Hi Reader -

The advocacy campaigns that succeed are ones that communicate often, with consistency and clarity.

But I know that’s easier said than done. Because it’s not just about one advocacy campaign. The management of your entire organization’s communications influence whether you can stay on top of – and even be proactive – with an advocacy campaign’s communications.

When I led a communications team, one of my team members would (exhaustedly) refer to “feeding the content beast”: the e-mails, social media, press releases, website updates, print newsletters, annual reports, and on and on.

I know what it feels like to be on a content hamster wheel, racing to keep up. I’ve felt this both as an E.D. of a small grassroots advocacy group and as the V.P. of Communications for a large regional advocacy organization. It’s so easy for comms to slip into a scramble, leading to frustration and missed opportunities.

After 25 years or so of leading nonprofit communications teams and advocacy campaigns, I finally figured out – through trial and error – a content process that worked. It combines content planning and project management, the two pieces needed to keep your content process moving smoothly and strategically.

The goal is to help you adapt to changing plans without losing your whole strategy, give you the space to jump on key advocacy moments, and not lose track of the important but not urgent items that always slip.

It won’t magically fix all of your team’s problems but it will ease the chaos and help you stay on a more proactive than reactive footing.

Throughout the next few weeks, I’ll walk you through the annual content process in detail. But first, I want to give you a big picture view of the annual cadence.

Two Notes Before You Get Started

First, this will sound like a lot. And it will take some dedicated effort to shift your practices into this new approach. But stick with it. It gets easier, I promise!

Second, I refer to “communications team” often. For bigger organizations, you probably have a formal comms team on your org chart. For smaller groups, you may only have one person (or less!) assigned to comms, with others helping out as needed. If that’s you, “communications team” means anyone regularly working on comms, whether it’s their full time job or not.

The Content Planning & Management Process Overview

At its core, this process is a regular cadence of three types of meetings throughout the year. I'm starting with the smallest piece first, because it's one thing you can add to right now that will help ease the scramble.

Here’s how it works.

Weekly Communications Team Meeting

Goal: Keep your comms team & content production coordinated
​Purpose: Project Management
​Time Commitment: Less than 30 minutes every Monday morning
​Attendees: The comms team

The weekly meeting is all about project management. What’s on deck for the week? Who is doing what? Any road blocks, changes? That’s it. This keeps your communications team coordinated, limits surprises, and helps you adapt quickly along the way.

Yearly Communications Planning Meeting

Goal: Sketch out your communications plan for the next 12-18 months
​Purpose: Strategy
​Time Commitment: Full day workshop once a year
​Attendees: The comms team for the full meeting. Pull in others (fundraising, key program leads, leadership, etc.) as needed.

There are two pieces to this yearly planning meeting: review of the previous year and mapping out your communications themes and plan for the coming year. Sketching out your year helps pull you out of purely reactive planning and gives you a rough plan to adapt throughout the year.

Quarterly Review & Planning

Goal: Develop a detailed communications plan for the next three months
​Purpose: Project Management & Strategy
​Time Commitment: ½ day (3-4 hours) per quarter
​Attendees: The comms team for the entire meeting. Others (fundraising, program, leadership, etc.) as needed.

In this meeting you’ll straddle strategic communications planning with more detailed project management. It involves three parts: quarterly content audit review, communications metrics review, and detailed communications project planning for the next three months.

Next week, I’ll dive into the details. We’ll start first with the Weekly Communications Team Meeting. Why there? If you only add one new thing to your content processes, the weekly meeting is the place to start.

Questions? I’d love to hear them! I respond to every email and I can incorporate them into future emails.

Jennifer ​Founder, Buoy 231 Consulting​

Build awareness. Mobilize your community. Change policy. ​Buoy 231 Consulting helps nonprofits build communications and advocacy campaigns that make their issues impossible to ignore. Ready to get started? Book a free call.