Marketing the Message

Many charities need improvement when it comes to communication practices, experts say

Michael Reynolds, a retired corporate marketing executive, now works three days a week at Sempervirens Fund, a

Los Altos, Calif., group that works to preserve redwood trees. He says his motivation is not just saving the trees, but also helping the fund and other nonprofit groups become better at communicating with potential supporters.

Over the past five years, Mr. Reynolds has helped the group use the Internet, e-mail, and other methods to show people how they can get involved with the organization. Sempervirens leaders say those changes have helped attract record numbers of new donors to a $13.4-million campaign it concluded last year to raise money to protect an endangered 1,350-acre redwood forest.

Mr. Reynolds, who also serves on the boards of several charities, says he still has more work to do in persuading nonprofit groups to improve their communications. He says that, compared with businesses, nonprofit groups conduct far too little research on the people they want to reach; follow the “whim of the moment” instead of adopting deliberate marketing strategies; do not hire staff members with high-level communication skills; and don’t offer enough training to help people develop such skills.

“The differences,” he says, “are glaring, to the detriment of the nonprofit community and the causes they try to support.”

New research suggests that Mr. Reynolds may be right. While many charities have hired seasoned communications executives, even large and sophisticated nonprofit organizations sometimes fail to handle their communication and marketing efforts effectively, according to a study conducted by Cause Communications, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit consulting group that works with charities. The research is based on interviews with 150 executive directors and senior communications staff members at nonprofit organizations and on questionnaires completed by 341 additional officials in those same positions. Among the findings:

• Ninety percent of the respondents said their organizations do not conduct market research to better understand their audience or test the effectiveness of their communications.
• Only one in five said they know what their peers are doing in the area of communications.
• Fifty-nine percent said their communications budget “could be better,” and another 12 percent said they have no communications budget.
• Eighty percent said their board discusses communications once a year or less.
• Eighty-five percent said their groups do not regularly include communications staff members in the decision-making process.

When it comes to communication, many charities are still in their “infancy,” says R. Christine Hershey, president of Cause Communications. “They don’t look at it from a strategic standpoint.”

Other experts on communications agree. Nonprofit organizations “are very advanced in policy, very advanced in organization, advanced in research, far advanced in development and raising money,” says Lisa Witter, executive vice president of Fenton Communications, a New York consulting firm that works primarily with nonprofit organizations. “What’s missing and often ghettoized is communications and media relations.”

Still, some communications experts see signs among grant makers and charities of a growing interest in improving their marketing and communication practices.

For instance, four prominent grant makers — the Annenberg Foundation, the California Endowment, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation — made grants totaling $300,000 to pay for the new research released by Cause Communications, notes Ms. Hershey. The money also paid for her group to publish 5,000 copies of its “Communications Toolkit,” which features low-cost publicity and marketing tips and resources, and to send them free of charge to nonprofit groups nationwide. Demand for the toolkit has been so heavy that the firm has received additional grants to print 5,000 more copies.

The grants demonstrate that some grant makers believe that effective communication and marketing is a high priority in a fund-raising climate in which many charities are struggling for attention. “Many not-for-profit groups spend so much time absorbed around the needs of the organization and less time speaking about more vision-oriented strategies,” says Leonard Aube, a managing director at the Annenberg Foundation. “Those vision-driven strategies are what ultimately lead to broadening and strengthening their philanthropic support.”

Tips for Improvement

The new research, plus interviews with communications experts, point to numerous ways charities can improve their communication and marketing practices. Among them:

Make sure staff members and volunteers convey one message. Sixty-two percent of the officials who responded to the Cause Communications survey said their organizations do not use an agreed-upon set of message points. Only 20 percent said that their organizations use a style guide or train staff to ensure consistency.

Given the intense competition for dollars, a charity must be able to describe exactly what it does and why it deserves support, communications experts say. Trustees and staff members of grant-seeking organizations often describe their group’s mission differently, says Mr. Aube. “This is a signal that the brand is probably going to be diluted,” he says. “There’s not a consistency of message.”

A charity must decide internally how to describe itself before it can communicate effectively to the outside world, says Ms. Witter of Fenton Communications. And the result should be easy to understand, she says: “How do you describe your organization to a 5-year-old?”

Figure out who should receive the charity’s message. Charities should assess what their donors and other audiences think about them and their work, experts say. Such research does not have to be expensive; it can be as simple as mailing out a survey to 100 supporters or sponsoring informal discussion groups, communications executives say.

Arc Hennepin-Carver, a charity that assists mentally disabled people in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, obtained free help in conducting research by tapping a marketing class for M.B.A. students at a local university. Pam Carlson, director of community relations, says the students helped Arc learn more about the effectiveness of its fund-raising tactics by conducting interviews with shoppers at Arc’s thrift stores and with people who donated cars to the organization or asked about the car-donation program.

Charities also need to do more research into what other groups with the same mission are doing. “In the business world, we always know who our competition is,” says Ms. Hershey. “In the nonprofit world, we don’t like to think of them as competition, we don’t like to look at them.”

Learn how journalists work. Public-relations officials say their bosses sometimes put pressure on them to pitch stories about charity programs with little or no consideration of whether such stories are newsworthy in the eyes of reporters and editors. Or they are instructed to crank out press releases and “send them to everybody possible,” an ineffective way to get press coverage, says Beth Reiter, vice president for communication at the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, who occasionally does volunteer public-relations work for local nonprofit groups.

Charities should not expect journalists to cover their organizations just because they are doing good work, experts say. “You’re expected to do good things,” says Stephanie Strom, a reporter who covers philanthropy for The New York Times. “That’s not news.”

Ms. Strom says she gets many pitches to cover grants that are too small to merit news coverage and from public-relations consultants who cannot say why the charity they represent is more newsworthy than others that are doing similar work.

Experts say charities should develop long-term relationships with reporters and editors, understand how they judge story ideas and respond to pitches — and learn how to break news. The American Lung Association, for example, issues a “State of the Air” report each year that provides updates about the level of air pollution in each county and state in the nation. The report attracts coverage by national and local news-media outlets equal to millions of dollars worth of advertising, Ms. Witter says.

The Liberty Hill Foundation, which supports grass-roots antipoverty groups in Los Angeles, conducts workshops on public relations for all of its grantees. Barbara Osborn, its director of media and research, says she tries to help the grantees “crack the code” of how journalists work, for example, by holding brown-bag lunches with representatives from the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and other outlets. She wants participants to learn the answer to questions such as: “How come if Sean Penn meets with the new mayor it’s news and when I meet with the mayor it’s not?”

The workshops appear to have made some of the groups give more attention to their publicity efforts: Four of 36 workshop participants have created full-time media-relations positions at their organizations in the last three years. Ms. Osborn, who advises the groups that opinion articles in newspapers offer a good way to get their messages across, says two grantees recently succeeded in getting such articles published in the Los Angeles Times.

Engage top leaders. For a communications strategy to be effective, an executive director or chief executive “has to get it,” says Ms. Reiter of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. “A communications director could sit in their office and put forth all the news releases and all the communications materials they want to and be in a complete silo.”

Some organizations specialize in providing communications training to charities’ top staff and board members. One is Spitfire Strategies, a Washington consulting group that operates a Communications Leadership Institute for executive directors, who attend three four-day workshops over a year’s time. The training is paid for by foundations that nominate leaders from their grantee organizations to attend. “At the end of the day, the executive director is the main messenger for the organization,” says Kristen Grimm Wolf, Spitfire’s president.

Two years ago, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation allocated $23,000 to provide training through the Communications Leadership Institute for the new executive director of one of its grant recipients, the Center for the New American Dream, in Takoma Park, Md. Coming from the World Wildlife Fund, where she had been a vice president, Diane Wood had plenty to offer the charity, which encourages environmentally friendly habits among consumers. But she had no professional communications experience or training.

She says the course taught her how to think about communications in a strategic way — a skill that was not as important at the much bigger World Wildlife Fund. There, she recalled, “I would go to the communications staff and say, ‘I need this done,’ and they would do it.”

Consider new approaches.To grow or achieve new goals, a charity may need to change its communications strategies. The Center for a New American Dream decided to do just that to meet its board’s goal of reaching more people. When Ms. Wood participated in the Communications Leadership Institute, her organization’s communication materials were reviewed by communications and marketing experts. They advised the center to retool the materials to stress the positive side of the organization’s message: that consumers can influence the marketplace through their purchases and help create a better world. “They said, ‘You have a trademark of being positive, optimistic, empowering Americans, but when I read your brochures it’s all gloom and doom,’” Ms. Wood recalls.

The center adopted a new logo and a slogan (“More of What Matters”), redesigned its Web site, reworded its brochures, changed the name of the newsletter from “Enough!” to “In Balance,” and created a new poster series that emphasized the benefits of living a simpler, less materialistic life.

At the same time, it also stepped up efforts to reach consumers by sponsoring a contest on its Web site to win a Prius gas-electric hybrid, posting ads on Web sites of other organizations, holding conference-call discussions between readers and authors of books recommended by the center, and starting “viral” e-mail campaigns in which recipients are asked to forward messages to others.

The result: The number of “activist members” — individuals who agree to contact companies or government officials to urge them to promote sales practices and policies that protect the environment — has grown from 28,000 in 2003 to more than 80,000, and the outdoor-clothing retailer Patagonia is promoting the center in its stores and on its Web site. The charity was also mentioned in more than 500 articles and broadcasts last year.

“It’s very funny, because our organization challenges excessive consumerism and here we were sitting down with branding experts,” says the center’s founder and president, Betsy Taylor. Although initially skeptical, she says that she has become a believer in the difference that revising a communications strategy can make.

“We tend to communicate with facts and data and believe the truth will set people free,” she says. But it is more complicated than that, she says. “People need an emotional connection.”