Mastering Nonprofit Messaging with Kathryn LeBlanc
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In this episode of The Small Nonprofit Podcast, Maria speaks with Kathryn LeBlanc, a communications consultant specializing in social impact. Kathryn shares valuable insights on the importance of clear, concise messaging for nonprofits, and how to effectively communicate your organization’s mission.
Key Episode Highlights:
The Importance of Clear Messaging
Operationalizing Communications
Developing Key Messages
Identifying and Targeting Audiences
Building Internal Capacity
Quotable Moments:
"A good message should be concise, rooted in emotion, and something people will actually repeat."
Actionable Tips:
➜ Create a Message Guide and Communication Strategy: These documents should be separate, clear, and shared consistently across your team.
➜ Focus on Building Internal Cohesion: A well-aligned team is better equipped to handle both day-to-day communications and unexpected crises.
➜ Develop a Crisis Communications Plan: Create a plan outlining how your organization will respond to incidents, emergencies, and crises. Assign roles, establish protocols, and train your team regularly to ensure a swift, unified response when needed.
Resources Mentioned:
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Connect with Kathryn
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Next Episode Teaser:
Stay tuned for next week as we crack the code on starting a social enterprise with Quilen Blackwell!
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Maria: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Small Nonprofit Podcast. Today I'm here with Kathryn, who I met kind of like in a weird scenario. she is a board member at an organization that is one of my clients. That's how we started talking and just, I really loved her work and I wanted her to be on the podcast to chat with you about All the cool things that she's been working on.
[00:00:21] Maria: Hi, Kathryn.
[00:00:23] Kathryn: Hi, Maria. It's lovely to chat with you again.
[00:00:26] Maria: Yeah. So nice to have you. And for people who don't know who you are, do you mind just give me a quick intro?
[00:00:32] Kathryn: Yeah. Thanks so much. So my name is Kathryn, Kathryn LeBlanc, and I run a small communications consulting firm that does Communications for social impact.
[00:00:42] Kathryn: So we support clients with communication, strategy, messaging, campaigns, training, and brand design, often working with groups like nonprofits, philanthropy. Some government, labor, and anyone else who's trying to [00:01:00] make a change in the world. Think very similar to you, Maria, but on the communications side rather than fundraising.
[00:01:09] Maria: Nice. So mostly communication support, and helping with the implementation for people. Yeah, you bet. I think that's such an important thing. I do some communications as well, but that is one of the bigger areas where I see nonprofits struggle with deeply and not see the value in, which is unfortunately, because it reaches everything.
[00:01:32] Maria: It is so important and so crucial. I'm wondering what kind of problems you've seen with maybe current or past clients where People get stuck in their communications.
[00:01:43] Kathryn: Absolutely. I'd say the number one answer is when clients are struggling to define a clear message, you have to be able to talk about your work.
[00:01:53] Kathryn: social change work isn't easy. And so you have to be able to pitch it really well and really clearly. So I'd say [00:02:00] that. Not having a clearly enough defined message about who you are, what your organization does, how you make an impact, why all of that matters, what your programs, your fundraising, what all of this actually means, and being able to deliver that as clearly as possible is a key area where folks get stuck.
[00:02:18] Maria: Yeah, I definitely see a lot of organizations be overly verbose in what they're trying to say, to the point where it doesn't even end up making that much sense. Like, we deliver innovative programs that launch economic growth, and it's like, but what is the program?
[00:02:39] Kathryn: Yeah, exactly. Think passive voice versus active voice, like we learn in high school English class, eh?
[00:02:44] Kathryn: I've had a client also describe it as how much distance we put between ourselves and the work, the actual cause, that we're trying to shape and the impact that we're trying to make, right? How much, policy gobbledygook or, [00:03:00] just different verbose language are you thrown in there?
[00:03:05] Maria: Would you mind giving us an example of a bad one versus a good one, like a simple, statement?
[00:03:11] Kathryn: Yes. I would say that, good examples of messaging would be if you can explain what your organization does in one sentence, having a one liner, like a tagline or a one liner explanation of your organization, that's a really important example of something that organizations should have and also a bit of a longer elevator pitch.
[00:03:33] Maria: Ah, the elevator pitch. Classic. Every board, they're like, I'm looking for an elevator pitch. How do I do it? But once you give it to them, sometimes it doesn't end up going in some other place, which I would assume is another place that you see people get stuck. The actual delivery and the implementation piece.
[00:03:51] Kathryn: Yes. And, I have a specific template helping organizations to write their elevator pitches or write their key messaging [00:04:00] and train groups in a way that. Hopefully makes the memory stick a little bit more and hopefully makes groups flow and more easily write things. That's something I've seen with success.
[00:04:12] Kathryn: So the ways that you actually structure your communications and messaging and the ways that comms teams and EDs roll it out across the group of staff training can actually influence how well groups can respond. actually operationalize it.
[00:04:28] Maria: So what would you say are the key elements for a good strong hitting message?
[00:04:33] Maria: And how do you know that your messaging needs to be revamped?
[00:04:37] Kathryn: Yes, that's a good point. So I would say that you can know that if your messaging needs to be revamped, if there's a gap between what your audience what your audience thinks about you and what they know about you versus what you wish that they actually knew and understood about you.
[00:04:56] Kathryn: And when there's that gap [00:05:00] between point A and point B, you have to narrow it to shape your audience's understanding of you or your various audiences understanding of you to actually be what you want them to think. So to answer the other part of your question on what makes a good message. So number one, being concise.
[00:05:16] Kathryn: A good message needs to be concise. Number two, a good message should be ideally rooted in emotion and an emotional connection and rooted in a shared value. There's been a lot of research on that showing that leading with human emotion is a lot better than, you know, dropping a book of statistics on people or arguing with them, right?
[00:05:39] Kathryn: So that's something to start your message with, ideally. And a third thing I would say to close this Maria is. You want a message to be. Something that people will actually repeat. good messaging is created to be shared. you should write messaging and write communications in the [00:06:00] way that people actually speak.
[00:06:02] Kathryn: And when you do that, it, just flows more naturally. It helps people remember things and share them more authentically. If a message doesn't spread, then it's not a good message. So you need to think about what needs to be done to be shared and to actually spread and reverse engineer from that.
[00:06:22] Maria: Ah, the way that people actually speak is such a strong, solid, it seems simple, but it is actually very difficult for people to implement.
[00:06:30] Maria: They end up saying like, yeah, someone could say this while they're writing it. But they don't practice what it sounds like out loud. And I feel like that is quite a big difference. when they actually start operationalizing the language, you can't say this really wordy piece of mission because your mission is, you know, two sentences already, in a way that people understand it because that's not how you are kind of trained to do it.
[00:06:58] Maria: You, you're trained to do [00:07:00] it in a way that is very, very verbose. So keeping it simple is the most important thing.
[00:07:05] Kathryn: Absolutely, Maria. Something I'm sure you've seen quite a lot is groups that have a mission statement that feels out of date, too, as well. and groups that are, oh, we always say this about ourselves, so this is what we say.
[00:07:21] Kathryn: And a lot of the times it may not accurately describe what an organization does, let alone actually grasp and pull the listener in and truly motivate them to support your cause.
[00:07:35] Maria: Yeah, that's always like a struggle. I wonder what you're thinking, once you have your messaging down pat, it's concise, it's easy, people get it, people repeat it, which I think is also a very important point. how do you start to operationalize it? if you're updating your messaging and rolling it out to your whole organization and broader community, what's that look like in actuality?
[00:07:59] Kathryn: So [00:08:00] there's two key pieces of strategic communications infrastructure, you could say for organizations. Some people decide to put it together, but I always prefer it to be separated. And that's having a message guide and having a communication strategy. So it's not enough to simply think, Oh yeah, that line's catchy.
[00:08:21] Kathryn: We say that sometimes I heard someone say a good line in a board meeting. That one time you got to write, messaging down and make it actually official, make it actually be shared consistently across the team, right? In an institutional memory capacity, writing things down, refining them, editing them, structuring them clearly, getting them approved, having a document that outlines things like tone.
[00:08:44] Kathryn: Tone guidelines, grammatical style on important word choices there and the key messaging on the organization and the issues you touch mostly. So having a message guide is hugely [00:09:00] important and then formally rolling it out to your team. I say put it in onboarding packages. for, new board members for new staff.
[00:09:07] Kathryn: The second thing is a communication strategy. So nonprofits should work towards having a communication strategy. There's a lot of templates online. and I also have a, downloadable link on my website that will be in Maria's show notes here to give you some tips and tricks in building your nonprofit communication strategy as well.
[00:09:28] Kathryn: A communication strategy is how to get your message and work across, right? So if a message guide is what you are saying, like what the actual words are, the communication strategy is how do you create strategic effective communications that resonate with the right audiences? So that includes outlining things like your audiences, your channels, and so importantly, your objectives and how you actually fulfill them, right?
[00:09:59] Kathryn: So [00:10:00] I think that in terms of moving from, an idea, a phrase, a message, it's also how to move it towards an organization actually being able to use it. And it's, The bridging from having an idea on messaging and bridging towards actual implementation and rolling a note that I often see groups struggle.
[00:10:21] Kathryn: And that's why I think having a message guided communication strategy makes a big difference. My last note on that would be the reason why I break it out into 2 documents is because if your messaging is on page 17 of your communication strategy. Literally no one will read it, and you will have an impossible time rolling it across to your non profit
[00:10:39] Maria: with the communications plan, something that I see that kind of kills some success is not identifying the audiences.
[00:10:48] Maria: So I wonder if you could give tips to the audience right now listening, how do you figure out who your audience is? okay, donors is my audience, supporters is my audience, but how do I [00:11:00] dive deeper on that?
[00:11:01] Kathryn: Well, that's such a good question. And frankly, I would love to hear your answer. I think that a few tips are.
[00:11:10] Kathryn: Writing out what you intuitively think, just getting a small group of people to write out what you happen to think your audiences are, putting them on paper, and then going from there, right? Having a group discussion on Is this really an audience or is this a group that we talk to once a year occasionally, right?
[00:11:30] Kathryn: Is this list really long and windy? Or conversely, is this list missing groups or mischaracterized. Maria, but what do you tell your clients? I'm really curious, including on the fundraising side. do you tell them to be broad? Do you tell them to be narrow in terms of audiences? I'm just curious.
[00:11:50] Maria: Yeah, I've actually thought about this, in a few different ways.
[00:11:53] Maria: So when it comes to communications, It doesn't really matter who you're [00:12:00] currently targeting if you have no plan and no strategy, right? it might not matter as much, but really defining who you want to target will be helpful. So then once you have that audience, you can Figure out where they're at. So, if you're currently targeting a very broad base, but you're specifically looking to target people who have had a relative with a major disease, like that starts getting a lot more niche down, even though the general public might be a good start, you need to get deeper into the audience and get more specific.
[00:12:32] Maria: So like with like my business, I have a few different audience types, but it's like an E. D. who is very busy on the brink of burning out and needs more hands on deck. Right? So it's very specific as to who I want to target, because I know that I will be a best service for that person.
[00:12:49] Maria: Right? So with. With fundraising or with communications, internally a nonprofit, what I like to do is get as specific as possible on that [00:13:00] supporter profile. So is this person giving time or money? You know, that's one variable. Are they local? Do they have to be local, right? is this a super, a hyper local cause, or can they be a little bit more broad in their geography?
[00:13:16] Maria: What about gender? We know people over 65 who are female tend to be, a primary, donor audience. So am I looking to target those individuals? Am I looking to target parents, pet owners, people who are new immigrants, there's just so many different ways to target people that my suggestion is always to get as niched down as possible.
[00:13:39] Maria: and then you could broaden out if needed, but knowing who you're audience of true believers would be. And, , true believers is a marketing term for people who don't know it. It basically means who are the thousand people that are going to purchase something every time they put it out. So if you're going to do, for example, a [00:14:00] merch collaboration with an influencer where they're selling t shirts that then the proceeds go to you, you need a thousand people to buy that shirt, right?
[00:14:08] Maria: So those are your true believers.but yeah, really niching down as much as possible to find those.
[00:14:14] Kathryn: No, that's a great answer. And it really handles that from a organizational communications and fundraising perspective, because that can be so tricky when you're sitting down and write a fundraising plan or communications plan.
[00:14:27] Kathryn: I'd like to add one more thing and it's on a more campaigning perspective. I often try to speak from the intersection of an organizational comms and branding perspective. And a campaigning, perspective. I find I don't see a lot of materials and perspectives that are in one camp or the other, and I like to bring both.
[00:14:46] Kathryn: so something on a campaigning side, I would say is that if you think that your audience is the general public and you're working on social issues, including, for [00:15:00] example, contentious social issues around human rights, something to think about is trying to target the movable middle, right? So when you think it's the public, cause you're not talking, Oh, this one stakeholder group, this other stakeholder group, or you're not talking to something specific and you truly are campaigning and trying to build support for your cause.
[00:15:21] Kathryn: When you think it's the public, it's like, I can understand that you're trying to campaign and build support for your cause. And so yes, that is like a mass mobilization audience, but instead of it being just truly the public thinking of, you're going to drop the folks that are hardcore against you, hate groups, for example, if you're working on queer feminist abortion type issues.
[00:15:44] Kathryn: but then when you're looking at everyone else, you have your base and you, of course, you had to think about messaging to your base, but you also need to think about, messaging to the movable middle, right? And in both fundraising and comms, you're engaging the [00:16:00] base, you're engaging the base, try to grow the base, and you need to create messaging and communication strategy tactics that resonate both with the people who Maria just called you true believers, your biggest supporters, the people that love you, but that also
[00:16:16] Kathryn: can still be understandable by the movable middle audience. As sometimes things can be a little bit too jargony, for example, to be understood by that persuadable audience, people who may not yet be of a major fan to your cause, but have the potential to be truly won over and engaged and start to care more.
[00:16:38] Maria: I want to jump into this because I love how you're saying message your base, your true believers. and the movable middle because sometimes people forget about the movable middle, but still looking to target them sometime in the future, basically. But I know, an issue that I see a lot of organizations bump into is actually trying to message to suit the [00:17:00] needs of the people who hate you.
[00:17:03] Kathryn: So I don't
[00:17:03] Maria: know if you've seen this in crisis comms where Something bad has happened and now your organization is being, for one example that I have, we had anti vaxxers show up to our farmer's market and they were yelling at our staff and saying that we were, you know, infringing on their rights X, Y, and Z because our landlord forces us to tell everyone going into the farmer's market to wear a mask, right?
[00:17:27] Maria: So that was a thing at a past organization. And what they were looking at was, oh, we should respond, we should write something to, to this group and let the rest of our donors know that we, are very in line with human rights and we're not trying to do anything and it was the landlord thing.
[00:17:47] Maria: What would you say to a situation like that?
[00:17:51] Kathryn: Well, I'm not terribly worried about what a small random anti vaxxer group thinks about the organizations that I'm working with a lot of [00:18:00] the time, right? but on a broader level, I would say You have to have your own narrative, and you have to know what you believe, and you have to define that clearly.
[00:18:12] Kathryn: Define your messaging and your framing clearly, and then double down and be consistent in your message. Be unwavering in your message and not back down in, your message. Not like a Oh yeah, we support this thing. Oh wait, no, we kind of sorta support this thing, or starting a message in one direction and then a week later meandering in another direction, you need to be really clear on what you're saying you need to be really sure and confident in what you're saying you need to repeat it. And an interesting case study on this was in Canada for years,advocates had been, Sounding the alarm on there being rising hate against queer and trans communities. Of course I will say that came at the same [00:19:00] time of there being rising hate around the world, totally global in nature, but specifically I'll tell about the Canadian context right now.
[00:19:10] Kathryn: And despite, you know, advocates having warned about that, you know, it was not a mainstream known issue fully being addressed or noticed, so to speak. But then in September of last year, around then in the fall, when New Brunswick started the parental, rights narrative in schools, in terms of the pronoun disclosure policy changing.
[00:19:37] Kathryn: And that's starting with one provincial premier, but then, sort of spreading to, the actions of multiple provincial premiers, comments at the federal level, et cetera. what we saw was a lot of very well meaning advocates trying to stand up for queer and trans human rights at the time saying, Oh, parental rights
[00:19:58] Kathryn: isn't about hate. [00:20:00] Parental rights is about love. But the problem with that is, if the opposition language, if the hateful language is something that makes them look, cute and cuddly, so to speak, right? parental rights sounds like a great thing. Then we shouldn't give it any more oxygen, right?
[00:20:16] Kathryn: we shouldn't be taking something that is making a hateful frame look better, and then repeating it in trying to deconstruct it. I had a colleague once, say it as so bluntly to me as, don't let your candidate, say the bad word, right? don't let someone repeat the bad word.
[00:20:34] Kathryn: You have to say your own narrative. So that was an example of advocates needing to construct a counter narrative and get that, repeated just louder and louder. Rather than trying to put people up on TV and redefine what parental rights means. That's just a term that you don't want to see advocates using because you're accidentally doing the opposition hate groups PR for them.[00:21:00]
[00:21:03] Maria: Oh, that was a really interesting example. Thank you so much. That was awesome. I've never even thought about that, but as soon as you're talking, I started like thinking about the American debate just happened really recently, thinking about like how they're using words to describe immigration and some of these terms.
[00:21:20] Maria: Right. So I love that you're saying like, don't use that word because it gives it more power. It solidifies it. Yeah, really interesting.
[00:21:28] Maria: So a lot of organizations struggle with controlling their own narrative. What does that look like in practice, in your opinion?
[00:21:38] Kathryn: That's a great question, Maria. You need to create your message strategically, make sure it's concise and clear, and you need to make sure that it gets repeated as much as possible.
[00:21:50] Kathryn: Message repetition is really important. And you also need to make sure that you're championing your own narrative, rather than accidentally [00:22:00] echoing your audience's narrative. You're driving down your own highway, not trying to veer onto your opposition's highway and drive past them. So, for example, if your opposition is saying something hateful, you don't want to.
[00:22:20] Kathryn: Take their quote and, argue with them word by word by word about what they said that's hateful. You can't take something that's hateful and then repeat it in the name of deconstructing it. You should have your own narrative in that type of, context. And that's why when the instance of the parental rights so to speak, parental rights issue of pronoun disclosure and, rollbacks of, rights of, trans and queer kids by provincial premiers and, became part of a sort of wave of rising hate against queer and trans communities.
[00:22:57] Kathryn: what would happen was sometimes, [00:23:00] well meaning advocates trying to stand up for human rights would say things like, Oh, parental rights isn't about, hate. It's about love. and they tried to take that narrative and reframe it. But the problem was, is they were accidentally, giving oxygen, accidentally giving fuel, to the narrative that was making the hate groups look all
[00:23:19] Kathryn: cute and cuddly. So that's why you have to actually create your own, distinct counter narrative, make it strategic, make it just repeated louder and louder. Anat Shenker-Osorio says, acquire singing in unison, right? Instead of trying to like, respond to every single bad thing that is said and deconstructing it, you need to have your own narrative.
[00:23:43] Maria: I've seen recently, one of the festivals in Toronto has lost a lot of its funding and, almost all its staff. Because they've been mistreated and they've taken that to the media. So there's just like so many, so many opportunities for your communications to go wrong. And so [00:24:00] many opportunities where it needs to be like perfect, where it really needs to hit the goals, but communications is not a silver bullet, but it's just really interesting to see.
[00:24:11] Kathryn: something you can do proactively in terms of incident communications, issue management and crisis communications is to try to have your team get along and be on the same page and gel together. You know, I think that a team that is, has some trust, that has a rapport, that has a general cadence in working together is going to have an easier time.
[00:24:39] Kathryn: When they're completely caught off guard, because there will be some sort of a trust or some sort of, Oh yeah, I got to go talk to our ED right now. and not just blurt something out right now. Right? So I think that, just general tips on, building cohesion in the workplace and having a team that's really rowing all in the same [00:25:00] direction will make a difference here and big picture
[00:25:03] Kathryn: what we were saying earlier on. having a message guide, having a defined purpose, having to find message for organization, having a communication strategy, building capacity for your staff. that's also important to have at the best of times and at the worst of times that's just some foundational preparation that will pay off truly in more way than what in getting your team to gel together and click and really reduce the confusion.
[00:25:31] Kathryn: You do a lot of consulting work like, you know, I do or you do Maria and you, you see teams that sometimes are not fully. understand, like understanding what the programs team is up to and the other way around, right? just building internal clarity and building external clarity. It's the kind thing to do to staff.
[00:25:55] Kathryn: It's the supportive things to do for staff, and it's the way to make your [00:26:00] organization more effective. truly.
[00:26:04] Maria: So let's talk about that
[00:26:05] Maria: capacity piece. Simply because I know a lot of our listeners won't have, you know, multiple communications with people, maybe just one. What would be your advice when someone's looking to get their house in order in their communications and their messaging and make sure that it's reaching the right people and it's actually getting out there?
[00:26:26] Maria: What would be your advice to kind of assess all that and get on the right path?
[00:26:31] Kathryn: Yeah, I'd encourage people to follow folks like myself that are often creating and also curating free resources and opportunities and events and trainings and materials that come to social impact communications. There's a lot you can learn online.
[00:26:48] Kathryn: Sometimes it's hard to sift through, you don't only need to learn how to make a good Instagram post. There's sometimes complex social change communications pieces. So following someone like me, who's [00:27:00] regularly posting the best of resources that's come out, things I find helpful tips is something can go a long way.
[00:27:06] Kathryn: Secondly, I would point everyone back to the guidance of having a documented message, guided and documented communications strategy, like Starting with what you have, starting with what you can, if it needs to be as short and simple as possible, if it needs to be in house, done totally in house with no consultants, that's okay.
[00:27:26] Kathryn: it is.
[00:27:27] Kathryn: An important thing to do, because you'll notice that sometimes one half of your team is not in sync with the other half of your team. So just by documenting and having those conversations and sharing things internally, even when something is done short and simply, or, done halfway. It actually still even then goes a long way in building clarity and building capacity.
[00:27:50] Maria: So basically don't run out there and start a podcast or open a TikTok account.
[00:27:56] Maria: Just sit with it for a bit. See what you don't know. See [00:28:00] what you're looking to kind of build, start creating a strategy and start working on the messaging. Does that sound about right?
[00:28:05] Kathryn: Literally write a message guide, write a comms strategy, just, Do it as best as you can. That's step one before moving any further.
[00:28:14] Kathryn: It truly will solve a lot of problems downstream.
[00:28:19] Maria: Nice. I like it. easy to follow advice. If you're not off to the races, just take that time to really be clear about what you want and What the metrics, goals, objectives, audiences, relationship building is going to look like. So that's awesome.
[00:28:34] Maria: Kathryn, is there anything else you'd want to share with our audience today?
[00:28:39] Kathryn: I think that just about sums it up, Maria. This has been a great conversation. I feel that you really understand the perspective that I'm coming from, working with a lot of nonprofits, including lots of small ones, working with a lot of groups, trying to Make the social change they want to see in the world.
[00:28:56] Kathryn: And also know that your perspective really resonates [00:29:00] with those groups as, as well, cause you know, them inside and out. So I have nothing else to add. This has been a great conversation.
[00:29:06] Maria: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your insight with us. I think this is an area where a lot of nonprofits get stuck when it comes to the messaging and the actual deliverability of it.
[00:29:17] Maria: So thank you again for coming.
[00:29:20] Kathryn: Thanks so much.
[00:29:21] Maria: And thank you all for listening to another episode of the Small Nonprofit Podcast. I will have all that listed in the show notes below. So if you want to see how you can update your own messaging, your own communications, want to get in touch with Kathryn, please feel free to do so.
[00:29:36] Maria: And. Like always, if you want to see our lovely faces, they'll be available on our YouTube channel. So you can see this with the video, as well as follow along with audio. So thank you so much for being here today. And that's it for today. Bye for now.
