The free flow of information between departments helps organizations thrive. Without it, projects hit standstills, ongoing activities get bogged down in redundancies, and strategic priorities suffer.
This is especially true for nonprofit organizations. For nonprofits, missed targets and ineffective workflows can very quickly make the difference between a healthy bottom line (and more support for constituents) and budget shortfalls that set its mission back.
Let’s say you’re conducting a university capital campaign. Different departments take on different tasks during this complex project. Development and marketing oversee their respective activities but fail to communicate effectively both internally and with each other. Your campaign messaging becomes diluted, prospects get solicited twice, outreach becomes ineffective, relationships are damaged—several missteps combine, and you miss critical campaign benchmark goals. But this doesn’t have to be the case!
Communication silos should and can be actively identified and broken down to ensure your organization will keep growing smoothly and reaching its goals.
While silos are certainly more likely to develop in large organizations, they can happen anywhere that communication becomes disorganized, or visions become splintered. For most nonprofits, these hotspots tend to be development, communications, and the places where they interact.
Let’s walk through a few key ways to improve the flow of insights in your organization to better support your development goals.
Have a strategic plan.
Simply put, they need a clearly articulated shared vision to ensure everyone is on the same page. It’s your job as an organizational leader to define and communicate that vision.
The need for a strategic plan is nothing new. You already know that having an organization-wide strategic plan and clear plans for separate initiatives like major campaigns is important.
However, simply having a strategic plan and shared vision isn’t enough to prevent silos. You need to actively use and talk about it, too.
For many nonprofits, this is the root cause of silos—a lack of clear communication around the big-picture strategy—not necessarily lousy technology or other logistical challenges that complicate information flow, although these definitely don’t help. If you identify problematic silos in your organization, look first at how you’re communicating strategy before getting bogged down in the logistical issues that are exacerbating the problem.
That said, how should you articulate and use your strategic plan in a way that combats silos? Consider these key tips:
- Establish a strategy, whether organization-wide or campaign-specific, and include specific objectives or goals. This creates something concrete for all teams to understand as the purpose of the strategy and makes it easier to establish benchmarks that measure progress.
- Relate your strategy and the goal to your mission. How will accomplishing this goal support your overarching mission and purpose for existing as an organization?
- Explain how different teams and aspects of your operations play roles in reaching the shared, big-picture goal. Take questions, discuss as a team, and be transparent about your vision and expectations.
- Talk about the relationship between mission, big-picture goals, and the roles of different teams. As you implement your strategy, you’ll probably establish team-specific sub-goals but don’t allow these to overshadow the shared driving force of the strategy.
The bottom line: Organizations need clear, shared strategies and goals to work harmoniously. Talk about them explicitly and frequently. Encourage everyone to actively think about the throughlines that connect your work, from the mission down through to the campaign, their department, their team, and their goals as individual team members.
Create shared sources of truth for the brand.
Let’s get more tactical—how do you prevent messaging drift? This is an area where many organizations first pick up on the silos that have been forming between their development and communications teams.
When fundraisers and marketers aren’t in sync, how they discuss your work and campaigns can become misaligned. This leads to less effective internal and external communication, confusion for donors and partners, and wasted time across the board. Left unchecked, messaging drift will cost you support and forward momentum as an organization.
There are several tried-and-true ways to prevent brand and messaging-related silos from impacting your campaigns and major initiatives.
First, always take the time to establish a case for support for campaigns and giving programs. This resource should serve as the go-to messaging guide, clearly outlining the initiative’s purpose, impact, and relation to the mission. Your development and communications team should refer to it when preparing marketing campaigns, emails, social media posts, press releases, notes for a one-on-one donor conversation, and any other times when they’re outwardly representing the campaign.
Along with a case for support, a campaign asset library can be a helpful addition to your teams’ toolkits. A simple folder that includes various standard logos, letterheads, infographics, photos, and more can deliver a lot of value for your team with a minimum of input. These assets will need to be created, anyway, and the simple step of centralizing them and making them accessible to all teams ensures visual consistency and establishes clear expectations.
Developing audience personas is another effective way to get development and communications in sync. Create standard audience segments for your campaigns and programs and describe them as imaginary individuals with names, interests, and histories. This resource helps guide both prospect research and messaging by removing any confusion about who exactly you’re seeking to connect with.
Audit your data and prospecting practices.
As mentioned above, technology can (and often does) play a role in the development of communication silos in nonprofits. This can happen either directly through mistakes or the improper use of tech or indirectly through needlessly complex tech workflows.
If tech is a silo culprit for your organization, try to pinpoint the exact issue so that you can address it head-on. Root issues might include ineffective or outdated practices, broken software integration, mismatched levels of training between teams, a misunderstanding of the purpose of a tool, and more.
Once you’re able to identify and address technology-related hitches in your communication streams and workflows, there are additional steps you can take to prevent silos from forming again anytime soon:
- Audit and clean your tech stack. Nonprofits’ toolkits can easily bloat with unneeded tools purchased for a one-time task or “free” platforms whose trials expired. Regularly review your entire tech toolkit to take stock of the things that your teams actively use and how those tools connect to one another. Trim out any platforms that aren’t used or that have features other tools already include, as well.
- Review your data hygiene practices. You’ve cleaned up your tech stack—but what about the data it contains? Databases naturally fill with outdated or irrelevant information about donors and supporters over time, but this data can create miscommunications between teams and external parties if left unchecked. Study up on data hygiene best practices and implement a regular cadence for your own nonprofit if needed.
- Check your development team’s donor qualification practices. Once you’ve cleaned up your data infrastructure and ensured that other teams interact with it correctly (for example, your communications team inputs newly acquired contact information into the database with standard formatting), look to your development team. Are they making the most of the valuable data assets you’re building? Do you regularly requalify prospects and refine your donor segments? If not, you’re potentially missing out on a lot of value. Your whole organization, not just some teams, should actively use data to pursue your mission.
When working with data, remember to consider your organization’s unique compliance requirements. HIPAA for healthcare grateful patient programs is a classic example that should greatly shape how your organization handles sensitive data for fundraising and communications purposes.
Create standardized communication practices.
Finally, consider other logistical guidelines and best practices you can implement to improve internal communications.
Don't be afraid to get granular to get everyone to speak the same language. For example, establish standard terminology for common concepts, tools, programs, etc. that your teams frequently reference. Create standard abbreviations and email subject line formats.
On a more general level, keep reinforcing within your organization a cultural emphasis on objectives. Always take the time to tie your new strategies and outcomes back to those objectives. When you clearly root communication in these guiding purposes, work more easily falls into place. Teams understand how their contributions help to build the whole, and if they don’t, you know you need to improve your communication efforts.
Other internal communication practices that work well for some nonprofits include:
- Designate subject matter experts on teams to serve as official references whenever anyone on any team has a question.
- Create or clarify organizational charts or chains of communication for other teams to be aware of when they have questions or need to ask for resources.
- Take a look at the tools your teams use for day-to-day office work. Are they streamlined? Do they make collaboration easy? Google Drive-style platforms that offer easy access and permission customization are good choices for many organizations.
You may worry that these kinds of changes will come across as controlling to your team. Depending on your culture, they might. However, you should aim to foster a culture that is willing to try new practices in the name of improved communication. When staff recognize the benefits of standardizing previously chaotic practices, for example, they may become more satisfied in their jobs.
Breaking down communication silos within your nonprofit brings many benefits—happier employees, happier donors, fewer mistakes, higher productivity, and more.
There’s no one way to tackle a silo and resolve its root causes. Instead, you should take the time to consider the problem from all angles once you identify it.
Where is it occurring? Among which teams? Is it the result of misaligned strategic priorities or perceptions of your organization’s objectives? Or ineffective tech workflows or data management practices? Have you established day-to-day communication policies that support a pleasant, transparent environment?
Once you can work your way through these questions, you’ll be well-equipped to develop solutions that set all the teams in your organization up for success. Best of luck!
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Disclaimer:
This blog is for informational purposes only and is not meant as financial, legal, or tax advice. Please seek professional advice from qualified tax, legal, and/or financial professionals before making any financial decisions.
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