No job function is untouched by this reality: In this economy, we all have to do more with less. This is particularly true for nonprofit communicators.
In this latest installment in PR News ’ series of roundtable conversations with our three PR Councils (agency, corporate and nonprofit), our nonprofit PR Council members discuss the challenges of the weak global economy, the effects (if any) of the election year on their organizations, managing board expectations and social media, among other hot topics.
Four Nonprofit PR Council members participated in this discussion: R.J. (Bob) Butt, director of outreach for The Royal Canadian Legion, an 86-year-old advocacy group for Canada’s veterans; Carrie Thacker, director of corporate and media communications, American Heart Association; Janice Maiman, SVP of communications and media channels for the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA); and Joanne K. Krell, VP, communications for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which supports vulnerable children and families in the areas of health, education and community building.
PR News: How have the continuing economic problems affected your communications efforts in the past year?
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Bob Butt: Everybody is “shaving the ice cube”—we’re all trying to save money. And yet we need more resources. It’s wonderful when you can have all the resources that you need but it’s not so wonderful when you’ve got to go for what you can get with what you’ve got.
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Carrie Thacker: We’re doing much more work with fewer resources. The majority of the money that we receive is from individual donors. So it’s those $5, $10 $25 donations that can make a big difference. So when the economy is down like it has been we certainly see a major dip in our donations. As a result of that, though, our development department is looking at different revenue models, trying different things in terms of corporate sponsorships. Some have worked, some haven’t. Just like us in communications, they are trying to keep up with the times.
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Janice Maiman: The crippled economy means we have to work ever smarter and more creatively to maintain momentum and deliver value. In the end, I think my team is sharper than ever before in responses to challenges that are greater than I have ever seen in my professional life.
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Joanne Krell: The economy has affected the budget and public support for programs essential to poor and working families, which then extends to an effect on children’s well-being. Vulnerable children are our target of impact so the status quo—or less—becomes awfully big competition.
PR News: If the economy does not show evidence of a sustained recovery, how will you adjust your communications goals and tactics?
Thacker: I don’t see it impacting our communications goals, strategies and tactics because people’s health is affected no matter what the economic climate is. However, if fundraising is down, we may be forced to cut budgets, which means we may have to do fewer releases.
Maiman: Our plans are fairly independent of the economy in that we are designing programs that are scalable and conservative. Goals, to be meaningful and effective, have to be focused on delivering value, in any economic circumstance. Tactics adjust as needed to make sure we are best serving our stakeholders and reflecting a real-world market environment. These assumptions are hard-baked into our strategy.
Do you expect the presidential election season this year to affect your organization and communications efforts?
Thacker: Depending on who ends up in the White House, it could potentially have an impact on our association’s advocacy efforts and our advocacy messaging to news media.
Maiman: The presidential election season absolutely impacts our organization on many levels. The most important factor is assessing and understanding the dialogue that emerges around the issue of tax equity. The possible outcomes of the campaign are environmental variables that get factored into our public relations and communications plans—no different than how we prepare for other relatively foreseeable market factors. When Congress or the president changes party, the Washington climate changes and national directives shift. Our mission and objectives do not. The fundamental challenge is making sure you know where the changes are, how stakeholder interests have shifted, and how best to communicate within the shifting climate.
What does your board of directors expect from PR in 2012?
Butt: They expect more marketing from the PR side of the house. But they’ve got to add some resources before they get that.
Thacker: We have a very good attitude that comes from our board of directors—they truly understand and appreciate the value of PR and therefore they see it as a major way to get out the AHA name to our key target audiences. When it comes to things like media impression and goals, they’re not so much interested in how many impressions we generated. They’re looking at the overall coverage that the AHA got, who it reached and how we reached it and what the key messages were that we got out throughout the year. We have a lot of science messages that come out of our organization and we also have a lot consumer education messages on how to manage your health. The board considers those to be as equally important as the science messages.
Maiman: We are introducing a new worldwide professional accounting credential—the Chartered Global Management Accountant—through a joint venture with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. This is an example of the type of innovation and entrepreneurial approach that the board expects from the PR team. Our focus, as always, will be to preserve and promote our core brand attributes while simultaneously pursuing bold initiatives to expand awareness and appreciation for the profession around the world. The expectation is that we will apply the vast array of communications and media channels available today to raise the profile of the professionals we represent.
Krell: As always, our board expects high quality output that represents the organization and builds and protects its reputation; in our case, that is working respectfully in the communities we serve and with the organizations we fund.
Have their expectations changed from last year when it comes to PR?
Thacker: There have been changes in messaging. For example, we have a new initiative, Life’s Simple 7. Our goal is to reduce cardiovascular disease and its risk and deaths by 20% by the year 2020. In years past we would concentrate on the people who were sick and try and educate physicians as well as the patients on things that that they could do to lead longer, better quality lives. Now we’ve realized with obesity being a huge epidemic and people getting risk factors at a much earlier age, we have to change our strategy and really focus on a prevention message overall.
Maiman: Our board expects PR to serve as an essential partner in driving the success of the organization’s strategic initiatives. The expectations of what we can and should achieve continue to grow incrementally every year.
Krell: Their expectations haven’t changes, but following a significant brand identity process throughout the last year, they are more clear about their aim.
What have you done to get the board to believe more strongly in the power of PR?
Maiman: Action speaks louder than words, and that is how we have proven ourselves over the years. To ensure PR is viewed as the strategic and essential function it is, we start at the ground level, working with teams at the inception of their initiatives or brainstorming sessions, helping to shape the agenda, messaging and positioning as early in the process as possible. This ensures that we are building internal consensus and driving awareness of what is possible and appropriate and most effective in a broad swath of organizational initiatives. We also work very hard to avoid “passion pitfalls”—projects that excite us or would capitalize on creativity but would not drive outcomes. In the end, we are evaluated not on effort but on results. PR has earned the trust of our Board because we deliver results that are measurable, strategic and significant.
Krell: We’ve built an understanding of how strategic communications serves the organization’s end goals. In the case of a complex foundation like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that means a clear, consistent focus on communications as a strategy to build traction, public will and social change.
What kinds of metrics do you provide to your board or boards of directors?
Thacker: We have all agreed that impressions are an overall metric that we all use. The other is the number of stories—if you look at the number of impressions as well as the number of stories and where they are placed that really paints a good picture of how things are being picked up, what’s being said and what’s had the most impact on our target audiences.
Butt: We’re doing the same thing. We’re providing the media analysis along with branch surveys—we have 1,500 branches coast to coast, and we try to put together a picture of the Royal Canadian Legion.
Maiman: We use an extensive palette of metrics to demonstrate our effectiveness to the board. These include the traditional measurements of readership impressions, media placements and Web site visits, as well as benchmark research on brand and awareness, detailed social media metrics on type and extent of engagement and internal client satisfaction.
Krell: We report annually to our board on all aspects of our communications work—from organizational brand identity to social media metrics.
How are you using social media differently this year compared to last year?
Thacker: We have about 30 PR people in our national office, and we are trying things like Twitter parties, or Twitter chats. For example, we have a huge annual meeting every November, and this is this place to be to find out the latest information on heart disease and strokes. So there are all these studies that are being presented—it’s breaking news on the cardiovascular front. And as part of that we selected a couple of things that we felt had a major consumer focus and so we did a Twitter party on one and a Facebook chat on another. So we picked the topics, and we had a physician who tweet for the Twitter party and we had a physician for our Facebook chat. I have to say, the Twitter party was kind of a dud. It was the first time we did it and I think the topic we selected was a little bit too narrow. And we were unsure of how it would go off logistically, so we didn’t promote it as heavily as we could have. We’re still going to try it in the future, but that was a big step for us. The Facebook chat, on the other hand, was a little bit better. We had 80,000 new people visit our Web site as a result of that. We had started doing things like that. We also will tweet when we’re sending out a press release—we have a social media person and she will tweet the news that we’re sending out that day.
Maiman: Our use of social media continues to grow in sophistication, scope and segmenting. We have a dedicated social media expert on staff who helps guide the organization on the constantly shifting sands of social media platforms. Our messages and approach are uniquely nuanced based on the particular platform being used.
Krell: We increasingly focus on relevance and do so by prioritizing, listening and engaging with our online audiences.
Butt: At the branches they are trying a few things out, and at the national level we’re just starting to use it. And once we get some confidence in it and get some training in it I think it might go a long way.
Is everyone on your communications team expected to engage in social media?
Thacker: Not so much at the local level. The communications directors in particular regions will work together to come up with the things that they want to do around social media. But there’s no set goals per se among all of our communications staff in using social media. At the local level they’re trying some different things and we’re starting to try some things at the national level to see how it goes. And as we become more confident in that we’ll be doing it more and more.
Maiman: For the last several years, I have made social media engagement a critical deliverable in the performance goals of all staff. Social media is not optional. It is a fundamental channel to the members we serve and the publics we must reach to be effective.
Krell: Yes, everyone is expected to participiate. Certainly there are people at different levels of proficiency and interest, but everyone is on the hook—and the more they do it, the better they get at it. Same with our agencies, and we have seen some of our best outcomes through creating a community of online managers across our firms that compete in the marketplace but work as one team on our behalf.
What issues keep you up at night?
Butt: How to get more members involved and how to get more volunteers involved. That’s what really bothers me. We’ve got about 349,000 members right now, and it seems to be holding steady, but I think we can do a little better. It’s a matter of demographics. Once upon a time the Legion was made up of 1,600 but we’re seeing that the branches in the downtown cores are starting to close.
Thacker: What keeps me up at night is how our role has changed. We’ve been tasked with not only reaching the public through the media but also reaching directly out to the public with the news. So as part of that, what keeps me awake is trying to think of ways that we can get the news faster, more directly to the general public. But as part of that it’s also looking at how do we get them more engaged, because when it comes to health messaging you’ve got a certain amount of the public who are engaged, who are concerned about their health—we have their attention. But it’s the rest of the population—which is the majority of it—that are not that engaged. And so in order to get their attention we have discovered that you really have to use graphics, podcasts and videos. We now have our own video group within our PR area, we do a lot of videos by Skype with our various volunteers and experts across the country.
Krell: Accountability keeps me awake at night. In the top philanthropic space in which we live, we are not selling and we are not fundraising, so ordinary measures of accountability don’t exist in the same way as the for-profit or traditional nonprofit world. On one hand, it’s great not to have Qs, Ks, sales and earnings or even fundraising, but to truly do a good job with the considerable resources available means a serious commitment to discipline and stewardship. I try to make my mistakes new ones, since they at least provide a lot of learning opportunities.
Maiman: PR has never been more important than it is today. The old adage is that people are an organization’s most critical asset. I modify that to say reputation is the most critical asset, and PR is one of the first circles of defense. We have to constantly nuance messages, mine an ever-more complex and expanding universe of communications channels and differentiate our efforts so that they can be received as intended.
Which media relations tactics have been producing the most success for you?
Butt: Controversy. We try to create some kind of controversy on the points that we’re advocating for, because that’s what we are—a veterans’ advocacy group. For instance, there’s a new veterans’ charter in Canada. So every time someone comes out and says something, we’re either for it, in which case we keep quiet, but if we’re not for it we speak up. We would like to start a little controversy because we would like to see some changes in that charter.
Thacker: One of the things we’ve tried to do is write our releases in a much more succinct way and make sure that the lead of our releases has the main consumer message in it. The other area is multimedia, and I think that we started out a little bit slow. The more multimedia we develop the more it’s being used. We’re getting great feedback from media saying how much they appreciate the videos, the photography, the graphics, all of that. They’re truly using it.
Maiman: The most effective media relations tactics for us are merely evolutions of what has always worked: Understand who is covering what and why, and focus on tailoring messages so that they not only tell the story we want to tell but do so in a way that helps the reporters or bloggers tell a story their readers will be interested in hearing.
Krell: Media call it the COPE model and we agree: create once, publish everywhere.
Do you do research into how your stakeholders prefer to communicate with your organization?
Thacker: We do an annual survey with all our major media contacts. ISome want to proactively receive our news releases via email, others do not. If it’s super-duper national media, they would prefer that we pick up the phone and call them and say this is really hot, you need to pay attention to this. They get so much news, and that helps filter through it very quickly. The trend I see is primarily via email.
Butt: Our members are making the switch to email. The media want to communicate via email as well. When we do a national release we go to 1,130 agencies, but we will go by email. We do not do a formal study of how they would like to communicate. But we can tell by the response that we get that they like communicating by email.
Maiman: We do extensive and regular research into what our stakeholders want to hear from us, how they receive what we distribute, what channels they prefer for receiving communications and how their personal communications preferences are evolving over time.
Krell: One of our most important stakeholders is grantees—those to whom we provide funding and partner with in the social change-making business. Every other year we participate in a Grantee Perception Report, which gives us a clear picture of how we are serving our customers and performing alongside the results of our peers. It’s an extremely important tool.
Do you network with other communicators in the nonprofit sector?
Thacker: We do, primarily with government agencies, and other groups such as the American College of Cardiology and the American Diabetes Association, so we work very collaboratively with these groups.
Butt: Most collaboration is between us and other veterans organizations.
Maiman: My primary networking activities in the nonprofit sector are focused around the organizations supporting the accounting profession within the U.S. and around the world. For instance, I am a member of the International Innovation Network, which is a group of professionals representing the communications and marketing efforts for accounting membership organizations around the globe.
Krell: Yes, we are active members of the Communicators Network, the premier association for foundation communicators. The organization has about 500 members squarely in the same space. We also have some participation in PRSA and IABC. Within our home state of Michigan, we meet quarterly through a nonprofit communications alliance for networking and discussion of a relevant topic. On a more one-to-one level, throughout the last six or so months, we have been meeting with the communications and policy teams of peer foundations to think more deeply about how we engage in communications and policy work to advance our mission, some of this is benchmarking and some of this is information and knowledge sharing.
CONTACT:
Carrie Thacker, [email protected]; R.J. Butt, [email protected]; Janice Maiman, [email protected]; Joanne K. Krell, [email protected].