Posted By Trina / 23rd May 2023
From making “sign off” less stressful to writing your elevator pitch, I have written articles for the CharityComms website since the organisation was set up in 2007.
I really enjoy sharing insights, tips and ideas on the website of the membership network for charity communications professionals.
Here are some links to my articles:
Four communications lessons from collaborative campaigns
Pooling your resources with other organisations can help you reach and inspire new audiences. What are the main lessons charity communicators can learn from recent prominent collaborative campaigns?
Ten top tips for online job interviews
Online job interviews are becoming the norm. Here are 10 things you can do to help you feel prepared, as calm as possible and ready to shine in an online interview.
How to make ‘sign off’ less stressful
How do you take the pain out of sign off? Here are five tips that aim to help you make sure your donors’ money is spent on communications projects that truly help your charity get closer to achieving its vision.
So, what do you do? A five-step plan to writing your elevator pitch
Here are some key steps to coming up with inspiring “boilerplate copy” that will help you build lasting relationships and motivate audiences to get involved.
Five ways charity communicators can emotionally protect themselves
Charity communicators need to prioritise their own, and colleagues, self-care. Then we’ll be better able to serve the people our charities support. Here are five ideas to help you better take take care of yourself as a charity communicator.
What not to include in your annual review
It could be your charity’s equivalent of a Christmas shop window display at Harrods or a summer blockbuster trailer. Your annual review could be brilliant. It can offer readers a snapshot of everything that you do that is amazing so that they feel excited about, and want to champion, your work.
Cutting through charity comms jargon to the essentials
With clarity, purpose and our audience in mind. That’s how we communicate in charity comms, right? Well, not always. And not speaking the same language can hinder the causes we work for. Your membership proposition, for example, might be my brand story. Another charity’s message matrix could be completely different to the content in yours
Read more of my CharityComms articles here.
Posted By Trina / 26th March 2012
1. Tweet re-angled content.
We spend hours on some communications that only get a mention on Twitter once. You might tweet about your fantastic annual review when it’s being launched and never mention it again. Don’t be afraid to re-visit it when relevant. So, with your annual review it might be when there’s an article about transparency in the third sector in the press. Or for a press release about a new service, you could retweet to highlight the impact of funding cuts.
2. Contact organisations like yours.
Too often in the charity sector, charities doing similar things work in insolation. Twitter is a platform from which you can start making contacts with other organisations to make them aware of your organisation, learn about what they do and gain their support. Maybe you could congratulate them on a campaign win or retweet one of their blogs. Doing so might mean they understand more about what you have to offer and you could cross refer service users or volunteers.
3. Respond to negative feedback.
It’s not nice when someone slates your organisation, one of your services or what you do. But not responding to what they say is a mistake. It could start a stream of vitriol. Instead, thank them for their feedback and point them to somewhere on your website where they can find out more about what the issue you’re discussing. It might start a conversation which could see that person become your most fervent campaigner. For best practice in responding to negative feedback, follow big brands and companies to see how they handle it.
4. Join in the conversation.
Generic plugs for your online content are a charity staple on Twitter. And this is okay – sometimes. But Twitter is a conversation between people and not to get involved is missing a trick. Make it a rule that you communicate with someone at least every third tweet. You don’t have to wait until someone mentions you. Keep an eye on what the people you are following say and comment on it if it’s relevant to what you do, pointing them to content and services.
5. Be authentic.
If your organisational values are to be “friendly”, “approachable” or “honest” tweeting about strategies, stakeholders and service users might not convey the image you want it to. The Twitter audience is different. Followers are used to informal language and if you communicate in stuffy speak, your content will stand out for all the wrong reasons. You don’t need to overegg the colloquialisms but talking in a natural way, avoiding jargon and using plain English should be your aim. That way more people will understand what you do whether you’re a research-based charity or an animal welfare one.
If you need help with a charity copywriting project, big or small, do contact me on trina@trinawallace.com or 07974 185 541.
Posted By Trina / 7th March 2012
Like most politicians, in the current US presidential election campaign Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are twisting the same statistics to meet their very different agendas.
“Over 4 million jobs created in the last two years,” says Obama.
“He has not created jobs,” Romney retorts.
In fact, you could argue that both are true. It depends from what date you start counting from, as this New York Times article explains.
Making an impact
There are lessons here for charity communicators. It’s vital that we use statistics consistently, appropriately and honestly across communications. Otherwise, supporters, donors and commissioners will begin to lose faith in what we do.
Used well, statistics can be shocking or impressive, powerfully conveying the impact that you make. Used poorly, they can detract from the good work that you do and even put it at risk.
Here are some ideas for how to breathe life into your charity’s statistics and make the most of what you’ve got.
1. Ask for help to get the statistics you need
Clients often tell me that they don’t have a statistic because they “…have not got that kind of data”. Talking to the people who do the monitoring and evaluating is imperative. Discuss the kind of things they monitor that would make powerful communications statements. For example, you could find out how much it costs to run a project that supports vulnerable people for a month or year. Or how many people use your services every day.
2. Be creative
To make your audience visualise less interesting statistics, think about what example you can use to bring them to life. You could talk about area in terms of the size of London (1,570 km2), volume relative to how much liquid it takes to fill an Olympic swimming pool (2,500 m3) or population based on how many people the Millennium Stadium holds (74,500).
3. Translate stats so they mean more
“47% of people would like to volunteer more.” “84.5% would quit smoking tomorrow with support.” “10% of young people believe…” These figures are hard for your audience to take in. Think about how you can format them in more digestible and recognisable terms. So the stats mentioned could become: “half of people would like to volunteer more”, “nearly 90% of people would quit smoking…” and “one in 10 young people…” Try to make numbers tangible so they’re more powerful.
So instead of:
Sam got a job after he had been unemployed for one year and three months. He had used our support services for 13 days.
You could have:
After two weeks of using our support services, Sam got a job – he’d been looking for work for 449 days.
4. Create a crib sheet
You could be completely unaware of fantastic statistics that colleagues from the team that sit near you deal with every day. Or you might not know that they use your staple statistic in a different way which changes the tone of what you aim to say. For example, they could use “two out of five people fear homelessness”. But you could work with “nearly two thirds of people do not fear homelessness”.
To avoid this, create a statistics crib sheet for people from across your organisation to use. Suggest that if they want to add figures to the crib sheet they contact you, or a dedicated statistics gatekeeper, first. That way you can make sure everyone is using the same, up-to-date source. If you start using a new statistic, it can be changed across all of your comms. To make sure nothing slips through the net, it’s a good idea to audit your communications at least every 12 months.
5. Be selective
Listing your strongest statistics in succession devalues them and could confuse things. Rather, use one figure to back up your main point.
So instead of:
91% of people said their self-esteem increased after attending one of our day centres. 68% wanted to attend more regularly. Four out of five people had benefited from using our IT services. As a result, 82% of people got a job or returned to education.
You could have:
Our work helps improve people’s self-esteem so that they can fulfil their potential. With support from our day centre staff and services, eight out of 10 people get a job or return to education.