Whew! That title is quite a mouthful, right?!? Fortunately, while the concept sounds a little weighty, it’s an approachable methodology that helps solve a key challenge for marketing communications professionals.
In the nonprofit space more than any other, your to-do list continues to grow while resources and time contract. The solution is often to let great ideas fall by the wayside as you’re not able to find the time to execute. Fortunately, there’s a better way — and it’s called Agile Communications.
Once you begin using Agile Communications techniques in your workflow, you’ll wonder how you were ever able to get work done before. Yes, it’s truly that transformational. Think of the difference between doing accounting in a ledger versus on a computer . . . and you’re close. Marketing teams at nonprofits are traditionally quite lean. Unfortunately, that means that many of your amazing ideas are left on the cutting room floor as you don’t have the time, energy or resources to get them done.
When you’re able to leverage a specific flexible and resourceful strategy for project management, you will find that you’re able to easily prioritize and execute on the ideas that will truly move the needle for your organization. This innovative approach is changing the way even the smallest nonprofits are able to communicate with and market to their constituents. This post is the first of a 3-part overview that will not only introduce the idea of Agile Communications to you and your team, but also give you the initial tools to get started.
Nonprofit MarComm Challenges
The nonprofit marketing space can be challenging, with donors being bombarded from all directions with appeals from television, email, SMS text messages, mailing pieces and even in-person appeals. Making your organization stand out from the crowd means evoking an emotion, creating a movement, constructing an experience. Sure, Coca-Cola can do that by creating immersive experiences such as their recent “drinkable jersey“, but do you really have that kind of budget? Only if you’re one of the lucky few. The rest of us have to struggle to keep small teams focused on efforts that provide the greatest returns.
Broken Workflows
You have limited budget. Limited staff. Limited time. And yet you still need maximum impact. This can lead to disorganization, frustration and an inability to execute, but it doesn’t have to. Instead, we have found that by borrowing the framework utilized to “fail fast” and quickly bring projects to market can also be used to create effective marketing and communication campaigns. No one wants to think about a multi-month marketing campaign that fails to hit the target, but continuous improvement is something that we’re all familiar with. It’s called “testing”, and every good campaign needs to be tested before it’s fully launched. Agile development processes are merely a framework that allows you to create testing mechanisms that get small wins out into the world — and then build upon them as you continue to gain momentum with your messaging.
If you find that your team is constantly struggling to work with internal and external teams to be as effective as possible, Agile helps keep you on track. Each stage of the initiative from inception to execution and a final retrospective helps you determine what worked and what needs to change in the next series of smaller micro-moments, or sprints in Agile terminology. Don’t get nervous about hearing a spate of new terms and concepts: we’ll walk you through them and how they can apply to your team over the next few articles.
Adaptive and Iterative Campaigns
Are your communication plans to support development efforts relatively inflexible, created months (or even years!) in advance with little room for adjustment? Let us show you how creating campaigns that are adaptive to the changing needs of your organization and the political and economic climate boost overall engagement with your audience. Better yet, these micro-campaigns ultimately improve giving and awareness within your constituent base. Agile marketing and communication processes fall within a relatively rigid framework, but you’ll see the true resilience of this approach once you begin using it.
Lifelong Engagement for Your Audience
The cost of donor acquisition continues to rise, making it imperative that you’re able to nurture and retain your best donors. This doesn’t happen simply by telling them a positive story once a year in your donation request letter. Today’s donors want information that addresses the burning need to contribute in their lives. They want to understand how your nonprofit helps fill that void and feed their passion to give back — to make a difference in the world. It’s not about pushing out mass quantities of information and hoping that something will stick. Engagement campaigns help bring your donors to the next stage in their giving journey, but they require deep integration between donor development and communications teams. Agile helps become the glue that brings the teams together to create a more connected organization; one that is more closely aligned to support the needs of your donors.
It’s a Marathon and a Sprint
When you segment your approach to marketing and communications into sprints, you’re able to increase the velocity (another Agile term) of your project delivery. These quick bursts of activity are highly targeted at delivering specific information and allow you to see measurable results and adjust quickly. Over time, you’ll learn powerful insights about your audience that will help you amplify the impact of even the most modest communications and marketing teams. Two key benefits of using Agile project management are the reduced cost and quicker time to market you’ll experience when you utilize this framework.
An Agile Communications structure provides you with the foundation you need to build your marketing communications strategy and magnify your impact in the world through true personal connections.
As a social sector communications agency, MagnifyGood specializes in elevating the marketing, PR, branding, advertising, and social media of nonprofits, foundations, and other mission-driven organizations. Looking to enhance your donor engagement, create compelling impact stories, establish a brand that aligns with your mission, or explore innovative strategies to connect with your community? Contact us here. Let’s magnify good together.
