You know you need to increase your nonprofit communications capacity when . . .

• You always feel rushed and rarely strategic.
• The workload always grows with little to nothing coming off the list.
• You can see how you’ll burn out eventually if you aren’t approaching that point already.

And yet, it’s often really hard to articulate to people who don’t do communications work for a living why you need help! (“Can’t you see my hair is on fire?!?” should be enough, but isn’t, unfortunately.)

Here are three ways to talk in more concrete language about your nonprofit communications capacity:

• the number of communication channels your team is managing
• the frequency of communications in those channels, e.g., how often they are updated
• the skill level in producing content and the sophistication level of the content

We know these three levers are essential to communications capacity questions based on our annual Nonprofit Communications Trends Report research and on our personal experiences in coaching nonprofit communications teams through both communications team growth and right-sizing their marketing strategies.

How Many Communications Channels Are You Managing?

As teams grow, they frequently add more channels, especially a social media channel or two beyond Facebook. Are you trying to share content in too many places right now given your staffing? What would you add if you did have more help? What do you think you should drop if you don’t get more help (X/Twitter will be the most popular answer, by the way, trust me and our data!)

How Frequently Are You Sharing Content in Those Channels?

Team growth also leads to more consistent and frequent posting of content. So if you are overworked, you might need to back down your posting schedule until you can meet the best practices in how often to post content.  If you are growing your team, consider if that means moving from monthly to weekly, or weekly to several times a week, or even to daily.

What is the Skill or Sophistication Level of the Content?

This factor — the sophistication of the content — may be even more important than the other two, given our current media environment.

Do you have the nonprofit communications capacity to produce highly visual content with great photography and video? Video is time-consuming and requires more skill and practice than other forms of content.

Think about all three of these together. Where are you strongest and what needs to give?

You are probably familiar with the project management triangle of Time, Budget, and Quality. You can only have two of the three under normal circumstances. So if you want it fast and cheap, quality goes down. If you have the budget for high-quality work, it takes time.

The same applies here . . . How will you balance the number of channels you are managing, the frequency with which you are posting, and the sophistication of that content? As you wrestle with your nonprofit communications capacity issues, know which two are most important to you.

Want to talk with others who have gone through these capacity-building conversations? Join our free community!

We know from our Annual Nonprofit Communications Trends Reports, the vast majority of you feel it is difficult or very difficult to say “no” to your supervisors when they make a work request. We found that most people who have trouble saying “no” give one of these seven reasons:

1. People-Pleasing Nature
2. Organizational Cultural Norms and Expectations
3. If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will
4. Lack of Understanding About the Strategic Value of Communications Work
5. It’s My Job
6. Because I Am Committed to the Mission
7. Not Knowing What Is Strategic and What Isn’t

But saying “no” is like a magic trick: it can grant you more time in your schedule, reduce burnout and clear your mind.

Unfortunately, all magic comes with price and the price you might pay when you turn someone down is feeling guilty.

But maybe you don’t have to decide between being over-committed or feeling bad about letting someone down.

Let’s look at some reasons why you should say “No” and ways you can do it without feeling like the bad guy.

When you should absolutely say “No”

• It will take your time and attention away from something that is more important
• It does not align with your values
• It will make you feel (more?) burned out
• It will be bad for your mental health
• You know you will regret saying “yes”

Kivi also lists four big reasons why communications staff specifically need the ability to say “No” to work requests in her post Why Communications Staff Need the Ability to Say No:

1. Conclusions: When leaders and other staff often reach their own conclusions about what communications work is needed without understanding best practices.
2. Capacity: Non-communications staff grossly underestimate how long good comms work takes to produce.
3. Conflict: Comms staff are often expected to “just make it work” instead of executives making strategic choices between their own programs.
4. Confusion: Without coordination and appropriate timing of messaging, the people you are communicating with will be confused by too many messages and even conflicting messages received simultaneously from your organization.

Tips on How to Say “No”

“No.” is a complete sentence. You can just literally say “No.” or “No, I can’t do that.”

No really, there is absolutely nothing wrong with just saying “No” to someone without giving any reasons or cushioning it in any way.

But before we get to what words you use, Elizabeth Scott makes these 3 suggestions on how to say it in Say No to People Making Demands on Your Time:

1 Be firm, but polite.

You want to be sympathetic but do not want it to seem like you will change your mind if they push you.

2. Be clear.

If you know you aren’t going to ever say “yes” don’t tell them you will get back to them. You will disappoint them more by leading them to believe there is a chance.

3. No excuses necessary.

You don’t really owe anyone an explanation. A generic “It doesn’t fit with my schedule” should suffice.

Jonathan Alpert adds to those suggestions in  7 Tips for Saying No Effectively

• Say it
• Understand people’s tactics
• Set boundaries
• Put the question back on the person asking
• Be selfish

Ways Nonprofit Communicators Can Say “No”

In her post 7 Ways to Say No Without Actually Saying It, Kivi shares a few approaches to saying “No” that may work for you:

• “Let’s talk about our goal with this. What are we trying to accomplish?”
• “Doing this means I couldn’t do __________ this week. Is that a good trade-off?”
• “How about if I ________ instead?”
• “Can you get me more information?”
• “Let me think about that and get back to you.”
• “I’m going to put that on my Good Ideas List.”
• Say nothing at all.

And Daniel Potter suggests these 5 strategies in How to Say No: A Guide to Saying No Politely:

• Cushion it with kindness or a compliment.
• Give your reasons.
• Be brief, but not brusque.
• Leave the door cracked if the answer is more “not now” than “no”
• Offer an alternative.

If you want to learn more about the psychology behind saying “no” and how it makes us feel, check out How to Say ‘No’ Politely. This article dives into rejection, FOMO and the three ego states among other things. It also shares more tips like plan ahead and keep it simple.

The Gift of Your No

Finally, remember these words from Kate Northrup in How to Say No Politely (While Honoring Yourself)

The gift of your no is that everyone in your life knows that when you do say yes, it’s real. They know where they stand with you. It puts everyone at ease.

And you honoring your “yes’s” and your “no’s” means that you get to trust yourself more and more, each and every day. Since you’re the only one you’ll be spending your entire life with, that’s a pretty big deal.

May we all have the cojones to say no when we mean no and yes when we mean yes.

In the last few weeks, several nonprofit communications directors told me their programmatic teams are growing, but their communications teams are not. Let’s look at five ways to make the case for growing your communications team.

Plan for Growing Your Communications Team Now, Even Without an Agreement to Hire

Nonprofits often need to plan for hiring new staff over a couple of years as they work the new position into the budget. However, we also see many instances where nonprofits are growing rapidly in response to various external factors, including the pandemic, a renewed emphasis on social justice, and new funding availability. With that rapid growth often comes additional investment in communications teams.

When you get word that growing your team is possible, BE PREPARED! We strongly recommend that you create a plan for what another person (or two) would do now. Project what kind of work products your organization can expect from that growth. Be ready with at least a basic job description for those new positions so you are prepared to jump quickly on any opportunities.

If you wait until you are sure there is funding to begin your planning work, don’t be surprised when someone else in your organization swoops in and snags that funding for another purpose.

If your leadership doesn’t understand that the communications team should grow with programmatic growth, focus on the following arguments!

Emphasize the Return on Investment and What Becomes Possible with a Larger Team

What can your organization expect to happen if you expand your team? It’s usually some combination of

• creating more content (especially around new programming!),
• increasing your communications frequency,
• adding new communications channels or more intensive strategies with existing ones,
• or reaching out to new audiences.

For more specifics about how these changes often roll out as teams grow, see Growing Your Communications Team: How Much More Work Can You Do? In that post, I share how the workload and communications team expertise change with each additional full-time hire.

If programmatic growth will require additional communications work, tie those changes together! Though many variables go into the equation for right-sizing your communications team, we recommend a ratio of 1:5 as a default, especially in smaller organizations. That means one communications team member for every five programmatic team members who might need communications support.

Emphasize Workplace Wellness, Employee Satisfaction, and Preventing Burnout

If your nonprofit’s leadership cares about the wellbeing of its employees and is genuinely interested in building a happy, healthy workforce, then you may want to emphasize how growing the team will reduce the stress on you and prevent you from burning out and leaving. (Unfortunately, that is a big IF in the nonprofit sector.)

Few executive directors understand the stress level involved in nonprofit communications and marketing work. They woefully underestimate the time it takes to do good work and the increasingly technical nature of the job, which requires using numerous kinds of software every day.  Educate them about the realities of your work. Tell them what you need to succeed in your work and be satisfied as an employee.

Emphasize Growing Your Communications Team to Create Space and Time for Strategy

Overworked communicators are doing, doing, doing all the time. There is so much to do. But in all that activity, you crowd out the time you need to think, solve big problems, and be strategic. You need breathing room to do all of that. Growing the team allows you to make strategic decisions so that the “doing” has meaning and produces results.

Emphasize How Building Internal Capacity Creates CALM (Collaboration, Agility, Logic, and Methods)

If your organization is farming out a lot of pieces of the communications workload to freelancers, it may make sense to build some of that capacity in-house instead. There are certain situations where hiring outside expertise makes sense, but if you are outsourcing core communications functions, odds are that work is taking too long or isn’t quite on point. By bringing that work together in-house, you can create focus, consistency, and expertise that is hard to reach with freelancers. That, in turn, results in better decisions and work products because it creates more opportunities for internal collaboration, agility, logical decision-making, and smoother workflows and methods.

What’s worked for you in building your nonprofit’s communications team? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments. 

Welcome to the world of nonprofit marketing, where your mission is to make the world a better place by spreading your organization’s message far and wide. And guess what? We do it all on a shoestring budget, with tight deadlines, and too often, with only a handful of resources. Quite often, being a nonprofit marketer means juggling a million things at once.

But there is a silver lining. If you’re fortunate enough to have a marketing team (lucky you!), here’s your golden ticket: delegation.

• By delegating tasks, you can free up your valuable time and direct your focus toward the big picture while also reducing your stress and workload and giving you more breathing room to excel (more on balancing your mental health here).

But that’s not all!

• Delegation also fosters more participation, collaboration, and teamwork, allowing marketing teams to harness the diverse talents across the team. You’ll benefit from fresh perspectives and innovative ideas from both seasoned and new members, creating a dynamic and engaged environment.

Sometimes though, figuring out how to navigate delegation in relation to new hires specifically, can be a bit tricky. You want to strike the right balance between assigning them tasks that free you up but also challenge and help them grow. Successful marketing teams have the right level of guidance and support. 

Where to Begin?

It’s about finding that sweet spot where they can support and contribute effectively to the team, while gaining valuable experience along the way. 

Let’s explore some strategies to help you navigate this delegation journey with new hires like a pro.

4 Key Areas of Delegation for Marketing Teams

First up, let’s dive into the world of onboarding, where you lay the groundwork for success. Then, we’ll discover the significance of systems and processes, making sure things run smoothly and efficiently. Next, we’ll talk about trust, which is essential for effective delegation. Lastly, we’ll explore the idea of control, finding the right balance between guidance and independence.

1. Onboarding is the Foundation for Success

Effective onboarding is critical for the success of new hires. When you bring on a new team member, you want to make sure they have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them. To help ensure a smooth onboarding process, consider the use of the following tools and techniques:

1. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): SOPs are helpful because they documents or other visuals that provide a clear set of instructions for how recurring tasks should be completed. New hires can refer to them when needed.
2. Shadowing: involves pairing a new hire with a trusted representative of the organization. The assigned buddy or mentor assists and guides the new hire during their initial weeks, helping them become familiar with the organization’s culture, processes, and expectations.
   
   This support system eases the transition into the new role and facilitates a smoother integration within the team. Choose someone who represents the organization well to act as a buddy during the onboarding process. This person can provide support and guidance to the new hire during their first few weeks.

2. Setting Up Tools and Processes

Set your new hires up for success by giving them the tools they need to get the job done. This might mean a project management system, cloud-based storage, or an editorial calendar. Be sure to provide training and resources to help them learn these systems, as well as best practices. 

3. Building Trust with Effective Communication and Delegation

Trust is an important factor in any relationship but especially when it comes to your direct reports. Delegating becomes easier when you foster an environment of trust. Here are some ways to do that:

• Spend some time getting to know your new hires and their work style. Be open and approachable.
• Delegate smaller tasks to help build confidence and assurance. As trust grows, delegate more complex tasks. For example, if your new hire is responsible for event planning, delegate tasks such as coordinating vendor logistics or creating the event agenda at first, moving on to something bigger as those are completed successfully.
• Encourage open communication and regularly provide constructive feedback. 

Remember the more you trust in your new hire the more you will be building their confidence and motivation to succeed. 

4. Relinquishing Control and Finding the Right Balance

It’s a mindset shift to be able to let go and trust others to do the job. But, by doing so, you are setting your team up for success and helping to build a strong foundation for the future.

Relinquishing control involves finding the right balance between guidance and autonomy.

• Consider the strengths and skills of your new hire when delegating tasks, and provide clear instructions and expectations for each task.
• Prioritize tasks together to ensure that your new hire knows what is most important.
• Check in regularly to provide guidance and support, and use coaching questions to help them grow. Ex. “What alternative approaches or perspectives could you consider?”  or “What are the potential obstacles or challenges you foresee?” or “How can we break down this goal into smaller, manageable steps?”
• Be sure to also offer opportunities for growth and development. For example, if your new hire is responsible for email marketing, offer them resources such as Mailchimp’s email marketing best practices or other webinars on email marketing strategies so they can continue to hone their skills and effectively manage their workload.

Marketing Teams Achieving Success Together

Delegation can very well act as your superpower if done correctly. When you delegate tasks to new hires, make it a win-win situation where you get more time to focus on the big picture, and they get a starter’s chance to grow and shine in their brand-new roles. This is how marketing teams succeed!

It’s all about putting a focus on onboarding, systems, trust, and relinquishing control. By mastering these areas and assigning tasks that match their strengths, we’ll help our marketing teams thrive and our new hires succeed.

Bonus Tip? Keep in mind that delegation is not just for your marketing teams but for all others in your organization as well. Check out these tips on how to create a culture where everyone is a marketer at your organization.

What’s already working for you? Share your tips or join us to chat about this topic with your fellow nonprofit communicators by joining our FREE private community!

We love to see nonprofit communications teams grow! I always do a little dance in my chair when someone in our community says they’ve been approved to hire a new comms team member. But then the question becomes, what should that new communications hire do? How should we write that job description?

In other words, what’s the vision for how your nonprofit communications team should grow?

There’s no right or wrong answer, but there are a few ways to think about this.

Don’t Try to Clone Yourself

This is an easy mistake, especially if you’ve been working as a team of one for a while. You need another person like yourself!

But that’s a trap for you and the person you hire. They will never meet your expectations, and honestly, you probably won’t even be able to define those expectations well. It also robs you of the most significant benefits of growing your team: adding diverse skills and insights that will hopefully balance you out rather than trying to duplicate you.

Instead, Think of Additional Roles or Specialties

First, consider what you and any other team members already do well. Then, think about where you and any others hope to grow professionally. Then, consider what gaps that leaves in your team.

Next, consider whether these approaches make sense for your organization.

Hire By Communications Skills

Do you need someone who is good with words and can take on a lot of original writing and editing of work drafted by others? Is the amount of written work your organization produces overwhelming current staff?

Or do you need someone who is at home with visual communications, like photography, graphics, and video? We can all make do with tools like Canva, but it may be time to hire someone who really knows what they are doing and can produce much higher-quality design work faster than everyone else who has learned on the job.

Hire by Communications Channel Management

Do you need your new communications hire to understand email marketing from start to finish, for example? This person might need to know about email list building and segmentation, crafting good conversion copy for emails, and creating the right graphics, too. The same could be said for a media relations/PR position, which requires particular skills and relationships.

Hire by Roles on Projects

In other cases, you may be looking for someone to fill a role within a project management framework like MOCHA, RACI, or CALM. You may need more helpers or contributors to many different projects (more of a utility player), or you may need people who can lead projects and make final judgment calls.

Hire by Internal Service Lines

I’m not a huge fan of this approach because I think it often leads to too much fragmentation of the communications and marketing strategy. Still, you could also hire team members who work for the comms team but are essentially embedded within programmatic teams, too. So, if you serve both children and elders, you might have a team member who focuses on comms related to children’s programs and another who focuses on comms for programs serving elders.

Hire to Fill Gaps in the Marketing Strategy

Yet another approach would be to look at where your team is missing someone who understands and can implement work on a core part of your marketing strategy. For example, do you need people whose job is to focus on the people you are communicating with, such as market researchers, data managers, or “business” development folks? Do you need a brand manager? Or a content strategist who drives messaging decisions?

You can’t expect someone to do all the things. I hope this post helps you sort through your options!

Want more? Big Duck has helped many nonprofits grow their communications teams and shares advice on their blog. 

Let’s tackle the appropriate reaction for nonprofit communications pros to this situation: Your executive director or other senior managers may have just hired a marketing consultant without previously talking to you. They are excited about a meeting they just had — again without you. They think it’s going to be great and are so excited!

You, not so much.

What You Believe When They Hired a Marketing Consultant Without Telling You

It’s natural to assume that if someone hires a marketing consultant without first discussing it with you, they think your approach is flawed in some way.

• Do they think you don’t have the skills?
• Do they think you don’t know how to be strategic?
• Do they not see you as having leadership potential?
• Do they not realize you are already doing that work?
• Have they not been paying attention at all?
• Is my job at risk?

What the actual hell?

Why would they hire — or even talk to — a marketing consultant without telling you first?!

What They May Actually Be Thinking

Let’s face it: Most nonprofit leaders do not understand nonprofit marketing and communications. It’s a mystery.

When things are mysterious, folks will believe there is some kind of secret to the work that only certain people might know. When Claire Meyerhoff and I did a podcast back in the day, we called it the Magic Keys.

Leaders often believe there are magic keys to unlock the secrets of media coverage, major gifts, or whatever else seems mysterious to them. And guess who they think holds the magic keys? You got it: Consultants.

Sometimes, people will go through the full process of seeking out and gathering proposals without you knowing, but honestly, that’s not the usual scenario.

The most common scenario is that the boss knows someone, knows someone who knows someone, or was maybe even forwarded a blog post from a consultant. (It’s happened on multiple occasions with our blog posts). This could be a personal friend, someone a friend works with, or even a board member’s spouse.

They think, “Sure, let’s have lunch,” or do a quick call. Again, this is all mysterious, so they go into it thinking, what’s the harm?

Any decent consultant can lead a quick discovery conversation and offer potential solutions right there on the spot.

And whoa, your leaders can hear those Magic Keys jingling. It’s a solution to everything they don’t understand. That means it solves things they suspect you don’t understand either. They can get very excited about this.

How to React When They Hire a Marketing Consultant Without Telling You

Instead of immediately reacting poorly when your boss announces that they are planning to hire a marketing consultant without, well, consulting with you first, ask some or all of these questions instead.

“Interesting! Tell me about the conversation.”

Say this in the most genuinely curious voice you can muster without the slightest bit of angst or sarcasm. Try to get an understanding of where the conversation began and how it developed.

“What do you consider the next step?”

See if talking to you is the next step, or if the next step is waiting on a proposal from the consultant, or what. You are trying to discern whether hiring the consultant is truly in motion or just an idea tossed out there.

“What’s the scope of work?”

All consulting agreements have a scope of work. If this is going to happen, you want to have as much influence over it as possible. Offer to help create the scope of work with your boss and the consultant.

“How do you see us (you and the consultant) working together?”

You are trying to understand if they are expecting you to be responsive to whatever the consultant needs or suggests, if this is collaborative with the consultant in a facilitative role, whether the consultant will be assisting you with the implementation of something you are already working on, or what.

“When can I talk to them and give them the background info they will need to be successful?” 

 Again, if this appears to be happening, you need to insert yourself into the conversations ASAP. Any good consultant will want to talk to you very early in the process. If they don’t, that’s a warning sign that something is amiss.

Ideally, you can turn this surprise into something that is genuinely helpful to you and your organization.

If you supervise nonprofit communications staff or just want to be a better colleague to your comms staff, consider being open to these five kinds of coaching conversations with them.

These coaching conversations represent the bulk of my private calls with nonprofit communicators participating in the Communications Director Mentoring Program, which includes unlimited private coaching with me. They trust me—in both my intent to help and in my professional expertise—so they open up in ways they often can’t with coworkers.

But by spending some time just talking through the work, you can provide same kinds of benefits to your colleagues.

“What Am I Missing?” Conversations

I often run through marketing plans, campaign strategies, creative briefs, and other documents with communications directors, helping them ensure they are including (or at least considering) all the major components. Sometimes, you just need to walk someone else with fresh eyes through something you’ve been working on to find your own omissions.

“Help Me Make a Choice” Conversations

Practically everything we do as nonprofit communicators involves multiple choices and decisions. Sometimes, analysis paralysis is overwhelming. Discussing the pros and cons of various options can help clarify which choices are really best.

“Is This Normal?” Conversations

People are weird, and nonprofits are weird. I  hear about very strange situations — some of which qualify as full-on gaslighting — regularly. Sometimes, it’s just someone in the office being a little squirrelly or a visionary boss going way off into space. Comms staff often need help getting grounded again.

“Am I Making Sense?” Conversations

When nonprofit communicators want to try something new — and you should be regularly if you want different results — they often get dazed and confused looks from bosses or colleagues who don’t understand the job.  Sometimes comms staff need reassurance that what they are proposing does, in fact, make sense.

“I Can Do This, Right?” Conversations

Many of the coaching conversations I have are really about confidence building. After answering, “Yes, you are making sense,” I often move into, “Yes, you can do this.” This can be very lonely work, especially for teams of one, and a little encouragement can make all the difference.  We also talk A LOT about setting boundaries at work, which can be very hard. I reassure people constantly that the boundaries they want to set are more than reasonable.

If you want to be a good boss or a good work friend, be open to these kinds of chats. Maybe even start one about your work to build that trust!

Taking off work can be stressful especially if you are a department of one. I am getting ready to go on vacation this week too so I am sharing 7 things you should do before you leave to make life easier on yourself (and everyone you work with). And maybe I will even follow my own advice. 

1. Make a List (or Lists)

As they say “Every great story starts with a list!”

OK, I say that. That was me. I love lists!

I keep them on my phone. I keep them on notepads. I keep them on whiteboards and computers and sticky notes.

I keep a couple of lists going when I am scheduled to be out of the office. The first is essentially this blog post – what I need to do to get ready. And, yes, “make a list” is on this list. It’s very meta.

The next list is broken down into what needs to be done normally during the week or weeks before I am gone, then what needs to be done for the week I am gone.

I further divide this into what absolutely has to be done (in my case, schedule emails and blog posts and what should be done, but could wait until I get back)

Then I also have a list of things I know I will need to do as soon as I get back.

2. Let the Right People Know

This seems like a no-brainer, but you need to not only let your boss know, but also your staff, volunteers, vendors, consultants, and anyone else you work closely with.

If you are in the middle of any projects, then those people need to know you won’t be around. Working with event vendors or any other outside contractors? Let them know who they should contact while you are gone.

Letting people know ahead of time will cut back on the amount of email and voicemails you have to wade through when you get back.

3. Communicate Your Boundaries

If you will not be checking email or answering work calls or texts while you are gone, then be upfront about that. You deserve a break so don’t feel bad at all, but you do need to relay those expectations to your boss and co-workers.

4. Set Up Your Out of Office Replies

Change both your email and voice mail messages to let people know you will not be able to respond right away. Include the dates you will be gone as well as the contact information for the co-worker(s) who will be covering for you.

And be sure to turn it off when you get back if you didn’t schedule that ahead of time. 

If you use an instant messaging app at work, be sure that is turned off or paused too.

5. Set Up Email Filters

If you get e-newsletters or other less important emails regularly, set up filters to clear those out of your inbox so you can focus on more urgent matters upon your return.

6. Clean Up Your Office

You are going to have so much stuff to do when you get back. Don’t add to the chaos by having an unorganized work space.

7. Don’t Schedule Anything Your First Two Hours Back

You can play with the timing on this, but give yourself some time when you first get back in order to catch up and get back into the swing of things.

Whether you are out of the office because of a planned vacation or something more unexpected, doing these things now will save you and your co-workers from being overwhelmed and stressed out.