Nonprofit Messaging and Frameworks for Clear Communication
Your messaging is one of the most important parts of your overall nonprofit communication strategy. It’s the difference between confusion and engagement from donors, volunteers, and policymakers. Unfortunately, one of the most common problems I see with nonprofit messaging is organizations trying to say too much or tell their entire story at once.
To help you keep your messaging clear and focused for all your audiences, I’ve put together a guide to nonprofit messaging to demystify what it is, common ways to structure it, and tips for the stakeholder review process.
Key takeaways
Your nonprofit’s messaging is your story, condensed and clarified in a way that makes it easy for your team to communicate across channels and resources.
Your messaging encompasses elements, such as your mission, vision, values, brand promise, and voice and tone.
There are several ways to illustrate your messaging strategy internally. I like the ecosystem model best for nonprofits.
Effective campaign support from Sprig Communications helps you go from messaging ideas to messaging results.
Starting or continuing your nonprofit messaging journey
Let’s start from the top. Your messaging is your nonprofit’s story — something you undoubtedly know well — in simple, consistent language. Your messaging is critical to nonprofit storytelling and outlines key parts of your nonprofit’s brand, including:
Your mission
Your vision
Your values
Your brand promise or tagline
Your brand pillars
Your voice and tone
It’s the foundation for every piece of communication that reaches your audience, no matter who’s writing it or what channel they’re writing it for.
Typically, I expect established nonprofits to have well-defined missions, visions, and values, usually through lengthy discussions and board or founder votes. If that’s not your organization’s situation, that’s ok! I’ll break it down.
Stating your mission, vision, and values
Your mission is what your organization set out to accomplish. Your vision is how you see a world in which you accomplish your mission. It draws your audience into the outcome of your work. Your values serve as your North Star and guiding principles by which you, your board, your volunteers, and your team act.
If you don’t have these three neatly defined, start small, especially if you’re not ready to involve committee members or stakeholders. Something I like to start with is a simple survey of your team or volunteers:
How would they describe your mission?
What shared values did they see in your org that made them want to get involved?
How do they envision your work making a positive change in your community, city, or state?
Take each answer and find the throughlines or ideas that connect them to start crafting each statement. (I have my clients run similar exercises as part of my nonprofit content marketing checklist.) Even if your org has a defined mission, vision, and value system, I encourage you to talk through these questions every year to see how closely you actually align, rather than just say you align.
From here, I find that it’s less common for nonprofits to have their messaging promise and pillars fine-tuned, let alone constructed in a way that makes it easy for others to use them effectively.
Building your brand promises and pillars
Your brand promise is what your organization is actively doing to fulfill its mission. Everyone in your org comes to work and says, “Today, we promise to…” and fills in the blank.
If you still need to craft a brand promise, consider the following questions:
What should your audience always expect from your organization?
How do you want the public to perceive the value of your work?
What actions are you taking every day towards accomplishing your mission?
For me, a brand promise might be, “Sprig Co. promises to use the power of words to help you do more good.” It’s an element that creates loyalty, trust, and familiarity with your organization. For you, it may be [your org name] promises to find safe places to live and thrive for people who are unhoused.
Next, your brand pillars. These make up the bulk of your messaging strategy because they tend to carry the heaviest load in your nonprofit content marketing efforts. Essentially, they’re the three to five topics or elements you want to reinforce most with your audiences.
A good rule of thumb for establishing your pillars is to look at the core tenets of your organization. For example, community education is a big focus for a variety of groups. For others, it may be outreach, group classes, workshops, or care coordination.
Categorizing smaller or more niche services, initiatives, and audience groups into larger pillars can help you map out the connections between them, so internally, every person in your org knows which actions influence another.
Finding your voice (and tone)
I give immense credit to any organization that already has a set of voice and tone guidelines, because it’s one of the most challenging nonprofit messaging elements to nail down. (It’s also very hard for all organizations, not just nonprofits.) Many people assume voice and tone are the same or use the terms interchangeably, but that’s not accurate.
Your voice consists of the words of your brand’s personality. Your tone is more flexible. It’s how you communicate your mood or emotions surrounding a topic.
Think of it this way: Your tone will be different when you’re writing a fundraising appeal compared to when you’re putting out a statement or crisis communications to your community. But your voice remains consistent, so readers know that each piece of content is coming from the organization.
I could devote an entire blog to voice and tone alone. So if you’re not sure where to start, shift your focus away from yourself for a moment, and consider your favorite brands. How do you know they’re communicating with you? Could you identify a piece of writing as theirs even if their logo isn’t on it? How do you feel when you consume their content? Any words that come to mind are examples of voice and tone.
Why use a messaging structure for your nonprofit
But, Alexis, this sounds like a lot of work — why go to all that trouble? Can’t we just write things and keep them consistent?
You’re not wrong. It is a lot of work. But the reason is that it’s such a foundational activity.
Internally, everything you do after you establish your messaging platform gets easier because you, your partners, and your team don’t have to think as hard about what to say or how to say it.
Externally, although invisible, your messaging makes it a lot easier for your audience to relate to you and retain your communications.
1. It promotes clarity and confidence for donors, volunteers, or audiences
Your messaging platform can help you communicate one thing (who you are, what you do, etc.) really well across your website, social media, impact reports, and more.
No misplaced messages, and no tonal whiplash. Each time someone interacts with you, they know you’re not being careless with their time, money, and energy.
2. It can speed up your response time, communicating urgency without manipulation
In good times and in bad, how quickly you respond to news and events matters. When legislators enact favorable policies or wrongdoers harm communities, communications play a crucial role in your mobilization efforts.
Having a messaging framework in place gives you the tools and guidance you need to share news and resources effectively. As long as your messages follow your guidelines, they can spend less time overall in the approval pipeline.
3. It keeps the conversation going once someone enters your ecosystem
Knowing what matters most to each audience group can help you communicate better with them once they’re in your system. For example, a first-time donor to a women’s shelter or mutual aid fund needs a different message compared to potential partners who downloaded your latest impact report.
Your messaging pillars outline what’s important to each group at different stages of interaction. So next time you’re sending a newsletter or coming up with new content ideas, you know what to say next and aren’t repeating your story from the beginning in every piece of communication.
My tips for smooth messaging reviews
Once you have your messaging written out, there’s a good chance you’ll have to run it by someone, like an executive, director, or committee. As with any approval process, you run the risk of every person wanting to include something or put their stamp on it somehow, which can be overwhelming and, honestly, unhelpful.
Fortunately, when you have a message framework, you have something to point to and say, “See, this is how we agreed to talk about ourselves!” every time a new idea comes up, but you have to get there first. Follow my tips for avoiding the approval frustrations that come with solidifying your messaging.
Identify who needs to be in the know
It’s totally understandable that people just want to be included, but not everyone in your organization needs to be. First, I recommend identifying the people who will need to use your messaging strategy daily (content creators, comms people, etc.).
From there, you can branch out to those people’s direct supervisors. If you work with outside consultants or creation teams, they might need to be in the loop, too. And if you have a committee or group dedicated to PR or communications, keep them on your list.
Remember, some people need to be involved, giving feedback and context, and some people just need to know something’s happening. Differentiating the two can save you significant time on the approval process.
Set clear expectations for the feedback you need per group or person
Regardless of who is giving feedback, be clear on the kind of feedback you need from them. Do they need to do an intense, detail-oriented review? Do they need to revise or weigh in on word choice? Are they a subject-matter expert with intimate knowledge of your programs?
Don’t be afraid to get specific or separate parts of your messaging doc to keep each person on task. Acknowledging their areas of expertise and telling them exactly where you need their perspective can make them feel confident in your work and focused on their area.
Paint the messaging picture visually
If you need to share the greater context of your messaging strategy with more people in your organization, consider placing it into a visual model. The most common visual frameworks are the house and ecosystem models.
The house model shows your messaging exactly as it suggests: in the form of a house. The basement and foundational levels are your purpose, mission, values, and proof points. The main level (what everyone sees) is your brand pillars. The roof is your overarching brand promise.
The house model works well for just about any organization, but for nonprofits, I like the ecosystem model. In it, your vision is your core focus, and it’s surrounded by brand pillars and proof points. Outside of that are your interconnected channels or audiences. I like this model because it shows the cycle through which you interact with your audience, which can enter your ecosystem at a variety of points.
Messaging and campaign support that rallies communities and earns funds
Small but mighty teams have full calendars and big goals. And it can be hard to take the messaging journey while trying to juggle both. That’s where Sprig Communications’ nonprofit campaign support comes in.
Whether you need help crafting or revising a nonprofit messaging strategy or launching a multi-channel campaign, we’ll start with a discovery session and follow up with a comprehensive plan and ready-to-execute roadmap for success.
Stop juggling ideas, deadlines, and guesswork. Get a real plan, polished messaging, and the confidence to launch boldly — again and again.
