This is a clip from our last Networking for Nonprofit event held at Summer Shack in the Derby Street Shoppes by Steve Dubin, President of PR Works on the South Shore of Massachusetts. He talks about the powerful stories that nonprofits have to tell and the importance of telling them in many mediums on a consistent basis. Steve works with several nonprofit organizations and is a great resource. The hand out he gave follows the video.
I am on the Board of Trustees for a spiritual center where we do an Annual Campaign each autumn. Once the pledges are in, board members agree to make follow-up phone calls. These calls focus first on those who pledged last year because experience has shown that at least 50% of these folks have simply forgotten to send in their cards. I give each board member a script for calls in two formats: one to use when someone answers the phone and one to use when they get an answering machine. The script is only a guideline and, after doing a couple of calls, most members get comfortable and begin changing it to meet the response they get.
It’s that time of the year when our mailboxes overflow with letters asking us to contribute to an abundance of worthy causes. I have a system to handle these requests. If I don’t know the organization and its name doesn’t intrigue me, the letter goes into the wastebasket. If it is from an organization I [...]
I had a conversation with to my husband about an upcoming meeting where a development committee planned to present the idea of hiring a marketing consultant to help the nonprofit get its message out. His frown told me he didn’t think much of the idea. As I explained that this was a great organization that just needed to communicate better with its members and the broader community, he responded “Then I think you should call the position “communications consultant”. It seemed like semantics to me, but I asked some questions and finally got his point.