investing in GivePulse's all-in-one donor, member and event management system, your nonprofit can increase engagement and streamline communication with constituents, ensuring you never miss an opportunity to connect.
Get started today by scheduling a demo with GivePulse.
About GivePulse
GivePulse's mission is to enable everyone in the world to participate and engage in lifting their community to new heights. We do so by providing a platform to list, find, organize and measure the impact of service-learning, community engagement, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility and volunteerism.
Founded in 2012 in Austin, Texas, GivePulse works with 650,000+ groups, including colleges and universities, nonprofits, businesses, K-12/school districts and cities and municipalities. Together, we connect millions of people in an effort to create positive social change.
Start making a difference today by visiting www.givepulse.com.