If you’re looking for a crash course or a quick refresher about how to plan, implement, and evaluate your organization’s communications efforts — marketing, PR, etc. — the folks at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation have anticipated your need. Their marketing and communications kit offers a short and snappy overview of the strategies and action steps you should be considering.
Designed primarily for their grantees, the kit is handy for any nonprofit looking for where to begin. It’s not nearly the full story, or the last word in how you should be connecting with the wider world (the ”evaluation” section is surprisingly thin and vague, for example). But it’s a start toward an essential organizational skill set. Says the kit’s author:
As nonprofits, we focus most of our attention on the issues and clientele we were created to serve. Too often, we underestimate the value of what we’ve learned from our work — the human stories, research findings, and best professional practices. Yet this field-tested knowledge can be invaluable when placed in the hands of the public, policymakers and other nonprofit and government agencies. Improving your group’s ability to communicate can have two-fold benefits: It can inform policies that will help advance your mission, and by increasing your visibility, make your organization more attractive to new members and donors.
Cool.
