How to Strengthen Your Nonprofit Brand With Key Messages
What Are Key Messages?
Key messages are an essential part of effective messaging strategies. They are the ideas your nonprofit must repeat over and over again in order to achieve your messaging objectives.
In addition to helping build trust via consistency, they also keep your messaging focused, ensuring that each message has the necessary touchpoints to take root in audiences’ minds.
As simple as that may sound in theory, in practice there is a lot of nuance that goes into creating effective key messages. In this post, we’ll explain what key messages are, how they are used, and how your nonprofit can develop key messages that strengthen your brand and inspire action.
Start With Why
Strategic messaging is grounded in your organization’s objectives, therefore the quality of the message will depend a great deal on how you frame your objective.
As nonprofits, we need a lot of things: staff, volunteers, program applicants, in-kind donations, and—of course—money. With so many pressing needs, it can be tempting to let those drive our communications, developing the right message for each short-term objective as it comes up.
However, this often leads to a bunch of disconnected messages that are all pulling in different directions. They might get you some traction in the short term, but they won’t get your brand where it needs to be.
Best case is they’re unhelpful when it comes to strengthening your brand and worst case is they might actually undermine your ability to establish a clear position in audiences’ minds.
Capital “O” Objectives
For messaging that works in both the long and the short term, you need to start with the big picture. How do you want audiences to view you relative to similar organizations in the space? This is your brand’s positioning and it should act as the heart of your brand strategy.
Once you have your positioning dialed in, try to break it down into specific objectives. What do you need to communicate in order to establish your desired positioning? Once you’ve broken down your positioning, use your audience segments to identify any critical objectives that are missing (such as “Increase donations” for donors).
Audience profiles can help you translate those objectives into focused messaging that takes into account each audience segment’s unique goals, concerns, and pain points. Taking the time to truly understand each of your audiences will allow you to select which key messages they each need to hear. It will also help your messages to feel more personal and more urgent.
That’s how you get to key messages. Although for marketers who are used to crafting public-facing communications, there are some important considerations to take into account that make a big difference in how useful your key messages actually are.
Copy This
Many (perhaps even most) nonprofits do not have any formal messaging guidelines, so if you do, you’re already ahead of the curve. However, a lot of the time what passes for “key messages” are really just talking points culled from various communications:
This is how we got started…
This is how we describe each of our programs…
This is the impact we’ve had…
Et cetera
This kind of document can be very useful—particularly if it’s based on a broader messaging strategy (see above)—but these are not key messages.
Key messages are the ideas you need to repeat again and again to achieve your brand’s objectives. Most people need to see the same message 4-6 times before they are able to retain it and/or take action. But if you're simply repeating the same talking point over and over, your audiences are likely to tune out before they’ve had an opportunity to retain what you are saying.
For that reason, key messages should be simple and repeatable. They’re ideas, not copy, and should be capable of being expressed in different ways, such as through stats, storytelling, descriptions, taglines, and more.
When used correctly, key messages allow you to get your message across without relying on a single set of stock phrases.
How Many is Too Many?
The other thing to consider when you’re developing key messages is quantity. How many key messages should your organization have?
This can be tricky, because you need enough key messages to cover each of your objectives, but not so many that you don’t have the time or space to repeat them. When it comes to key messages, less is often more.
You will generally want at least one key message for every objective on your list, but for the more important objectives, you may wind up having two or three. That said, try to limit yourself to having no more than ten key messages, with the sweet spot being between six and eight. This should give you enough messages to cover each of your objectives, while still leaving plenty of space to repeat them all in your communications.
How to Use Key Messages
Key messages are incredibly useful for planning communications. We like to organize them by audience segment, that way if you’re planning a communication to donors, for example, you have a list of vetted messages that support both your long-term and short-term goals.
You can also use these messages to build out a robust set of copy assets you can use to streamline content creation.
Effective messages aren’t one-off creations; they’re part of a comprehensive framework that is always working double duty to support both your short- and long-term objectives. Once your messaging is dialed in, the ROI for everything you produce will continue to grow along with your brand.
Click below to learn more about our approach to brand messaging.
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