You May Have Heard This Before

By Ben Delaney © 2007

The importance of consistent messaging

Have you ever seen an ad, or a TV commercial and realized you already knew exactly what it was going to say? Have you ever found yourself with a jingle rattling around your brain, hours after you heard it on the radio? Have you glanced at an ad in a magazine, recognized the company, and turned the page? If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you’ve been a target of effective and consistent messaging.

One of the prime characteristics of effective messaging is that it’s boring. Boring that is, to those who create it, because it seldom changes. Boring perhaps to those who hear it, because they are constantly being told the same thing. But not boring at all to those who rely on people understanding their organization, because effective messaging creates an image in the mind of your customer that is long-lasting, cohesive, and easy to remember.

Messaging includes every public impression of your organization. That includes your logo, your tagline, what the CEO says at the country club, how your receptionist answers the phone, the sales literature, your trade show presence – essentially, every public manifestation. As a marketer, your goal is to create a consistent and coherent message that hammers a few key points over and over – until your customers know them as well as you do.

Messaging isn’t a slogan, though. It’s much more than that. Messaging is the overall impact that everything you say and do has on your customer. If you use blue and gold on your logo, but your ads are red and black, you have muddled your messaging. If your website proclaims, “The only product you need to create better relationships with your customers”, but your business card says, “Great CRM System”, you have created a dissonant and less effective message.

The keys to effective nonprofit messaging

For nonprofits, consistent, effective messaging is even more critical. Every nonprofit has a Mission Statement. That’s where your messaging starts. But not where it ends. Your organization also needs a Vision Statement, a Needs Statement, and a USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. Let me explain each one and how they differ.

Your Vision is what you hope to accomplish, such as “ending hunger in Central America.” Your Mission Statement describes how you fulfill your vision. You might say, “We will end hunger in Central America by teaching locals how to farm more effectively.”

The Needs Statement is for your donors. Donors need to believe that your organization is meeting a critical need, and doing it better than your competitors. (More on competition in a later installment.) Your message has to evoke a need that is relatively unchanging. Your needs statement is a quick explanation of why your organization exists and why people should support its mission.

Your needs statement is that rationale behind the vision and mission. In our example, it might read like this: “Thousand of children in Central America go to bed hungry every night. If their parents understood a few recent discoveries about farming in their region, they could produce 50% more maize and feed their children every night.” See the difference?

Like commercial enterprises, each nonprofit also needs to have a “unique selling proposition (USP).” This is a few key points that differentiate your organization from others with similar missions – as your customer perceives them. I have heard dozens of clients in for profits and nonprofits tell me that they have no competition. That is bunkum. Your customers will perceive competitors, and you need to offer a unique reason that they should support your organization instead of any other one. There is a limited pot of donor money out there. Your unique selling proposition is key to differentiating your organization from all the others. In our example, the USP might be, “We provided more money to support farmer training than any other organization, and our method has been proven to be highly effective. Last year we helped 8,431 farmers learn new techniques and help their children getter more to eat. Won’t you help?”

You mission, your vision, your needs statement and your USP form the basis for all of your messaging. Be sure that everything flows from those key statements, and that every opportunity for communicating your message is clear, consistent, and true to those ideals.

Here are some key questions that will help you evaluate how consistent your messaging is:

• Do you present your mission, vision, and needs statements consistently?
  
• Have you identified and codified your Unique Selling Proposition?
  
• Does your logo look the same in every usage?
  
• Is your color scheme simple and consistent?
  
• How often does your tagline change?
  
• Is the look of your website and literature appropriate to your company, products, and customers?
  
• Are your customers comfortable with the language you use?
  
• Do you consistently make the same sales arguments (your USP)?
  
• Do you describe your services differently in different places?
  
• Do your service or product names relate to each other and the company name?
  

If your messaging is consistent, and true to your mission, vision, needs statement, and USP, you will find that soon your customers are parroting it back to you, and even your competitors will start to talk about your organization in your terms. That’s good messaging.

Thanks to Kathy Cole, of West Wind Consulting, for helping me better understand these important aspects of nonprofit messaging.