Communications Staffs Are Happy Yet Restless, Survey Finds

First the good news: Seventy-two percent of nonprofit communications staff members say they are satisfied with their jobs, according to a new report.

And now the bad: Nearly half of the people who direct communications for charities plan to leave their jobs within two years.

The people they supervise say they are even less likely to stick around. Sixty-two percent of their staffs say they plan to jump ship during that time period.

The specter of such massive turnover should alarm chief executives and development directors, says Kivi Leroux Miller, a marketing consultant for nonprofit clients, who conducted the study.

Communications directors hold key institutional knowledge, she says, which could harm organizations if it’s lost. They understand the best strategies to get a charity’s message across as well as tactics “down to how to update your website and how to send out your bulk email.”

At its core, says Ms. Miller, the restlessness revealed by her study is about the need to treat communications work as a true profession, similar to the way fundraisers have seen their work taken more seriously over time. “When you treat something as a skill set you want to hire someone to perform as a professional, you invest more time in it from a management point of view,” she says. “You invest more resources in it. You give people credibility for their ideas, you don’t question them as much, you trust them more to make good decisions.”

Fundraisers are familiar with being second-guessed, she says: “An executive director rewrites a direct-mail appeal that a development director has spent a lot of time on, following best practices — and they ruin the thing. The same thing is happening to communications directors. People are meddling in things they don’t understand.”

Only 40 percent of the communications directors surveyed characterized their relationship with their group’s executive director as “excellent.”

The sixth annual online survey by Ms. Miller’s company, NonprofitMarketingGuide.com, which offers data on salary, staffing, and current nonprofit communications practices, included 1,613 nonprofits of all missions. Forty-seven percent of the groups reported having annual budgets of under $1 million.

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‘Dumping Ground’

Communications professionals were more likely than CEOs and development directors to cite the following factors as frustrating them on the job:

• Urgent tasks taking priority over important ones: Forty percent of communications directors identified this as a serious problem, compared to only 28 percent of chief fundraisers and charity leaders.
• Too many interruptions in the workday: Twenty-seven percent of communications directors complained about it, compared to only 19 percent of development directors.
• Lack of coordination with co-workers: Fourteen percent of communications directors said this was a serious problem, though only 8 percent of top fundraisers and 4 percent of chief executives did.

“A lot of times the communications role is the dumping ground” for tasks that don’t fall easily into the CEO’s or the top fundraiser’s territory, says Ms. Miller. “A lot of things get thrown at them that aren’t priorities or shouldn’t be priorities.” Instead, leaders need to define the communications job more clearly, setting true priorities “instead of simply pelting this person with the brightest new idea you saw some other nonprofit do.”

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Use of Social Media

The report also offered a glimpse at how nonprofits are communicating with their donors and other constituents and how often. Some other findings:

• The five most important channels of communication respondents cited, in descending order, were websites, email, traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), in-person events, and print marketing.
• Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were the most commonly used social-media networks by nonprofits. Instagram’s popularity is ascending sharply — 2 percent of groups in the 2013 survey said they used it, but 28 percent use it now — while the use of LinkedIn, Pinterst, Google+, and Tumblr has remained flat since 2013.
• Roughly half of organizations post to both Twitter and Facebook at least once a day. They were more likely to post to Twitter multiple times a day (29 percent, versus 21 percent for Facebook).
• Fifty-nine percent of organizations said they expected to spend money on Facebook ads in 2016. Twenty percent expected to spend up to $100, and another 22 percent expected to spend between $100 and $500.
• Twenty-five percent of organizations send out email appeals each quarter.
• One in three charities said they send snail-mail solicitation twice a year.
• However, 33 percent of charities said they do not send direct-mail newsletters to their supporters. Forty-one percent of groups send out monthly email newsletters.

Note: This article has been modified to add statistics about the use of Instragram.