I talked about my weird love of proofreading in the first blog, but I have another confession…I also thoroughly enjoy making industry jargon digestible to individual audiences. There’s something so satisfying about taking one message and tailoring it to fit multiple demographics.
As part of developing the nonprofit’s branding guidelines I talked about earlier this month, I rewrote key messages for our high priority stakeholder groups in a few different styles based on our target audiences. I was spurred by the fear of wasting an already lean budget by continuing to release a bunch of comms that our audiences couldn’t understand or didn’t care about. To me, this approach was second nature, but the organization’s more tenured staff saw unique and targeted messaging as less “consistent,” and it rocked the boat.
To make matters worse, my leadership believed casting a wider net was sure to bring in more leads, but they were casting in all the wrong fishing holes. We were churning out marketing in the exact places where our audience wasn’t looking, and our bottom line suffered.
As the new kid on the block, I had to win their support, even if I already knew this would be a huge game-changer for our comms strategies. I needed to put it into an actionable plan to prove the value of targeted and relevant communications and messaging. It was an uphill battle, but I knew it was worth it, since it would undoubtedly improve the outlook of the organization even after I’d left.
As part of the branding guidelines, here are a few tactics I built in to get our mission in front of those who needed it most in a way they could understand, digest, and act on it:
1. Separated our channels depending on user base.
As a nonprofit, we heavily relied on social media. Social media management software made it especially easy to post the same message to all our accounts and be done…but was it working? Short answer: no, it wasn’t, and it was the first tactic to go.
Here’s how I broke out our audiences at the time, and how I adjusted our tone and content to match:
- LinkedIn: Here we found our funders, established alumni of the program, donors, and our peers. The messaging was more mature in word choice, and related to our impact, opportunities to donate, and upcoming events. (P.S. Did you know you can invite people to follow your page by using their email? I grew our profile from 300 to 1,600 followers in one week by leveraging a built-in feature!)
- Facebook: Our program participants and families were on Facebook, so we used it for recruitment efforts and cross collaboration with other community-based organizations (check out Taylor’s blog in the Nonprofit Circle for more on social media collaboration). Here, our messaging was more informal, fun, and family oriented.
- Instagram: Anyone and everyone who wanted to follow. No, really. Instagram’s international presence makes it difficult to target and drive measurable action, so I used Instagram as a more behind-the-scenes platform, where our tone erred on the side of youthful.
- Twitter: This served as a sort of catch all. As a nonprofit, even having a Twitter was pretty out there…unless you’re controversial, it can be difficult to garner a meaningful following. I kept the account open because it wasn’t hurting anything, but I didn’t invest much time, energy, or effort into growing it. To this day, I still don’t put much stock in Twitter, but that’s a story for another time.
- Snapchat and TikTok: weren’t part of our strategy. We did not belong on these platforms, and I stood by that firmly. Remember, not every platform is for you, and it’s okay to prioritize those that bring legitimate value.
2. Identified gaps: who were we missing?
As I went through researching our relevant audiences and how they preferred to receive communications, I realized we were missing a major opportunity: our alumni. Our program had distributed over $30,000,000 in scholarships over its 40+ years in operation, and to qualify, the students paid a $25 application fee and participated in 16-weeks of character development and educational readiness programs.
40 years of service meant that some of those students were now professionals in the workforce, and could reasonably “pay it back,” yet we weren’t targeting them. I changed that, and I changed it quickly. I built custom messaging, developed an email and mail campaign (we didn’t have email addresses for early first scholarship recipients, since they’d entered the program before email became ubiquitous). For those whose contact information we didn’t have, I paid a service to find them. Colleges do it all the time, so why couldn’t we?
I can’t emphasize enough what a game changer it was. It’s now one of the first things I ask when building a campaign: “are you communicating to EVERYONE you need to be, and are you communicating where they are?”
3. Revisited and revised existing comms.
When I first joined the nonprofit, I thought everything that came before me was untouchable. I think this is a common feeling among young professionals: the website, flyers, fundraising materials, annual fund letters, everything predated me, so why should I touch it? Was it even ok for me to touch it?
Of course, I was wrong about that. The more I went through the branding guidelines development process, the more I realized our public messaging was written with no consideration of its intended audience. The only truly “consistent” aspect of the messaging was that it was laden with corporate jargon. For example:
- Our website: The primary purpose of our website was to recruit participants, but all of its copy felt like a funder had written it. Nothing about it was exciting or even helpful to the students (or their parents) who made up our target audience.
- Our flyers never talked about the benefits of the program, instead focusing on reiterating the mission statement verbatim and copy/pasted website text.
- Our annual fund letters lacked impact AND appreciation! We were asking for money without telling funders how many lives they’d supported or saying thank you.
It. Was. Rough.
So, I got to work. Leveraging our newly developed brand guidelines (see the first blog in this series) to help massage our public copy took some time, but by the end of it, I had:
- An updated website that spoke to families and drove participation. I created dedicated pages for funders with heightened language that spoke directly to their needs, but for the most part I kept it simple. I stuck to a 6th grade reading level, kept it punchy and informative, and went into more detail on the benefits of participation. I also made sure the whole site was intuitive to navigate and that our call to action buttons and any pop ups made sense, weren’t annoying, and scaled on mobile. #marcommspower
- Youthful new flyers that never once mentioned the mission verbatim. There’s nothing wrong with the mission being first and foremost on many things, but a flyer that’s distributed at events or circulated on social media isn’t one of them. Flyers need to be eye-catching, easy on text, and (most importantly) relevant to the audience.
- An overhauled annual report that dove into the organization’s true impact and focused less on program recruitment. The annual report had previously been a catch all for any metrics the organization wanted to (or felt like they needed to) report on. Once I had identified our target audience and wrote specifically to their needs, our annual report went from a “nice to have” to a deeply relevant showpiece. Pro tip: an infographics page towards the front of the report grabs your audience’s attention right away, and those graphics can be recycled into easy social content (callback: integrated marketing campaigns make great portfolio pieces).
These are just a few of the ways that I updated this particular organization’s messaging to connect better with our audience, but there are countless examples of other ways marcomms professionals can better just about every aspect of a brand’s public presence. I’m sure all of you have at least one example of when you’ve done this, and they’re probably completely different from anything I’ve laid out here.
In closing, I want to circle back to the beginning of this whole story: specifically, the idea that because consistency is important to branding, then “good branding” means using the exact same language whenever and wherever you communicate. This is just plain not true.
If you decided to start a new campaign aimed at a Japanese audience, would you write the content in English? Writing to audiences from different demographics, social channels, or customer segments is no different. Identifying your target audiences, meeting them where they are, and speaking to them in their brand love language will transform and elevate every aspect of your strategy.
What’s the worst example of corporate jargon word salad you’ve ever had to translate? Or what are some of the other fun, creative ways you've de-jargoned your workplace? Share them in the comments!
