A Designer's Foundation | The Facts: Nonprofit Communications

A Designer's Foundation | Dallas, Houston

The Facts: Nonprofit Communications | The goal of nonprofit communications is to ensure that an organization's efforts to define a social problem and its proposed solution reach the awareness of those who hold the power to allocate resources and choose appropriate policy alternatives. This is a high standard for success, with implications for evaluation design and data interpretation. There simply isn't enough funding made available in the nonprofit sector to do this effectively. In commercial marketing campaigns, attitude improvements of one-tenth of one percent are deemed important because they can represent millions of dollars. But sometimes funders of communications campaigns want to see attitudinal shifts of 10 to 30 percent. In response, nonprofits sometimes make promises to funders that they cannot possibly fulfill¹. With few solutions available to them, nonprofit organizations are initiating in-house do-it-yourself approaches, co-opting staff hired originally for purposes other than communications to develop outreach material.

A survey conducted by A Designer's Foundation in May 2007 of 18 nonprofit organizations in Dallas and Houston found that of these organizations:

$147,515 is spent on staff whose primary job responsibilities are NOT communications to develop communications strategies.

$80,000 is spent to produce and deliver these strategies ( e.g ., printing, photography, Internet hosting, postage).

$48,508 is spent on dedicated communications staff and/or agencies and freelancers.

Of the total $276,023 invested in this activity, NONE of the organizations surveyed use a strategic communications plan.

CONCLUSION: Over $270,000 is spent annually by these organizations to communicate their message to the public without a communications plan and carried out primarily by staff with no formal communications degree or experience.

More, of the nonprofits surveyed, 78 percent deal with health and human services issues. When one considers their ability to successfully connect with those who need help and with those who can help could determine whether a person lives or dies, it brings into sharp focus the value of effective communications.

None of this is to suggest that these nonprofit organizations are not doing a good job of delivering their services or that they mismanage available resources. They are, in fact, doing extraordinarily well with what little resources they do have. But, when these same nonprofit organizations must compete for public attention with for-profit corporations that invest BILLIONS in media, it is starkly apparent the immediate need for better, more abundant, universally accessible, and ongoing communications services.

Information compiled by Julia Coffman for the Communications Consortium Media Center is used with permission.