As a church, ministry, or nonprofit, the connections you make with people are your lifeblood for financial support, volunteers, participation, and engagement in your cause. How you communicate with your audience can make the difference between growth and stagnation. Before you improve messaging, make sure your organization is aligned around what you’re saying and why.
1. Develop a clear marketing maxim for your organization.
Like the chorus of a song, the familiarity of a repeated message breeds appeal, recall, and trust. Harness that power by using a consistent statement about your organization.
A brand maxim can turn your team, members, donors, and the people you serve into promoters. When the brand maxim (sometimes referred to as a brand story, brand mantra, or elevator pitch) is clear and concise and people get what it is you do, you equip them to recruit others to the cause. You give them an easy response to the question “So, what do you do?” or “So, what does that organization do?”
Like a chorus, your maxim should be clear, concise, and easy to say. Use everyday language! This is not the place for industry buzzwords.
Keep the maxim audience-centric. Remember, people reading your message don’t really care about you — they care about how you can help them meet an external or internal need (often both!)
Your brand maxim should highlight what makes you unique among the peer organizations with similar missions.
It may be helpful to work with a copywriter to perfect your brand maxim. Their outside perspective can be helpful to spot insider language and they understand the power of story to communicate a concept.
Once you nail your brand maxim, use it everywhere: in-person connections, in print and digital media.
Encourage your entire team to use it so you’re speaking with one voice as an organization.
2. Use story to draw people into your cause.
Stories are relatable and the people you need to reach are hard-wired to respond to stories. Stories trigger reactions in our brain chemistry: conflict in a story creates tension and releases the stress hormone cortisol which helps people to pay attention. Then oxytocin — the hormone responsible for empathy and generosity — is released. It’s how people feel a connection to you and what you do as an organization. As the story resolves and the hero of the story experiences transformation, the reward center of the brain releases the feel-good hormone dopamine, filling us with optimism and hope.
Paul Zak explains it here in a talk entitled Empathy, Neurochemistry, and the Dramatic Arc at the Future of Storytelling 2012:
Nonprofits, ministries, and churches are rich in stories that include a hero (the main character, not the organization), a conflict (something that gets in the way of what they deeply desire), something big at stake if the hero doesn’t get what they want, and ultimately a transformation.
If you need people to open up their wallets and support your cause or feel a connection to what you’re doing, tell stories.
Another story option is to use metaphor, where you use something that is familiar and understood to explain something unknown or complex.
3. Have one clear call to action.
Too many nonprofits and ministries unknowingly sabotage their results with an unclear or nebulous call to action. If you want people to give, say so — and make it easy to do it. If you need them to volunteer, make it easy to sign up or get training. If you need them to help you raise awareness by spreading the news on social media — tell them, then give them the tools they need with simple steps to follow.
Don’t assume people will know what their next step should be. They don’t want to waste brainpower searching for how to respond, so make it crystal clear. If they find it confusing, many people will give up and your response rates will plummet.
If your response includes a form, ruthlessly simplify. Keep it short. Gather only the information that you absolutely have to have. When possible and appropriate, pre-print or pre-populate the fields with info that you already have. Don’t ask for the same information in two different places.
4. Work with a professional designer.
It may be tempting to cut corners and hire a board member’s niece who took a class in graphic design or use a design contest site to generate lots of options. Don’t do it. You need a real professional who knows how to do design research, develop a unique design that aligns with who are and stands out from the crowd, using visual elements to amplify your message.
Communication designers think strategically about your message, the objective, the audience, and the format. They know that everything communicates — from the curves of a typeface, the angle of a line, the style of imagery, right down to the choice of paper — and they align these elements with your brand. They pay attention to every detail, making sure your design is highly appealing and readable. Finally, in the long run, professional communication designers can save you time and money by creating proper files that work the first time.
Here’s the key: Design should express strategic alignment, but cannot compensate for lack of it. Be sure your brand strategy is clear before you begin a marketing campaign.
5. Be consistent with your visual brand and message across all platforms.
Because each platform presents unique challenges and opportunities needing different skills, marketing projects end up compartmentalized between digital and social media, video, and print.
Staff and marketing partners need to see their piece of the marketing puzzle as part of the larger whole rather than separate silos. It takes vigilance and a strong commitment to brand standards to ensure that messaging, voice and visuals consistently align with one another and the brand across the various platforms. Consistency isn’t just a marketing discipline. It’s a reflection of organizational alignment. A brand codex is a great way to get everyone communicating as one voice.
6. Test with your audience for resonance.
To make sure your message (verbal and visual) connects with the audience you’re trying to reach, share it with a sampling from the people you are targeting before you launch a campaign.
Sometimes you’re too close to a project to know how your audience will respond to it. You care deeply about your cause but your insider knowledge can get in the way of communicating with people who don’t have the same level of experience with it.
If you send direct mail on a regular basis, consider doing an A/B split where two segments of your list receive different versions of your mailing. You can test response rates for full color envelopes versus 2-color, two different envelope teasers, two calls to action, two different highlighted stories — you get the idea.
A/B testing also is highly advisable for social media ads. Try using different photos, different messaging, or different calls to action. See which gets the most response with comparable targeted audiences. When you have a clear winner, put all the ad spend behind it to maximize campaign results.
