Today's world is loud. Every day, we're bombarded with an endless supply of information, issues, advertisements, and more. When it comes to nonprofit work, it can be a challenge to make sure your message stays at the forefront of your audience's mind.
Read more: Compare the Best Banks for Nonprofits
At The Clean Slate Initiative (CSI), we work to expand access to record clearance for millions of Americans and ensure that the process occurs automatically. Our work has maintained a steady drumbeat of engagement across digital platforms, and, more importantly, our momentum has grown exponentially in just a few short years.
Our success is multi-faceted, and one of those facets is our ability to keep CSI a part of conversations across the country. Here are some ways we've been able to do that and how you can too.
Be clear and consistent about why your work is important.
An organization's mission and vision should always be front and center. People should know why your work is important, and if they don't, they should be able to find that information easily (on the homepage of your website and in your social media profiles, for example).
When people know why an organization's work is important, they're more likely to engage with your work, share it with their networks, and stay a part of your audience long term.
Build relationships.
Relationship building is a vital part of any organization's work, but it's especially important in keeping an organization's work relevant. Partners and allies can help you amplify your message, reach new audiences, offer unique perspectives to learn from, and share resources that you might not otherwise have access to.
At CSI, our partnerships are built into the fabric of our work. We are constantly working with our partners on events, communications, advocacy efforts, and more, and those efforts help us maintain a forward momentum in our work.
Center the people who are impacted by your work.
Organizations have an opportunity to use their resources to uplift the people who are impacted by the work. Their voices are powerful, and they deserve to be heard. When you allow those voices to be heard, you begin pulling people into your cause. It's no secret that storytelling can change hearts and minds, and it's a vital tool for relevancy in an oversaturated world.
Another priority for CSI is to build capacity among those directly impacted. To this end, we aim to empower people with lived experiences via tools, training, connections, and other resources to build power and agency. A fringe benefit is that we create authentic ambassadors of our message and movement, which contributes to keeping Clean Slate a part of the conversation, even if we aren't there.
Invest in marketing and communications.
For any organization — big or small — investing in marketing and communications is one of the best things you can do to ensure your work stays above the noise. Your marketing and communications colleagues are strategic partners in your work, ensuring that your organization's issue consistently shows up in news feeds, social media scrolls, online searches, and more.
An organization's marketing and communications team will be able to tackle things that others on your teams might not have the creative expertise or time to handle: things like audience identities, brand establishment and consistency, taking advantage of important pop culture moments, and managing a crisis with solid messaging that keeps your work in great light.
Break through the busy news cycles by staying true to your cause.
In a non-stop, 24-hour news cycle world, it can be hard to get media coverage for your nonprofit's issues — but it's not impossible.
At CSI, a couple of ways we help our cause rise above the media chatter is by building relationships with reporters and sticking to pitches that are relevant to the work we do. It can be tempting to capitalize on a big media moment by pitching a story with vague or loose ties to your work, but if that thread isn't strong, the reporters aren't going to bite.
You can keep your organization on the beat if you stay true to your mission and pitch stories that clearly demonstrate newsworthy movement or accomplishments, impact, or a strong thread between a larger media moment and your work.
Share your impact.
People will talk about an organization's work if they know it makes a difference. Sharing impact stats and information on your websites, social media, and through other platforms can help keep your work relevant — and keep people coming back to see that impact grow. Providing those stats to partners, allies, influencers, and journalists equips them to share the story of your work with a variety of audiences and on a diversity of platforms.
Any nonprofit organization is capable of keeping its work above the noise if they're strategic, creative, and persistent. Our work as nonprofits is important, and when we focus on making sure people know that, we're able to keep that work relevant by inspiring others to talk about it, too.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.
