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Creative Nonprofit Communication Plans I

Communication is today's topic. Creative thinking about how to market your organization, promote your cause, or raise money is always needed. What can you do though, to get new and workable communication ideas. There are many approaches to creative thinking, of course. You know how to brainstorm. You probably know how to search for ideas that you could use. To communicate more effectively, you might need to do some analytical thinking first. What do you want to do, or do better? Is communicating a health message to the community your goal? Is raising awareness of a new program the goal? (As an aside here, I wonder if any of you belong to the Nonprofit Marketing Group on LinkedIn. If you aren't on LinkedIn you might want to join, then search for that group and join. Fundraising and marketing come up frequently in group discussions – End of tangent.) Once you have communication goals and objectives in mind, write them down. A goal is the end of a relatively long-term effort, that can be measured: Deliver a message about staying in school to sixty schools by the end of 2015. Objectives are interim steps that lead up to that goal. If you don't have written communication goals and objectives, I really think now is a good time to write something down. Nonprofits, especially smaller ones, are always short of resources and not having firm guidelines to work on can lead to serious inefficiencies. Enough of the analytical thinking .... Write down ways to reach those goals and objectives. Try to list at least fifty methods of communicating to each goal. Think of every possible combination of message, medium and audience that could possibly be used. Think of clients, donors, users, sponsors, and partners too! You might come up with a great new tactic to try.

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