Crafting a nonprofit content strategy that works

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
Welcome to another episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit. Today we’re talking about the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your nonprofit and how to talk about it and write about it to create awareness and increase revenues from donations and your service offerings and your grants and so forth. In other words, we’re gonna talk about content and content strategy.

The things that go into spreading the word about who you are and what you do. This topic has never been more important. I’ll bet that everyone listening to our show is doing something important. That’s why you got into managing a nonprofit, working with a nonprofit, serving a nonprofit, being a volunteer, because of your belief in the mission and because that mission is important. But sometimes,

when we need to talk about what we do and who we do it for and why we do it and what the impact will be, we clam up. We just don’t have the message ready to go. Or we forget something that might be important to this listener, this person we’re talking to, this organization, this funding agency, this business contact that we’re now meeting with and we’re not quite sure what to say. And instead, we accidentally share something less important, less relevant to that person.

And so that’s why the who, whom we’re talking with is so important because when you think about it, all of our interactions as human beings are contextual. I speak with my fiancé differently than I speak with my son. I speak with my colleagues at Counterintuity a little differently than I speak with some other folks. I go back to where I grew up. We all go out and relive who we were in college and pretty quickly we’re sounding rather different. So again, all communication is contextual.

And we wanna figure out who we’re talking to for content strategy. So today, we’re gonna talk about how considerations in developing your content strategy and this long ago reporter, newspaper reporter, that’s how long ago it was, this long ago reporter can tell you it always starts with the classic questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. Whom are you speaking to? What do you do? Where do you do it? Is your program national, global, local, virtual? When do you do it? And when is your program slash service slash event happening? Why are you doing it? What will the impact be? And how do you do it? How can we know that we can trust you to do it because you know how to do it?

Remember, the number one reason people support any nonprofit is because they believe in the mission. And the number two reason is that they believe you can accomplish it. So this is really important stuff for you to know and to talk about. And crafting a content strategy will help you reflect your nonprofit’s identity. And when we say reflect, we mean send that message back out into the world. A well-defined identity is essential to distinguish your organization and help people understand its nature, but also to build trust,inspire action, and foster long-term relationships with supporters. One of the most powerful tools to express this identity is through content, what we used to call stories, but now we call them content. Whether you’re writing a grant proposal, updating your website, or posting on social media, the way your nonprofit communicates should be intentional, consistent, and reflective of your mission and values.

And I want to hit that intentional word just for a minute. The people who are intentional tend to get the biggest result of all sorts in life. And in any negotiation, as we’ve all probably discovered, the person who cares the most and has put the most into it frequently gets the better result. So we want to be intentional. And that’s where a content strategy comes into play.

A content strategy is not just a plan for producing and publishing content. It’s a framework that aligns your messaging with your nonprofit’s identity, your audience expectations, and your communication goals. So we’re gonna explore today how and why to create a content strategy that reflects who your nonprofit is and how you wanna talk about it. And we’ll also walk through key decisions like determining tone, language level, storytelling techniques, and more. A content strategy gives your communications clarity, consistency and purpose and proceeding without a kind of winging it, and we’ve probably all been in the winging it space, Winging it may have been more acceptable in the pre-internet days, but now with everything living perpetually online, where it can always be found, it just seems particularly fraught to me, fraught with risk, risky. Without a content strategy, your messaging can become fragmented, confusing or disconnected from your mission. With a content strategy, you have formalized what you’re going to talk about and how and why. And it provides, again, a guide to how to proceed. So I’ll start with giving you five examples of how a content strategy helps your nonprofit. I think, as I already mentioned, consistency builds trust.

So without a content strategy, your tone might shift wildly from one platform to another, or you might use jargon that alienates your audience. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t understand what is this jargon. And when that happens, you lose credibility. People just don’t understand, don’t know why they’re there, don’t quite follow it. Well, who is this person who’s speaking to me as this nonprofit? They sounded this way on Tuesday and now it’s Thursday and they sound this way. I don’t get it. If you’re consistent, and speak within one voice, people get to know you. this is them, this is what they do, and this is how they sound. It keeps your team aligned, and that’s important. There’s a lot of important things here. That’s why I keep saying important.

Whether it’s your executive director, your development officer, your social media intern, a volunteer, a strong content strategy ensures everyone speaks in the same voice. It reflects your values. Every piece of content, blogs, newsletters, videos, billboards. Every piece of content offers an opportunity to show your nonprofits personality, values, and vision. And it helps you make the most of limited resources. As we know, nonprofits often have tight budgets and small teams. By the way, pretty much everybody complains about small budgets and tight teams no matter what size or whether they’re nonprofit or not. A clear strategy prevents wasted effort and ensures that your content serves a strategic purpose. You’re making the best use of the resources you have. And then the fifth reason is it increases engagement.

When content resonates with your audience, they’re more likely to take action, to donate, to volunteer, to share, to advocate, to do something to help support you. So, Let’s take a look at how to develop a content strategy. I can tell you that here at CounterIntuity, we begin client engagements by developing a content strategy for all the reasons given above. So when I walk you through these steps and examples, please know that we have a process for doing this that I’ve kind of simplified and reorganized to put in here to try to be helpful. What we do is we do a day-long in-person meeting. Sometimes it’s half day. And by the way, if day long or half day rings the uh-oh bell for you, like, no, I mean, I don’t want to be in that meeting.

That’s not how we approach it. We make it fun and upbeat and we ensure that everyone gets heard and their ideas are collected and appreciated. And it’s, it’s oddly generally always a good time. I say oddly because people go into it with concerns about how it’s going to be. And I would just remind you that founders of our agency are theater people. So we try to be audience oriented and keep people engaged. So what I’m recommending here today in this podcast episode is to turn the process I’m about to share with you into a team building, team listening session. If you can pull that off, that’s really the best way to do this. I think someone being siloed and doing it on herself or doing it by herself or himself. or theirself is probably not the best way to do this.

 So this team building, team listening session is how we handle it. And we’ve been doing that for almost 20 years and it adds a layer of fun and positivity. So if you have a way to do that, that’s my recommendation. But again, you can go to the show notes, you can go to our website, get a transcription of this. You can follow the steps we’ve outlined. It’s all in here. We format it a little differently when we’re doing it interactively with folks. If you have to do this one-on-one or in drafts that go back and forth between people, that can work too. But again, the day-long working on it together process can be and should be a real mood lifter, a productive mood lifter. But if you’re gonna do it on your own or you’re gonna go back and forth through a Google Sheet or something, that’s fine. You’ll figure this out. So we cover all these things in our process and we’re just sharing the proposed steps. and outcomes that will help guide you to a similar outcome in, here we go, eight easy steps. Eight easy steps.

So let’s jump in. Step one, define your nonprofit’s identity. Before you can communicate your identity, you need to define it. And so ask yourself and your team, what is our mission? This is the why behind everything you do. What is our mission? What great problem are we working to solve? What are our core values? Are they compassion, innovation, equity? Your content should express these.

At Counterintuity, we have core values. Our core values are creative, can do, committed, and clever. And those drive what we do. We hire around those core values. We use those to gauge our success and they keep us clean and pure as best as human beings can be every day. So we are committed to our clients. And so we’ll ask ourselves, how are we doing with this client at the moment? We know we need to be committed. It’s a core value. This solution, is this really creative or is this not so creative? Clever says that you can really approach things in different ways and can do. says yes, we can do that and we’re gonna do that. And again, there’s a lot of that that comes out of the performing arts world that my business partner, Amy Kramer and I came from. What are your core values?

You’re gonna wanna know those because everything you’re gonna put out is gonna reflect your core values. Ask yourself, what is our personality? Are you serious and data-driven? And there are certainly nonprofits that are serious and data-driven. and thank goodness for that. Or are you more warm and conversational? Think of your nonprofit as a person. What is it like as a person? If you met this person at a party, what would this person be doing? How would this person present themselves? How would they sound? And then ask yourself, what makes us unique? What sets your organization apart from others in your field? Because absolutely there is something.

Let’s tell the world about that. So write all of that down. And this foundational document, often called a brand voice guide or an identity brief, will shape every content decision you make. So again, we start with defining your identity’s profit, I’m sorry, your nonprofit’s identity. So examples, and we’ve all heard mission statements, so please bear with me. So I’m gonna give you some examples. So for mission, might be to empower underserved youth through arts education. And we’ve known plenty of those folks and good for them. Values might be creativity. I say creative, cause that’s one of ours. Creativity, inclusion, empowerment, community, those are all examples of values. As a client of ours recently said, their performing arts shows aren’t just about the show, they’re about Building community that’s exactly right.

It’s not just about the show for them. It’s about bringing the community together and boy do we need more Community community getting together right now in this country personality youthful inspiring hopeful grassroots that that’s a personality Smart is an aspect of the counterintuitive personality that we’ve been hearing for quite a long time. So we did not originally start with understanding that, because I can be as dumb and clueless as anybody, but people kept saying, you guys are really smart. And so smartness is one of the personality traits here. And then what’s the unique thing that you do? Do you do, as an example, peer-led workshops designed by students or former students or such? So you figure those four things out, mission, values, personality, and your unique point, unique offering, et cetera, and you start to define a personality.

 Step two, understand your audience. So I touched on this a little bit before, how everything is contextual. Effective content strategy depends not just on who you are, but also on whom you’re talking to. So who are your primary audiences? And that’s plural. primary audiences. Donors, funders, I always separate those two, donors and funders, they seem a little different to me. Donors, funders, volunteers, community partners, policy makers, people who benefit, who are you speaking to and what are they like? What do they care about? Why do they support you? What problems do they hope that you can be part of solving? What language do they use? Are they familiar with your field’s terminology or do you need to simplify? And that’s really about jargon. If they don’t understand your jargon, it’s just good to, if you’re gonna use your jargon, define it. And so here, of course, we know what a CTA is, we’re a marketing agency and we’re always sure to say call to action. So are they familiar with your field’s terminology and what you’re doing or do you need to simplify? I mean, you wanna be understood.

After all, that’s the purpose of communications. And then where do they consume content? Social media, digital newspapers, print newspapers. There’s still some of those around. Printed reports, print and mail. Because print and mail are still big for some people and annual reports are important to some funders. Even billboards, I mentioned billboards before, even billboards have a potential role to play. Is your audience an audience that would learn about you from billboards in the neighborhood? Because we’ve done those campaigns too very successfully. So where will your people, the people you’re targeting, consume your content? And you may have multiple audiences. And in fact, you probably do, almost assuredly do. So create personas for each. So remember I tried to picture you at a party.

Now try to picture different people that your nonprofit may talk to in different environments. A donor might need emotional stories and clear impact statistics. Like wow, this tugs at my heart. I tend to give to dog charities, tree charities, and people suffering charities. to share a little bit. And I, yeah, they grab me by the heart and then I wanna know, are they really doing something important about this? And if they are, I’m there. So a donor like me, like everybody else, might need emotional stories and clear impact statistics. But a policymaker, let’s say you’re talking to government about how do I get some funding from you locally, state, federally, whatever, might want research and policy briefs. They want different things.

Step three, determine your tone and your voice. Your voice is your consistent personality and your tone depends on the context. Think of voice as your nonprofit’s character and tone as how that character expresses itself in different moods or situations. So ask yourself, should our tone be formal or informal? And depending on who you’re speaking to in 2025, 2026, probably somewhere between formal and informal. Do you want to sound professional, passionate, activist, academic, friendly, urgent, optimistic, or empathetic? Or some concatenation of a couple of those? Some nonprofits obviously want to sound activist because they are activists fighting for issues they believe in. Language that sounds strong and active will benefit them. I mean, if you want to join them in the fight and they don’t sound like they’re fighting, you’re in the wrong place. If they sound like they’re fighting and you believe they can get a result, then they benefited by using stronger tone and you benefited by realizing that they’re doing what you, they’re manifesting the change you hope they will. And by the way, that strong tone will turn away people not drawn to that sound.

But were they gonna be supporters anyway? I mean, if they don’t like what the organization’s doing, then tone plays no role for them. But tone will help the supporters and would-be supporters understand what’s going on here and get involved. And then the question becomes, how should your tone shift across platforms or formats? So more casual on social media, more polished in reports, and so forth. If you’re writing a grant application, your language is probably a little more professional sounding and should be. If you’re writing on social media targeted to your individual donors, probably less so. These things may seem obvious, but I’m spending the time to point these things out because it’s good to take this in and to realize that we need to sound in accord with the goal we’re trying to achieve with the people who can help us achieve it. who will be getting this message. And I’m not sure we’re always cognizant enough. And so I like to bring this up as a reminder of sorts.

So use your identity and your audience research to guide these choices. So I’ll give you some examples of tone guidelines. So social media, upbeat, informal, visually engaging. As an example, the same nonprofit doing a grant application might sound more formal, more precise, more impact focused. And then on their website, they might be friendly, informative, and hopeful. And then in their newsletters, they might choose to be warm, a little more storytelling focused because it’s a format with more space and more personal. That’s all the same person. That’s the same nonprofit avatar that showed up at the party, but the tone is changing a little bit because the delivery mechanism is radically different.

 Step four, choose your language level and style. Language choices shape accessibility, inclusion, and engagement. And by the way, at the core of the human experience is language. Language is what separates us from our primate cousins. It’s our ability to communicate with this language. So language is central to who we are. So we’re gonna start with something that I personally have had some thoughts about and some internal consternation division about. And there I use the word consternation proving my own point.

So the first consideration is readability and clear, concise language. So there is a tool on the internet and we will put it in the show notes called the Hemingway Editor. And there’s another one called the Flesh Kincaid. And what they will do is they will check grade level. And I remember decades ago learning that President Reagan generally spoke at a third grade level. And that is a completely defensible maneuver because he’s speaking to everyone. And I know because I’ve tested how I write and speak, I know that I write and speak at a 12th grade level. So sue me. It’s right for our market though. our market is nonprofit leaders who generally are highly educated. Plus it’s who I am, it’s who I actually am.

When I was a boy and always, it seemed every year winding up in a different school, I thought, well, you know, they won’t figure out about me right away. And right away they were onto me and it took me until adulthood to realize it was the vocabulary, because I read a lot. So how you talk is the cornerstone. of your identity and it’s the cornerstone of counterintuitives identity as a marketing agency for nonprofits. And this is one of the reasons I think people say, well, gee, you guys are so smart. It might also be that we try to keep our finger on the pulse of what’s going on.

But in any event, if I were writing and speaking to a community organization and you think about the organizations in your community that do really good work and are doing things that have to have a broader appeal across the community, Would I run some of the things I was going to say or write through the Hemingway editor named after, of course, Ernest Hemingway, who was known for being terse and focusing on the right verbs and nouns and not worrying about adjectives and adverbs too much?

Would I run some of the things that I was going to communicate through the Hemingway editor or the Flesh Kincaid, both of which would suggest ways to lower the writing level to a lower grade? Would I do that to ensure more people would not only understand but be attracted? Quite possibly, probably. And again, we’ll put those links in here if you choose to do that. Jargon and accrimons, I touched on this briefly before. avoid these. You want your audience to understand. So instead of saying, for instance, SEL interventions for youth, I mean, I didn’t know what this was, SEL interventions for youth. say social emotional learning programs for teens. And by the way, social emotional learning programs is a term I myself learned only last Friday from a very smart client when we were working with them. Perfect example of how some people might not understand your jargon. I mean, I’m relatively well read. I had no idea what social, emotional, et cetera was. Inclusive language.

Make sure that you’re speaking to to people in a way that reflects who they are and you’re avoiding stigmatizing phrases and you’re respecting the language preferred by the communities you serve. I will overshare that when I was a boy, I was very influenced, perhaps deleteriously so, by Harlan Ellison, who had a big, big vocabulary and also had a jump and jive kind of style that mixed it up and threw in like, ain’ts and whatever. And to this day, I still do that. So I’ve been marked by the communities that we serve. We want to be understood by nonprofits.

We want to help them. And so you want to respect the identity language preferred by the communities you serve. And then there’s multilingual needs. Do some of your audiences prefer content in another language, just to state the obvious? You can build translational and cultural adaptation into your strategy. And by the way, There is a Google plugin that will afford you the opportunity for people to get your website translated automatically in dozens of languages. And we’ve installed that for lots of clients. So language should reflect both your values of, as an example, inclusion and accessibility and your audience’s needs.

Step five, decide what stories to tell and how. One of the things we do is we collect stories from clients in lots of different formats. And it’s always fun to hear an incredible story. The boy who has come home from the event this nonprofit has run for other children like him, and he’s crying in the car on the way home. And the driver says, are you sad? And he said, no, I’m so happy there are other kids like me. That was amazing. I almost cried hearing that story. So you wanna find the stories that serve your strategy. And so you’re choosing stories that align with your mission. In this one, you’re hearing that the event was life-changing for this little boy. And I’ve never met him, but part of me is very moved by him and moved to find out that at age eight or 10 or whatever, he finds out there are other kids like him. That’s a great story for that nonprofit.

 So align with your mission. Choose stories that align with your mission. Don’t chase trends that distract from your own core purpose, and I know you wouldn’t do that anyway. But you wanna find stories that you have that, from outside your universe or within your own nonprofit, that relate to what you do. You wanna show impact as well. Highlight how your work changes lives or systems. And then have a clear takeaway. What do you want the reader to feel, to learn, to do? So this is that call to action that I was propounding. A call to action is essential. What do you want people to do? Because here’s your chance to ask them to do something. We had a fundraiser extraordinaire, John Guile, on this podcast recently. And John said the number one mistake some nonprofits make is not to ask. They’re not asking people enough, and they’re not asking the right people, and they’re not doing it in the right format. We can all do better than that. We need to be askers. So let’s tell the stories that are gonna grab people and let’s ask them to do something in response to that story. Could be send a donation, could be sign up for our email newsletter, could be please come volunteer, could be would you serve on our board, whatever the heck it is.

Step six, create a content calendar and a channels strategy. So now that you’ve clarified your voice, your tone and stories, decide where and when to share them. So a content calendar, to do that you plan content types, blog posts, videos, the short form videos are hot. People watch them, I get sucked into watching those, I like those, it might be a minute, might be two minutes. Graphics. What about themes? This might be mental health month.

This might be back to school. This might be this big issue is coming before the government and we wanna focus attention on that and publish dates around that too. So content calendar has content types, has themes and has dates associated. And there it is, you’ve planned out your calendar. And then there’s the channel strategy which works with the content calendar and the channel strategy is where you choose to publish the website, the newsletter, Instagram, YouTube, events, et cetera, and tailoring content to each platform’s norms and audience. And then there’s cadence, which is determining how often to post. Daily social posts, weekly newsletters, quarterly reports, et cetera. I was on a meeting of marketing agencies this morning, really smart friends and peers. and we were having a discussion about for clients and for ourselves, whether we email once a week, twice a week, every two weeks, et cetera. Well, everybody on the call has a strategy behind that and has a reason that they’ve chosen that cadence.

Some felt that they don’t want, their target market does not wanna hear from them as often as others on the call said, no, people wanna learn this? They need the educational assistance. They need some how-tos. They need some help. Particularly now when things are a little uncertain and things are changing rapidly in the news, I think that people wanna hear from you a little more. And especially if there’s something they can do, they want to hear on a more regular basis than I would have said three to five years ago. So your calendar should reflect organizational goals, your organizational goals, obviously, of raising awareness, of mobilizing activists, of increasing donations, and so forth, and not just filling space. Not just we need some post by Thursday. Let’s talk about it was a beautiful day yesterday. Once in a while, that might be kind of fun, because everybody wants to hear somebody having a good time when things are a little fraught for others. That didn’t sound quite right. What I mean is everybody needs to pick me up now and then. But that should not be your main purpose. Your main purpose is not just filling space, your main purpose is lifting people up and creating awareness about your organization.

Two more, step seven, create internal guidelines and workflows, super important. because you wanna ensure consistency across all communications, you wanna document this. So this is what we call process. You need process. Process, it may seem like a drag. no, I have to write this process and I have to figure this out and Lisa’s all this, write all of this stuff. I avert to you, this will save you uncounted hours in the future. It’s far better to spend the time. and do these things now and create the processes because they save you time later. And hats off to the people at Counterintuity who have educated me in this lesson because now I just follow their processes. And it’s been terrific.

Process helps. So yes, you need a style guide. And so it doesn’t have to be, I recently was sent Walmart’s style guide and I think it’s 60 pages, 60 slides. I don’t think you need that but you do need voice and tone rules. You do need grammar preferences if you’re a little looser in your language. You need how your logo is used. You need the color palette, approved terminology, the way you’re gonna talk about things. When I was a teenager, I noticed that there was an ad for a camel cigarettes jacket in a magazine. Again, this is from the before times. Camel cigarettes advertising in magazines. you seen that? And it was a bomber jacket. He talked about the heavy duty zipper and it said, it’s got. And as a language maven, even in my teens, I’m like, hmm, most advertising has the sound of it has because most buyers are women and this was targeted to men, it’s got and they wanted it to sound rugged and the jacket looked rugged and you hear the difference and I could hear the difference then.

This is the sort of thing. that would go in grammar preferences, let’s say in your style guide. Tone, voice, grammar, logo usage, color palette, approved terminology, et cetera. Your internal guidelines would also include templates. Create some templates for your newsletters, your social posts, your blog headers, your reports. Again, templates will save you a lot of time quickly. So if you’re gonna send out an email newsletter every month, or twice a month, which I generally recommend, create a template. Don’t restart it every month. And I realized this sounds like, of course, but believe it or not, not everybody does that. And you want an approval process. Who writes? Who edits? Who approves? Streamline to avoid bottlenecks. Accountability, who does what, will save you time. We improved this when I realized I was the bottleneck, which was especially dumb. Given how smart our team is, our team is very smart. And so I realized I was the pretty much daily impediment on a number of things. I extracted myself from that. And now the other team members here at Counterintuity are more empowered. And we are able to sound smart while moving fast because we get out of the way. So a process would tell you who has to have an approval here. And I did not need to be approving all sorts of things. And then you want some training.

You want to systematize and document your training to onboard new team members, volunteers, interns, et cetera, with your strategy and your guidelines and board members. Board members need an orientation. So this strategy that you’re developing overall that we’re talking about here is only useful if your team knows how to use it and that they’re empowered to do so. So step seven was create internal guidelines and workflows.

And then finally, and you probably saw this coming, monitor, measure, and adapt. A content strategy isn’t set in stone. It should evolve based on what works. What were your goals and are you achieving your goals with this? So just like everything else in life, This should be based on what works. So you wanna track engagement. What were the open rates, the likes, the shares, the comments? What were the conversions like? The donations, the signups, the event attendance, things like that. Feedback, what are people saying? Are they confused or are they inspired? Internal alignment. Are staff and board members using the strategy? Do they feel it reflects your organization? Did they understand it? Did they like it? Are they on board with it? And then, how do you do this? You schedule quarterly or biannual reviews to assess and adjust.

Notice, I did not say daily, weekly, monthly. I mean, I think you should look at those things, but you should not be adjusting daily, weekly, monthly. It’s just crazy making. As people who follow entrepreneurial operating system, which we advocate for nonprofits to EOS, entrepreneurial operating system, we believe in those quarterly reviews. You get real results from review and analysis and discussion. As the saying goes, you can expect what you inspect. So track your data, see what the results are, adjust accordingly. Some further thoughts. Some things to perhaps be aware of and perhaps steer clear of. Mission drift is a challenge and a consideration. Avoid diluting your voice to chase viral trends. I don’t believe in chasing viral trends because by the time you get there, it’s done. Used to be a saying, by the time it gets to the cover of Time Magazine, it’s over. So stay grounded in your identity, stick to who you are in getting your message out. Everybody else is doing, et cetera, let them do that. Stick to who you are.

Let’s talk about resources again. You don’t need a full-time content team to have a good strategy. You don’t. Start small, focus on quality over quantity. Pick a platform that will work best for you and go from there. But do some of this, do what you can do. Please don’t think this is holy cow. This is the 1200 page novel I don’t want to read. Think about this as I’m gonna write this three page document to start. I’m gonna write this one page thing. I’m going to, et cetera, and then they grow. You don’t have to do this all at once, just like you don’t have to eat a meal all at once. You eat it in sections. Representation, this goes back to the whom are you speaking to? and whom are you reflecting? I would just advocate that you ensure the voices in your content reflect the communities that you’re serving. And invite collaboration if it’s possible with are there people you’re serving who could be interviewed, could be part of this, could share stories, because if they reflect your target audience, they should be reflected in what you’re putting out. And I think it’s always good to bring up crisis communication.

Do you have a plan for how your tone or your content might change during a crisis? A natural disaster, a political upheaval, an internal controversy, et cetera. It’s good to have a little crisis communication plan, even if it’s a paragraph, a page, two pages, because you never know what might happen. And I’m talking to you from Los Angeles. We had big raging fires in January. Things changed here. And so the stories being put out about Los Angeles changed radically. And so one of the boards I sat on, for instance, we decided to do something bigger and more tangible for a couple of fire stations. So, and that came out of that terrible disaster of what happened with our fires. So having crisis communication and what might happen with your organization and how you might handle it would be good.

Finally, be authentic and be intentional. A strong content strategy is not about marketing buzzwords or rigid rules. It’s about expressing who you are in a way that resonates with those who believe in your mission. By defining your identity, understanding your audience and making intentional. intentional choices about tone, language, and storytelling, you create a voice that’s both powerful and consistent. For nonprofits, content is not just communication, it’s connection.

Do want people to have more awareness of you? This is how you do it. And do you want more awareness of what’s going on with them? Of course you do. With the people you serve, again, this is how you do it. It’s not just communication, it’s connection. And I would say to you that one of the challenges of the time we’re in right now is disconnection. People feeling not connected enough to community. Wherever and whatever that community is, people are looking for more connection. And you may find that your nonprofit can be a tribe to which they belong. And then also in a world where attention is scarce and trust is earned slowly, A thoughtful content strategy helps you cut through the noise and speak with purpose. It tells the world not just what you do, but who you are and why that matters and why they should support that. Support your work.

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope this was helpful. I hope it wasn’t too long. We’ll put a lot in the show notes that you can look at. We’ll send some links to those editing platforms if you’d like to get look at that. And if you have any thoughts, we’re always interested in the dialogue. Please reach out and we’ll put links there as well. We’ll put them in the show notes. I’d love to hear from you. Please spread the word. Thank you for what you’re doing. Please put out the word about what you’re doing because we need you, especially now. Thank you.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.