25 Ways to Increase Your Organization's Communication Capacity
Tirza Hollenhorst, ifPeople
Nearly every organization is feeling the pull to communicate more. Quality matters, of course, but the shear quantity and frequency of communications that most organizations seek to produce has increased dramatically -- whether its blogs, tweets, commenting, web site updates, collaborations, cross posting, press releases, or good old print brochures.
To stay abreast, your organization needs to maximize its capacity for communication. At a time when you probably can't hire additional staff, that means making the staff you have as efficient and effective as possible.
How do you do that? We recommend you: clarify your strategy, invest in automation, and get everyone participating. Here's the first half (plus a bonus one!) of our 25 ways to increase your organization's communication capacity. Come to our session at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference to hear the rest!
Clarify Your Strategy
Before you hit the accelerator, you want to make sure you know where you're going -- and that the car is pointed in the right direction. If you have already done the strategy work, now is a good time to make sure you have shared it with everyone (not just the communications department).
Here are some specific actions you can take to clarify your strategy:
2. Find out where you audience is and go there. Don't waste time with channels that might be the next big thing (or a past big thing) if your target is using the old standby. Whether its print, social media, or conferences, be strategic about where you spend your time.
3. Clarify your key messages. Take the time to clarify your primary and secondary messages for each of your targets.
4. Use research to establish your keywords. Google AdWords has a great free tool for assessing the search frequency of your keywords. If you haven't done your research, your keywords might be words no one else is using. Jargon anyone...?
Automation
It's not an easy time to make investments in technology. If your organization is functioning without a content management system and a relationship management system that serves all your database needs, however, chances are you're wasting time (re)entering data, recreating communications every time, or waiting on someone with the technical capacity to take care of content and communications tasks. If all of your web updates have to go through a single person, that's a pretty tight bottleneck on your capacity.
6. Use an RSS reader to keep on top of news and trends. A well defined RSS feed will keep you up to date without wasting your time going to different sites or repeating the same searches.
7. Cross post. Tools like ping.fm and hootsuite.com allow you to post to Twitter, Facebook and more at the same time. Make sure that photos posted to Flickr and videos on YouTube come up on your Facebook page. By taking advantage of cross posting, you can make a limited amount of activity look like more and ensure that people coming to one site see more of your recent posts. (But don't abuse this -- we want you in the conversation!).
8. Schedule communications. Block out a chunk of time each week where you can take care of several communications posts at once. You can schedule blog posts, tweets, and site updates for future dates, so that you can sit down and write three posts, but have them trickle out over the course of a week. A regular Twitter stream is more effective than 3 posts a week, all at the same time. By scheduling updates, you keep your communication regular -- and you can repost, without spamming the airwaves. Use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule your tweets. create and schedule many tweets all at once. This prevents tweets from interrupting your day. Of course, you can also send real time!
Get Everyone Participating
A key aspect of increasing your organization's capacity for communication is increasing the number of people communicating. Communications can no longer be the realm solely of the communications department and the executive director. Since most of your staff has no formal training in communications, you have to make it easy!
10. Have a centralized file system to store media. A reusable bank of success stories, "about us" paragraphs, bios, photos, videos, and statistics make it easier for people to respond in the moment and ensure that your brand and message are clear.
11. Teach writing for the web. The last time many of your staff wrote regularly was in university. College essays make bad web copy -- and it's actually easier to write for the web. Using fragments, bullet points, and top loading content is contrary to how most people were taught to write. A good writing for the web class may take only 90 minutes and will free your staff from the tendency to craft complex and grammatically varied sentences that will never get read. (Check out our overview at: http://www.ifpeople.net/learn/website/writing-for-the-web.)
12. Make communication part of everyone's job. It's not enough to give people the ability to update the web site. It should be written into staff responsibilities that they complete basic tasks like updating the web site, writing blog updates of their work, and posting relevant information.
13. Use checklists.You never want a press release to go out without a link to your web page. Make sure this doesn't happen by having simple checklists for different communication tasks. Everything from campaign emails to event postings can benefit from a check list.
For more ideas on how to increase your organizations communication capacity, join our session at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference!
ifPeople helps organizations that make the world a better place to use internet technology to communicate and collaborate. By integrating web software with communication strategy, our solutions enable nonprofits and businesses to manage information, build strong relationships, and foster online collaboration.
