From Our Brains to Yours
Develop Great Messages
Strategy, tactics, evaluation and measurement, may all be in place and spot-on, but if you’re delivering the wrong message it can all be for naught. This week, three quick things to keep in mind during the message development phase of campaign and communications planning:
1. You are not your audience. Usually, neither is your organization’s staff. [...]
How political should your nonprofit be?
On Friday, a federal appeals court struck down a limitation on non-profit money in politics that felt to many of us in this business, as one of my colleagues put it, like “a fact of life, like gravity.” Boiled down, the ruling cleared the way for non-profits to raise and spend unlimited money in support [...]
Apply Lessons Learned the Right Way
Success invites imitation. Great success invites even more. We are always looking for new best practices or success stories about how an organization, campaign or project was successfully conceived and implemented. Many of us have pulled what we thought were the best practices from a previous experience or case study and, when implemented, were not [...]
How strong is your signal?
http://www.connectioncafe.com/posts/2009/august/update-nonprofits-power.html
Over at Connection Cafe, there is a great post about all of the non-profit messages the writer encoutered between Thursday at 5 PM and Sunday at 5 PM, so essentially the weekend. We often talk about how much advertising we see in any given day, but I had never thought about how much of it [...]
Analyze No More!
At Englin Consulting, we’re lucky. We work with extraordinarily smart and talented people who bring those assets to bear to make the world a better place. We love our clients and the work we get to do with them.
One thing about working with extraordinarily smart people: we’re often helping them and their teams [...]
Not to beat a dead horse
Seth Godin reinforces the point that tactics (tools and plans) are not strategies, points we’ve made here and here.
Godin said it well:
“In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in [...]
Focus, Focus, Focus
We all have limited resources. Fundraising campaigns, advocacy campaigns, candidate and issue campaigns all constantly try to get the most out of their limited resources. Whether those resources are financial, people, time or something else, there is rarely enough and using them wisely will be the true test of your success.
The best results come with [...]
New Versus Old
We all know people who are either enamored with the new tool or enamored with the idea of doing something new and different. They avoid doing the slower, older, more conventional approach that has demonstrated its success over time. They want to be seen as new and forward thinking, they want to make a splash.
But [...]
Organizational Change for Decision-Making
For this week’s Three Things, we’re shifting gears a bit to the process of transitioning a communications team, government relationship team, or even an entire organization to a data-driven approach to decision-making.
In our client work over the years we’ve seen many of the brilliant, motivated, dedicated people we get to work with struggle with how [...]
Nice emails – have we won yet?
So you’ve got an email list 200,000 names big and every time you send an email to your list you generate 25,000 emails to Members of Congress from across the country. Over the year, you generate more than 1,000,000 emails and 10,000 calls to the Hill.
Is your advocacy program successful?
Well, your activity levels are certainly [...]