Why Message Matters

Strategic message development today is what strategic planning was during the 1980’s and 1990’s – an essential best practice for organizations that want to stay competitive and achieve mission success. Where strategic planning focuses on internal organizational alignment, strategic messaging focuses externally, connecting the organizations goals to what actually drives its audiences to take the action required for mission achievement.

That desired action could be almost anything: vote the organization’s way, fund it, volunteer for it, participate in its programs, buy its products and services, quote it, or collaborate with it in some other important action.

Creating strategic messages requires hard, strategic decisions and challenges the culture of many nonprofits. Five principles are vital to successful messaging:

1. Action Drives Message – what action do you want your audience to take?

2. Self-interest Drives Action – people act because they want something. Base your message based on your audiences’ interests, passions, emotional triggers, not around your organization.

3. Desire Trumps Need – people have needs. People seek wants. While your organization may focus on basic needs of people, communities or regions, people are more focused on what they want.

4. Overlapping desire sustains action – mutual satisfaction between the desires of your organization and what desires motivate its audience is the best of all worlds.

5. Less is more – many memorable phrases make no more than three points (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; stop, drop, roll)

 

The purpose of strategic messaging is to capture the attention of your constituents, engage with the audience around their desires, and structure the subsequent conversation between them and the organization. By following these basic principles, you should be increasing the attention from your audience to your organization.