Highlight the strengths of your mission

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stand out[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book, Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Remind your readers continually of what is innovative about your mission. No one likes to reinvent the wheel or be part of something garden-variety. Show that you play a special and essential role in your field: a role that cries out for involvement from your readers.

Ask_yourselfAsk yourself: How is your mission unique within your field, and how does that give you a special niche?

Your mission may be to implement an entirely new solution to an age-old problem that has been haunting your community. Or maybe you are striving to improve or expand what already has begun to work. Either way, identify what it is about your mission that makes it extraordinary.

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Examples

1) Por Fin Nuestra Casa (Spanish for “finally, a home of our own”) has the mission:

“To raise the standard of living for families who currently reside in dangerous or substandard conditions.”

Not so unique, you might think. But they then flesh it out:

“We advance this cause by creating shelters from low-cost recycled materials. PFNC utilizes surplus shipping containers resulting from the United States’ consistent trade deficit. These containers serve as the building block of PFNC housing, but go through an extensive conversion process to make them a home. PFNC offers an affordable housing solution that is scalable and fully portable. Each PFNC unit includes First World amenities for a price of less than $10,000 (US).”

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Spotlight your mission repeatedly

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Stage_Spotlight[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book, Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Have you advanced your organization’s mission today? Your readers are eager to know about it!

Every marketing or fundraising piece you write needs to speak to the advancement of your organization’s reason for existing in the first place. That is, every page should remind your readers that you never forget what you set out to do in your community.

Every values-driven organization has a specific mission to make a positive difference in the world. My guess is that you already know what yours is. You may not have memorized your official mission statement, but you are clear on the essence of your organization. Your mission, after all, is a key part of your organization’s brand..

To each of your readers, your mission, or perhaps some particular aspect of it, is the heart of the matter. They want to hear that it is central to everything you do. They want to know that your work continues to be relevant to their lives and the life of their community, even as times and circumstances change.

There is no shame in reminding yourself of your organization’s mission statement once in a while. Some people I know even plaster it on the wall or make it their screensaver to keep it at the top of the mind and on the tip of the tongue.

Your mission should inspire and motivate support and commitment from those who share your concerns. Your organization’s name alone should cause your mission to spring to mind.
However, if you—and your colleagues—do not revisit your mission statement regularly, and ideally fine-tune or update it on occasion, you can get stuck in out-of-date patterns of branding. This is true for both start-up organizations (whose missions are usually still evolving) and more established groups. For instance, a client organization of mine had focused for decades on the needs of all low-income families, but recent demographic changes in their county compelled them to focus on new immigrants, with their associated cultural and linguistic challenges.

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“Ask Dalya”: Communicate the Differences among Organizations

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personally speakingQ: There are thousands of nonprofit organizations, and many do similar work or are perceived as the same thing. What would be your advice to quickly communicate the differences?

A: You’ve hit on one of the biggest ideas in branding: emphasize your organization’s uniqueness. To make your organization stand out, you need to highlight what distinguishes it from similar groups. You must show how your organization is uniquely positioned to address a specific need that your community has expressed.

Your uniqueness is whatever your ideal readers really want and are concerned about but cannot easily get elsewhere.

For instance:

  • Does your organization deal with a particular aspect of an issue that no one else focuses on?
  • Do you use a breakthrough approach or method?
  • Do you work with clients who have nowhere else to turn?
  • Do you have special expertise that has positioned you as the ‘go-to’ organization in your community for years?
  • Do you play an essential role in a collaborative effort or continuum of care?

Your uniqueness must be so clear, and so relevant to your readers’ individual or community lives, that it gets noticed and gets people talking about you. This defining quality of your organization makes you the best choice for your readers to support or work with.

Ask yourself: What is the [“insert your organization’s name here] Difference”?

This might be a good question to bring to a staff or board meeting for group discussion.

Got questions about how YOU can use your writing to make a difference? Send them to my assistant, Leslie Rivera, and I’ll answer them on the blog.

Fire the Choir: Why Green Marketing Hasn’t Worked and What To Do About It (Part 2)

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[Dalya’s Note: This blog post was originally published 5/13/13 by Carolyn Parrs who is the Principal of Mind Over Markets, author of Green Marketing Blog, and Founder of Women of Green. Today we pick up where Carolyn left off in Part 1]

 

Quit Saving the Planet

A recent Google search for the phrase, “Saving the planet one [whatever] at a time” revealed more than 17 million responses, with everything from saving the planet “one flush at a time” to “one hanger at a time” to “one bag, one shower, one burger, one carpet, one idea…” You get the idea.

But if we’ve learned anything in the past five years of tumultuous economic activity, it’s that saving the planet one “whatever” at a time doesn’t work. Not only do consumers have a serious case of “green fatigue”, many are pinching pennies and carefully deliberating every purchase.

Instead, make green a part of the story, not the whole story. That means you can’t just tell us what you’re not, you need to tell us what you are. Green doesn’t just have to do good, it also has to work well. Only the most zealous greens among us will sacrifice product performance for ecological advantage (yes, that would be the choir).

So what does all of this mean when trying to make your green message heard and translated into sales? It means you have to stop saving the planet and start crafting messages that are relevant to the fate of the people living on it.

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