For nonprofits looking to sharpen their communication strategies, CompassPoint's 24th Annual Nonprofit Day offered a wealth of advice.

In the panel Rethinking Strategy: The Intersection of Impact, Brand, and Business Model, three experts defined these terms and illustrated their use for effective nonprofit communications. Jeanne Bell, CEO of CompassPoint, led the discussion and was joined by Jara Dean-Coffey, founder and principal of jdcPartnerships, and Holly Minch, principal at LightBox Collaborative.

The cornerstone of their presentation rested in the necessity for nonprofits to think strategically about communications plans, working with a definition of strategy by David La Piana: "Strategy is a coordinated set of actions designed to create and sustain a competitive advantage in achieving a nonprofit's mission."

Good communications flow from good strategy. Therefore, nonprofits must have a crisp understanding of the problem they solve and how they solve it.

Each speaker then went on to unpack one of the three areas of intersection and drive her point home with a compelling case study.

Impact: Be Rather Than Do

Jara Dean-Coffey discussed impact, with a focus on how organizations should be evaluative, rather than simply doing evaluation. Evaluative thinking needs to be built into the foundation of both strategy and everyday operation, and means much more than deploying an annual survey.

Using the example of a small nonprofit working with school reform, Dean-Coffey illustrated a common problem in approach to impact. What the organization was measuring had nothing to do with what any external stakeholders — from foundations to donors — actually wanted to know about the organization's work. Staff were exhausted and felt ineffective, while the intent of the leadership was scattered and vague.

In order to address the problem, Dean-Coffey followed some steps many nonprofits might consider with respect to impact:

• Think about the questions that must be answered and then ask salient questions that matter
• Be systematic rather than episodic
• Ground work in credible research, case studies, and literature that already exists in the field
• Think beyond surveys: make qualitative measurement an everyday activity by listening to and engaging staff for feedback

Brand Is Reputation (and Reputation Is Everything)

Holly Minch began her discussion on brand by asking, "Just what is brand anyway?" Inviting the audience to let go of any preconceived notions around bald market ambitions, Minch stated that simply put, brand is reputation. Much more than the flexible symbols of a logo or tag, brand is the durable sense of value an organization adds to the world.

Minch offered two key points to consider with respect to nonprofit brand strategy:

1. An organization can't achieve its mission without persuasion so think of brand as a persuasive tool
2. It is necessary to go do more than just understand an organization's value; communicating and differentiating that value are also essential

Minch illustrated her points with a case study featuring a legal services organization wanting to shift from a case-by-case approach to one addressing systemic change at the level of public policy. Strategic crossroads are an excellent place to evaluate communication strategy and think of new ways to present. Minch accomplished this using two main methods:

1. Looking beyond how work is done to the difference it makes by telling stories about the people served
2. Aligning staff around fundraising with a suite of messages communicating impact to ensure employees at all levels are well-armed with an elevator pitch

Model Behavior

Jeanne Bell kicked off her discussion of business models by describing a challenging shift in the nonprofit landscape. Whereas providing services used to yield resources, it is no longer enough. Nonprofits now must demonstrate impact to attract resources and, moreover, they must be skilled in articulating that impact. In fact, Bell holds that impact is a second bottom line to consider alongside profitability.

Bell's case study focused on CompassPoint itself, outlining the challenges around lengthy decision-making processes. Like many nonprofits, it had professionalized the executive roles but not the activities around them, hewing to a model where the board set the strategy while the staff implemented it. The solution to this problem highlighted the necessity of allowing staff to have strategic input alongside the board and loosening up meeting structure to focus on shared decision-making rather than top-down reporting.

Communications as Core Competency

The talk concluded with final advice from each of the three speakers in their respective topic areas.

Impact attracts resources, and program people must be empowered to see exactly how they are achieving this. Delivery and communications are the business model. Being evaluative and communicating impact are not optional and do not just represent a percentage of a grant. If an organization cannot afford to evaluate and communicate impact, it might not have the right business model. It's time for nonprofits to push for these as core competencies, affecting everything down to hiring decisions.

Later in the afternoon, Holly Minch picked up the thread in her breakout session Your Next Best Communications GAME Plan. Read about it in a blog entry by TechSoup tech analyst Ariel Gilbert-Knight. You can also check out the post Carlos Bergfeld, TechSoup web content developer, wrote about the session on Rethinking Movement Building.

Image: Dmitry Baranovskiy