As nonprofit communicators, we know that building our capacity to communicate is important because there is so much we want to achieve. But it can feel like so much is outside of our control and it’s not always obvious what steps we can take as individuals to move in the right direction.

When I facilitated a workshop last week on building nonprofit communications capacity, I asked the participants to answer three questions. The first question was, “What would you be able to accomplish with greater communications capacity?” and I shared participant responses in Part Two of this blog series.

The second question I asked was, “What would help you to get closer to your vision? What needs to be in place?” Yesterday, I shared participant responses to that question, which included:

• Supportive organizational culture and buy-in
• Integration and alignment
• Strategic thinking and planning
• External partnerships and collaboration
• Human resources
• Structure, content, policies and guidelines
• Technology
• Professional development
• Better habits
• Personal outlook, attitude and approach

So, if we know why we want a greater capacity to communicate, and we know what needs to be in place, how do we bridge the gap? What steps can we take as individuals to get closer to our vision? To bring forth ideas from the session participants, I asked the final question of the day…

 

What steps can YOU take in the coming days, weeks and months to increase and enhance your communications capacity?

In their words, here are the responses from within the room:

 

Review or audit existing communications

• Look back at what works, what doesn’t work
• Write down what I am already doing, who is my target, and is it working?
• Reevaluating and auditing communications
• Explore/investigate the communications audit
• Analyze strengths and opportunities (risks) – less focus on weaknesses

 

Review/improve personal performance

• Assessment of my current strengths
• Review my performance objectives
• Identify one error/mistake and figure out how to fix it

 

Be strategic

• Write the PLAN for communications
• Reference the strategic plan more frequently
• Be more proactive and less reactive

 

Focus on productivity

• Schedule my productivity – blocks of time specific to my own creative projects
• Calenderize tasks
• Schedule time to achieve a tangible task
• Reduce distractions (internet disconnect, move to a different room)

 

Prioritize

• Schedule priorities
• Complete five priority plan and check in
• Schedule tasks that are priorities
• Make it a priority

 

Be efficient with available time

• Shorten meeting slots
• Less waste in meetings

 

Collaborate internally

• Team cooperation to discover new ways/methods to communicate
• Internal communications so that everyone within understands/is on the same page

 

Work with available human resources

• Leverage interns from a specific field
• Build a team

 

Focus on goals, outcomes

• Also, monetize value of outcomes of improved communications then get resources
• Benchmark creatively – compare to other organizations; ones that do similar things and ones that don’t

 

Be more efficient

• Say more with less: Facebook vs Twitter
• Try to perform better and quicker typing skills when sending messages
• Look for shared resources

 

Listen

• Learn, listen, plan, do
• Listen more: gather different perspectives, Audit, tools

 

Get organized

• Create database
• Create the core comms documents (and get approved), keep current and share

 

Clean up communications

• Declutter content on the website and delete the organization’s ‘cyber trash’ (outdated links and profiles)

 

Be accountable

• Thinking more about things we can control (small projects vs. changing managers mind)
• Kick ass and take names (don’t smooth over others’ mistakes) hold people accountable

 

Invest in professional development

• Self educate on the latest/most popular ways of communicating
• Training
• Learning and professional development
• Professional development day for all staff
• Each month schedule at least: One nonprofits focused article, blog entry, webinar, workshop AND general communications or marketing article, blog, webinar
• Taking the time to teach myself new things
• Keep up to date with current comm. trends
• Research new sources
• Dedicate time for learning tools

 

Advocate for financial resources

• Get the necessary budget

 

It’s encouraging to see that communicators felt so empowered to take capacity building into their own hands. Though the session was about ‘Five Good Ideas’, participants went away with many, many more than five.

What do you think of these ideas? Do they resonate with you? Which ideas can you implement today to start building your own capacity to communicate?