Chapter 10
Marketing, Communications, and Reputation
Through your marketing, communications, and reputation, you present your organization to the world. Your organization’s identity, brand, and reputation go beyond your mission. They showcase your value to the community and distinguish your organization from all others. The environment in which nonprofits and NGOs operate is on a 24/7, 365-day cycle. Staff, board members, and service users can opine on their experience with your organization in real time, and news of bad practices, critical incidents, and poor working conditions can instantly go viral.
Making the case for strongly managed messaging and reputation management goes beyond a risk framework. It is an essential organizational function for driving strategy, increasing reach, and ensuring high performance. Failure to actively monitor your marketing, internal and external communications, or reputation can create vulnerabilities that can quickly become liabilities when something goes awry. And something always goes wrong.
As described in Part I of the book, every functional area of a nonprofit organization carries risks that may seem trivial on their own. It’s only when you dig deeper to assess the likelihood and impact of a specific risk or consider risk interactions that the actual degree of risk fully emerges. Remember that, at any given point in time, an unattended risk interacting with changing circumstances can combine in ways that are highly damaging.
To avoid being surprised by risks that are unfamiliar today and catastrophically real tomorrow, you have to have a basic understanding of each risk. You must continually monitor each risk’s likelihood and impact as the conditions of your organization change. Not only should you monitor these risks regularly over time to manage them as your organization changes, but you should also adopt a method of risk assessment that allows you to model various scenarios and correct stressors that can create conditions in which your organization can succeed or fail.
Tip: A tool such as The Nonprofit Risk App can help in weighing risks present in each functional area of operation and in letting you do testing (what-if gaming) in different scenarios.
The five major areas of risk described in this chapter are commonly associated with communication. These areas are:
–Focusing on mission and partners. What you say and do, as well as whom you do it with and for, are the basics of your communications and fundraising activities. You may take those communications as given (or just assume that someone else in the organization has dealt with them). Both fundraising and communication personnel need to be clear on these issues because, if something goes wrong, they are likely to be the first point of angry contact, along with the staff, board, and media.
–Calendaring. Managing the organization’s calendar and events to avoid conflicts, as well as managing interactions and synergies across all events and parts of the organization.
–Messaging. Creating and disseminating organization-wide messages that are relevant, consistent, factual, and powerful.
–Managing the economic model. Communication activities can be used to support the organization as a whole, but they can also be used to generate income for the organization.
–Outsourcing. Communication is frequently outsourced in whole or in part to contractors, other organizations, and volunteers.
Focusing on Mission and Partners
It’s hard to conceive of a nonprofit organization that does not have a clearly established mission, but such is the case more often than you would like to think. Commercial corporations are generally regarded as having the purpose of maximizing shareholder value. Although there are many discussions about the details and nuances of this purpose, however you view it, the purpose of a commercial corporation stands in contrast to that of a nonprofit organization or government. In these organizations, some public purpose is often the mission or goal.
What to Watch For
Here is a list of things to consider as you look for risks in your mission and in your work with partnering organizations. It’s not exhaustive, and your organization may need to occasionally modify it. It can be a useful starting point for you in creating your own watch list.
–Monitor mission and purposes as times change. It’s not enough to have a nice mission statement on the wall. Over the years as conditions of specific funding gifts and donations change and as the organization’s environment and needs change, the mission and purpose may change. In addition, as in commercial organizations, laws and regulations may impact the operations and even the mission of a nonprofit.
–Keep track of grant conditions. With fundraising, it is critical to balance the conditions attached to gifts and bequests, including those that may not materialize for years or even decades. These conditions can apply to operations and communications. Particularly as time goes on, an organization can easily accumulate a wide array of conditions that can affect almost every part of the organization.
–Track related organizations and their risks. In addition to missions and conditions, nonprofit organizations run risks when they form formal or informal relationships with other nonprofit or commercial organizations. These relationships can come with conditions either at the beginning or they can develop over time. Furthermore, if related organizations run into any problems—from operational and financial issues to reputational concerns—their problems can affect your organization.
–In addition to risk, track changes in names and missions of your partners who either provide you with services or who are funders. If a partner’s mission is refined in a way to exclude your funding, don’t be surprised.
–Remember that a “change” in a partner’s priorities and mission may be a new director or board’s interpretation of long-standing priorities and the mission.
–Do you keep a constantly updated list of the correct names, addresses, spellings, and positions or titles for your own organization and partnering organizations? If you use an integrated contact management database, make certain that it can handle the same person being listed in multiple roles at multiple organizations. Ideally, it should also have a date range to apply for each item of contact management.
–Do you periodically review board minutes from partnering organizations or have a person attend as a liaison? This is an area of particular vulnerability when the organizations are different sizes.
Prevention
The first step in preventing risks related to mission and partners is to know the terms of your mission and conditions, and to be diligent in working with partner organizations and donors. One particular area of risk is from longstanding projects and relationships that have not been looked at carefully for years. New management in the nonprofit organization may appropriately question conditions that have been handed down that may either no longer apply or may have evolved in the passing down.
Management in donor and partner organizations may also change. If so, it may be appropriate to reevaluate the conditions and purposes relevant to their funding. These evaluations can be positive and productive, but it is not uncommon for them to be unpleasant. You may deal with donors as organizations or donors as individuals (including heirs of deceased donors). As in so many risk areas, the most effective way of preventing risk events is to know the details. Particularly with projects and relationships that date back a long time, there may be a reluctance to do this, but it is essential.
Staying abreast of conditions in your partnering organizations is not enough; you need to stay abreast of conditions in their partners’ organizations. Beyond that, staying on top of issues that are bubbling up in any of the spheres that you or your partners work in may help prepare you for problems as well as knowing the concerns to check for.
One of the most difficult steps to take in preventing risk events from mission and partners is to prevent future problems. This means clarifying terms and conditions of any grants or gifts and reviewing them for their impact on operations now and in the future. (Many nonprofit organizations are able to work with donors and potential donors to minimize restrictions, but it may be too late for some agreements from the past.)
Mitigation
When a risk related to mission and conditions or partners arises, the first step (as always) is to find out the details. This is a very good argument for conducting periodic audits of missions of partners so that you are finding problems before they become crises.
When the risk event occurs in a partner (or even is alleged to occur in a partner), your ability to find out what is going on may be limited. Your own communication tools should be ready to respond to your own and related organizations’ problems with a response protocol that is independent of the specific partner and issue.
Calendaring
The public-facing components of your organization, both fundraising and communication, are involved with calendaring, the scheduling and management of events for the public. Internal events or events that involve external players rather than the general public can pose the biggest challenges.
We make a distinction between public events that are open to a broad group of people and events that need to be scheduled with external players such as clients, funders, suppliers, and users of the organization. Typically, events with external players (but not the general public) are conducted as part of the ongoing operations of the organization.
Among the biggest challenges in event planning and scheduling are those that involve conflicts with other events. The broader your potential audience for an event, the more likely you are to have a conflict. Risk comes into the picture when conflicts aren’t taken into account in a timely manner.
All organizations have calendaring issues and potential conflicts both internally and externally.
What to Watch For
Knowing that all organizations have some kind of calendaring issue can actually make your risk analysis easier. It’s there: you just have to find it. And once you find the first one, chances are you’ll find others that exist or might exist if you don’t take action.
–A companion to events that “everyone knows about” is events that no one knows about. Usually this is accidental because they may be scheduled at the rushed ending of a meeting after everyone has either physically or mentally left the meeting.
–Events where the location or time excludes critical individuals or classes of individuals, unless that is a deliberate strategic goal as in the case of reshaping a board’s membership to exclude certain individuals or groups of individuals. (You might call this “strategic calendaring” because the scheduling prevents certain individuals or groups from attending or voting.)
–Make certain that project- and grant-specific calendar events and associated notifications are held so that grant funding is not jeopardized. This is a particular issue for many nonprofit organizations because funding can be tied to the calendar events, even though the events themselves do not generate funding.
–Repeating scheduled events that “everyone knows about” so they aren’t listed on any calendars.
Prevention
Centralizing calendaring and scheduling in an organization may appear to be the simplest way to avoid conflicts, but it is remarkable how difficult that can be. Some degree of decentralized scheduling is essential. Making an appointment for a plumber to deal with a clogged drain is irrelevant to many parts of an organization, but it’s critical to the people in the vicinity of the drain, and the plumber may rightly take priority over any and all other events.
Cloud-based scheduling products such as calendar software from Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, CiviCRM, and Salesforce are not a cure-all; for individuals, their calendars need to be integrated with personal appointments and other commitments. It helps (as do collaborative scheduling tools such as Doodle), but these calendaring products are not a total solution.
What is possible is to delineate what types of scheduling are handled in what parts of the organization. It is not necessary to expose the reasons for blocked-out time, but sharing unavailable times and getting people to use those tools is helpful.
Be particularly sensitive to scheduling volunteers and external players. One of the reasons volunteers leave nonprofit projects is that the demands on their time become excessive.
For regions where weather can be a problem, scheduling an alternate date along with the primary date can save a lot of time. In regions with harsh winter weather, such alternate dates are often automatically scheduled for all events between December and March.
Provide multiple contact routes for people to change their attendance status or ask questions. This is particularly important when events are scheduled during in-person meetings.
Mitigation
As soon as a conflict is evident, handle it—it won’t go away by itself. The organization needs to speak with one voice and, with regard to calendaring, that voice needs to be reliable.
Know who can reschedule an event, so that if a conflict becomes apparent (whether it’s weather, or availability of a critical participant or a conference area), the meeting can either be rescheduled or planned without the conflicted participant.
Messaging
The organization needs to have clearly set message protocols so that people inside and outside the organization know who is speaking and with what voice (personal voice, corporate voice, internal communication, and so forth).
What to Watch For
As is often the case with risks, there are some early warning signs you can watch for.
–Letterhead, website, and social media messages that by their nature (design, originating account, and so forth) carry the weight of the organization. To use Twitter terminology, the difference between a message marked with #ourOrganization, and another sent from @ourOrganization indicates that the first is about the organization, but the second is from the organization.
–Because letterhead, social media accounts, and websites are the hallmarks of official messaging, make certain that they are controlled as carefully as cash, keys, and other valuables.
–Be particularly careful with new media accounts that often are first developed on an ad hoc basis and become an official channel of communication without protocols being built around them.
–Ask for copies of the final result of media releases and articles. This is particularly important for media that you may not deal with regularly. In the case of photos and videos that are part of interviews, assume from the start that you will want to reuse them.
–Not everyone who works on communication has the same knowledge and background. Take nothing for granted and make sure that everyone who deals with media knows to ask these questions:
oAre you on a deadline?
oHow much information do you want? (Words, minutes, etc.)
oIs there a photo component? In this day of powerful cell phones, a simple interview can easily be a photo shoot, so make certain that people are ready.
Prevention
In today’s world, it’s critical to be able to identify who speaks for an organization in what contexts, as well as in what role and, most importantly, for what organization.
Note: This is an area that is rapidly changing as this is written as new media and social platforms are arising.
Once you have identified the speaker, the role, and the organization, in today’s world it’s necessary to know the rules by which all participants are playing. Do they recognize the roles as you do so that they know who is speaking in what capacity?
For many organizations, it is not unreasonable to have a simple chart that documents who officially speaks for which topics. Post it on your website for media and the public to refer to. Creating such a contact chart is an excellent exercise for an organization (large or small) because it brings the issues to the forefront where you may be able to get consensus.
Also in the area of prevention, establish a protocol for managing the information about the people and organizations with which you operate. The protocol can include who is responsible, as well as rules for managing changes and updates to data. If a major funder of your organization has a new address or other new descriptive or contact information, does someone handle it informally or are there rules for determining who makes the changes and when they are made?
Mitigation
When messaging has gone wrong—whether it’s messaging from the outside about your organization, anonymous messaging that mentions your organization in passing, or messaging that for one reason or another is sent from your organization incorrectly or, perhaps with errors—you need to be able to quickly identify exactly what has happened.
For larger organizations that, unfortunately, need to deal with these incidents on a frequent basis, a formal checklist used for identifying the problem can be coupled with specific protocols for handling each combination of factors. For even the smallest organization, a similar but smaller checklist can help people find their way in the world of message management. Preparing such a checklist and associated response protocols can be a powerful advance mitigation strategy for even the smallest organization.
Tip: Don’t just use the checklist to identify messaging issues. Save the incident checklists so that you can track messaging risk events. Particularly for smaller organizations, it is easy to take each event as a one-time rarity. Keeping the data can help you identify patterns. Also make certain to include a follow-up note with each checklist so that you can keep track of actions taken and, very importantly, information that may come to light after the incident has passed. In this regard, it is useful to record and keep contemporaneous records of what happened, whether or not those records are modified by subsequent events or analysis.
For organizations large or small, you can construct a checklist from any of these factors that are appropriate. You may want to use this checklist for messages sent to and from your organization whenever there is some question about the nature of the message (that is, whether it is accurate or not).
–Message source name: identified and known: Y/N?
–Message source location: internal/external/unknown?
–Message response protocol used (social media, web, letterhead, responsibility for response, etc.)?
–Does the message indicate a breach of security?
–Is the content damaging? (This answer needs to be tracked over time as the risk event plays out.)
–Is a response required?
–Who will respond?
–If the decision is not to reply, who will provide and enforce that silence?
–Does the message contain threats?
–What other parties are brought in?
–Remember to track consequences and subsequent events.
Managing the Economic Model
An organization’s activities have value to the organization itself, society, employees, recipients, and others. In commercial organizations, the value of endeavors can easily be measured by the profit and loss data for each activity.
In both commercial and other organizations, some projects and expenses are integrated into the overall budget without showing separate profit and loss data. In all organizations, management is looking at whether specific activities should be self-supporting.
This particularly arises with regard to activities in communications. Is a website that contains valuable information a resource that should be available for a fee? For some nonprofits, the publication of books and periodicals has generated positive cash flow. In discussing communications these days, the question of what can or should be a priced service is critical.
This is a question that is both financial and essential to the organization’s role. The discussion is listed here because there is risk involved in almost every decision that is made with regard to charging (or not charging) for information that an organization publishes, whether it is created by the organization or assembled from research.
Perhaps the biggest risk in deciding on an economic model for an organization’s intellectual property (and “free” is an economic model) is that publication in the age of the Internet is dramatically and rapidly changing. That, in and of itself, is a major risk.
What to Watch For
–Do the organization’s publication and data creation activities constitute an essential activity or service? Is it a traditional and long-standing activity that is not essential, or has the entire publication and data creation process become irrelevant in the web-based world? (All of the above are possible answers to these questions, but, if these are your answers, make certain that you actually do follow through on each component.)
–Because the web is truly worldwide, does this mean that the organization’s audience (and potential customers) for its intellectual property is global? Does this affect the creation and publication processes? Do translation issues need to be addressed?
–Is it necessary to create a planned scenario of change and evolution reflecting consumers of the intellectual property and their relationship to technology? (Age, for example, is a major factor.)
–“Publication” isn’t just about brochures, websites, and white papers. It can cover the development, use, and protection of the organization’s intellectual property (see “Prevention” in the following section for more details).
–Another area of risk is the fact that information that an organization may previously have charged for (often in print) is now often available for free. More than one organization (commercial, governmental, or nonprofit) has seen its revenue stream disappear with the advent of open data.
Prevention
Just about every organization has intellectual property among its assets. How you create, manage, and protect that intellectual property is up to you and your board.
The key parts of your organization’s brand and presence—such as logos and slogans—are valuable to you and others. Consult a legal advisor for advice on how to protect these properties in your jurisdiction. International treaties governing trademarks and copyrights can be expensive to work with, but an experienced legal advisor willing to sit for half an hour with your executive director and/or board can provide advice that is customized and scaled to your organization. There are some basic steps that you can take that are not expensive in many cases.
Caution: These laws, regulations, and treaties vary by location, so make certain you seek advice from someone who knows where you are located and is familiar with your situation. Beware of searching the web for advice on this subject, because it may be outdated or applicable to another area. In the global Internet world, you need to consider the location of your readers and audience as well as your own.
Your staff and board should have a general understanding of the issues involving intellectual property so that your organization does not infringe upon the rights of other people and organizations. Ongoing training should remind people of their responsibilities under the law.
Mitigation
There are two types of risk events that arise regarding your intellectual property.
–Unauthorized use by others. If your intellectual property (logo, published materials, and the like) is used without your permission, it is usually a good idea to notify the unauthorized user and take appropriate action. Many organizations have a standard procedure and form letter (usually written by a legal advisor) that are used as a first-stage response. Informal use of your intellectual property needs to be thought through before an incident occurs.
–Your use of others’ property. If you have mitigated the issue with training, as advised in the previous section, this shouldn’t occur. Nevertheless, it can happen. If you discover that your organization has accidentally infringed on intellectual property owned by someone else, an immediate response (such as stopping that use) is appropriate. Depending on the scope of the misuse, you may need to bring in legal counsel very early on in the process so that you (and your staff, funders, clients, and patrons) are not surprised.
When it comes to your economic model itself, this needs to be monitored and addressed in the same way as in a commercial organization. Keeping track of the environment for the business or service is just as essential for a nonprofit as for a commercial organization because the basic issues are the same. There are many resources—including publications, websites, conferences, and consultants—you can use. It is often a good idea to explicitly search for commercial operation strategies related to your economic model so that you get a broader perspective on the issues.
Summary
Marketing, communications, and reputation are among the fastest changing aspects of the modern Internet-based world. Many people and organizations still rely on comfortable ideas along the lines of “our users/supporters/clients won’t be interested in those technologies.”
Many mission statements guide the nonprofit organization to instruct, support, or communicate in advancement of a cause or activities. The tools that are needed today are different from those of yesterday, but the mission of communication remains valid and must be implemented in new ways.