Stop Talking to Yourself! Personalize Your Messages to Communicate Your Impact
Stop talking to yourself: It’s not about you, it’s about your audiences
Communicating the worth of what you do is an essential tool for spreading awareness of your cause, inspiring supporters, and increasing donorship. Here are some of NPIQ’s Insider Tips to help you do just that. 5 Insider Tips to Communicate Your Impact, part 1 of 5
INSIDER TIP 1: Build personalized messages
Talk to members of your audiences. Learn "what’s in it" for each constituent. What do they care about? Analyze and evaluate responses with your colleagues.
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It’s all about what resonates with your audiences! It’s their’ points of view, needs & interests, that are vital to your success.
Whether you’re reaching out to corporate donors, philanthropies, individual donors, the Board of Directors, volunteers or employees, make sure that you know your audience. Talk to them, familiarize yourself with what’s important to them, what they’re interested in, what words and language they like to use and how they like to be communicated with.
This is what you need to create personalized content that connects.
Develop a core messages that effectively speaks to your target audiences: then morph the core message into personalized messages to engage with the intended, diverse target audience(s) – various versions of the message are needed to effect different audiences.
BUILD PROFILES
Step 1: Start by building constituent personas or profiles of your ideal constituents.
As you can imagine, most organizations have several constituent personas.
Building these personas helps all you to more effectively create more personalized messaging and appeals.
For example, start by creating three constituent personas that are best for your organization: Corporate Catherine, Donor David, and Volunteer Victor.
Step 2: Talk to/ audit members of each audience to understand what might influence them. Brainstorm the characteristics for each of these three constituents and continue by brainstorming "what's in it for them" - what do they care about?
As you can imagine, each of these constituent audiences have different backgrounds, goals, attributes, and far different reasons for being associated with your nonprofit organization. They probably consume content differently, and even respond to different styles of writing, and different content formats.
GET TO THE CORE!
Step 3: Using the results of your brainstorming, develop one core message that connects the dots between your mission and how it relates to your constituents.
Step 4: Tweak the core message into personalized messages for each constituent audience focusing on “what’s in it for them”.
PROVE IT!
Step 5: Of course just stating a message gets attention, but buy-in comes from the proof points you’ve created to support each message.
Proof Points might include:
Statistics
Human-related stories
Testimonials
Infographics
Suggestions from leaders, professionals
SUMMARY
These constituent personas, personalized messages and proof points will help you captivate and motivate your audiences; while prioritizing and crystallizing information; ensuring consistency, continuity and accuracy; measuring and tracking success; and staying focused when communicating.
Check back for Insider Tips 2-5 in the series: 5 Insider Tips to Communicate Your Impact.
NPIQ partners with you to build communications messaging, strategies and tactics
that define how to capture the attention of your target audiences and result in maximum impact.
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