How to Equip Your Team to Successfully Communicate Your Best Messaging - Episode 48

0:00 You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. In today's episode, we share. How to we equip your team to successfully communicate your best messaging? So stay tuned. If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I'm Kath Patrick and I've helped dozens of progressive nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter.

0:40 It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are. To have them seeking you out as an equal partner. And to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the Nonprofit Power podcast. I'm your host, Kath patrick. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. Even when you've figured out the most effective messaging in the world, sharing that with the rest of your team and helping them to use it to produce the results you want can be a huge challenge.

1:31 What definitely does not work is to simply provide all those talking points and say, here's everything in our messaging that works. Go do it. That's valuable information to have, but it is not enough. You may already have in your head all the details about when and where and how to most effectively deploy which pieces of that messaging. But you cannot assume that the rest of your team already knows that. In fact, they probably don't. In order for your team to effectively deploy your best messaging, they have to understand why it's the best. What each component is designed to accomplish, and when and how to use which pieces of it to greatest effect.

2:15 I see over and over again, the following problem. There's a huge gap between the knowledge that the chief messaging architect in an organization has, and everyone else on the team. The CEO or the policy person or whoever in the organization is the primary architect of your advocacy messaging. They have developed the most successful messaging through a combination of strategic thinking, and trial and error. You do your best strategic thinking ahead of time, about what you know about your audience, about how they view the problem you solve, the value of your work and the impact that it makes. You do all that strategic thinking to formulate your most likely to succeed messaging.

2:59 And then you go out and you use it in conversations with decision makers. And you find out what's missing. What lands and what doesn't, where things get misunderstood and so on. And then you go back and you improve that messaging. And this is a continuous cycle. Until you have messaging that is super dialed in and highly effective. And if you're the person who's been doing the bulk of the work to develop and test that messaging, you know far more about it than anyone else on your team. And here's what I see happen a lot. And it leads to a ton of frustration on the part of everybody involved.

3:39 And that's the person who's the primary messaging architect and tester and experimenter, has all sorts of embedded knowledge and experience from both the strategic thinking behind the messaging, and from the results of that repeated experimentation and refinement. You've learned a ton in that process about what works and what doesn't. Under what circumstances and with what types of people. But your team didn't go through that experience. And so they don't have all that in their head. So, if you go to write down all the messaging for your team in whatever form you choose, whether you do it in slides, or you do it in a narrative or bullet points or whatever.

4:21 And you lay it all out for the team and you say, here it is, this is the messaging we all need to be using. That is just step one. The reality is that's only about a quarter of what your team needs to be effective with their messaging on behalf of the organization and its work. What we tend to forget, if we've been the one who's been developing this brilliant messaging over time, is that each piece of that messaging is designed to work with a particular audience in a particular situation. And if we don't provide that context and don't help people understand the strategy behind the messaging that's been developed, they will not be able to use it effectively.

5:01 And you'll be frustrated and your team will be frustrated. And there will be missed opportunities to engage decision makers. Because you didn't give your team what they needed to be as ninja about this as you've become. So today, we're going to talk about how you transfer your messaging ninja-ness to your team. Or at least set them up to be ninjas in training. So there's going to be two components to this. One is how you share your whole pile of messaging with your team. You know, people have to be able to come back to it and refer to it repeatedly. So you definitely have to write it down. But there's ways to write it down that are easy to absorb and will make sense to people.

5:42 And there's ways to do it that will cause them to quickly get into overwhelm and shut down. The other is how you share and teach your team about the strategy behind the messaging. How it was developed, where it came from and how to deploy it effectively in different settings with different objectives. And different audiences. So first, let's talk about how you can share the strategy behind the messaging. What is this messaging for? What's it designed to accomplish? And there's two pieces to the strategy. One is the overarching strategy of what we're trying to help decision makers understand overall. And the second is in any given setting, depending on what action we want that decision maker to take.

6:26 Then there becomes a specific objective related to that. And that shifts how we focus some of our messaging. The best way to help your team get their arms around this strategic thinking behind the messaging. Is to engage them in some basic questions around a couple of well understood objectives that the organization has. Let's say you're working on getting city funding for one of your programs. So using that as your anchor, take your team through an abbreviated analysis of your strategy in that situation. Who are the key decision makers? What is our current relationship with them? What do we know about them in terms of how they view the problem we solve our solution and our work.

7:08 The impact that it has. How do they value that work and impact? And what's in the way of them saying yes to our ask? You can go through that conversation in relatively abbreviated form. And of course, you're going to wind up supplying some of the answers. But at least you're taking them through the strategic thinking process of, first of all, what's our strategy for getting the result we want. And then messaging is part of that strategy. Which is designed to take the decision-makers from where they are now to yes. Each messaging component has a strategic purpose. It's designed to help someone who is already somewhat aligned, move closer toward wanting to help you.

7:49 Or it's designed to dismantle a belief or a thought or an objection the decision maker has, that's keeping them from taking the action that you want. Your team needs to understand that every single point in your messaging structure is designed strategically to achieve one or both of those purposes. And that's just getting them to understand where the messaging came from. Then you want to take the team through the different components of your messaging that would be deployed in that engagement process. Right. First, they get the strategy of how you're going to go after the thing you want. And then you say, and this is how the messaging works with that strategy.

8:31 And it's important to point out to your team that you won't be using all of your messaging in any given situation. You use what the situation calls for. Another thing that's absolutely critical for your team to understand is that messaging is never completely finished. You take a risk when you share your beautifully developed messaging with your team and present it as, this is now the official messaging. I would beg you to reframe that as, this is our current best messaging that we have found to be most effective so far. Make sure your team understands that messaging is always evolving in response to a variety of changing circumstances.

9:18 Now that doesn't mean that you're going to dump it out the window one day and replace it with something brand new. It just means that it's a process of continuous improvement as more testing is done and more understanding is developed and more feedback is received in the form of decision-maker reactions to your messaging. We continue to make refinements to make it even better and even more dialed in. You are never done with that process. It's important for the team to understand this for two reasons. One, they should not treat this messaging as something that was handed down on stone tablets. And that they should just memorize and then go forward. And two, they'll be a lot more bought into this whole messaging thing, if you help them understand that they're now part of the testing crew too.

10:07 They're part of the continuous improvement process. You want to make sure your team understands that as they're deploying this messaging in conversation with decision makers, they are going to be receiving feedback. They're going to be making observations, noticing what lands and what doesn't. Noticing what adaptations they're making on the fly that either works or doesn't. Mistakes will be made. They are part of the refinement process. And it is their responsibility to do that adaptation and adjustment in real time with a decision-maker. And then to share back what they've observed and learned. And then all of that comes back in a debriefing process that then contributes to continuous refinement of the messaging.

10:51 But if you don't make that clear to your team. That it is both a continuous refinement process and that they have a role in that refinement process. You're missing a huge opportunity to improve your messaging, and to empower your team. Ultimately what you want is a whole bunch of people on your team who are just as good as you are at engaging decision makers and developing relationships and utilizing super effective messaging to get results. The whole point of all this, is to get the results we're looking for. So understanding the strategy behind the messaging is key. And it will really help your team understand why they would use certain messaging in different situations.

11:36 But before you launch your team to go deploy this messaging out in the world. They need an opportunity to practice in a low risk environment. So I know people generally don't like role-play, but this is a really good use of role-play. And you and any other experienced, very effective messengers in the organization should be the ones who play the role of decision maker with the members of your team who are learning this skill and/or who are working with messaging that is new to them. And one thing you can do to accelerate learning and make people feel less put on the spot is to do a couple of demonstration role-plays first.

12:18 So your team can see and hear some examples of how to use the messaging effectively before you ask them to give it a try. It takes a lot of the discomfort out of roleplay if you do a couple of good demos first. And do it a little bit lightheartedly so that people loosen up. I'm sure you've worked with this before and you know how this goes, but people do have resistance. And yet it is so valuable in this context. You might also want to, and I really recommend this, create a series of very short role-play videos. And you can do this with minimal effort. I'm talking, get out your phone, park it on a tripod, turn on the camera and start filming.

12:59 And you could do something as simple as a series on how to respond to particular questions or remarks that decision makers commonly voice. And how you engage them around that. And then video the role play between you and somebody else so that people can hear how you're using your voice, and how you're working with the decision maker to bring about improved understanding. These videos do not need to be polished. The purpose is to give folks a chance to go back and watch the demos more than once. So they can really take in all that nuance. There's a lot going on, even in a short role-play. And it takes more than one time through to catch all of it.

13:41 And one of the things that I see happen a lot when people are handed a stack of talking points and told here's the messaging, make sure you say this stuff. Is that, first of all, they think they're supposed to deliver all the talking points. And we know that not all of them will be appropriate in any given conversation. But the biggest problem is what's missing from a set of talking points on a page. What's missing is the nuance of how you then bring that talking point to life. With a combination of how you use your voice, how you support a point and provide context, tell a story, based on how you see the decision-maker reacting. You cannot communicate that in writing.

14:21 People have to see and hear that to understand what it looks like, what it sounds like. And how it feels to be in that kind of an interaction. When you skip that step, what I see over and over again is then when people are handed talking points, they turn into nervous little robots and it's a mess. So then they either catch themselves being nervous little robots and jettison the talking points altogether because trying to stick to them is making them freak out. Or they stay in nervous robot mode and the conversation goes very poorly. Not because the content of the messaging was bad or wrong. Those might've been exactly the perfect talking points.

15:03 But if they're not deployed in a way that engages and pulls the decision maker into a conversation, then that's going to have minimal value. I don't know how many different ways there are to say this, but I feel like I have to keep saying it. That you can't just spray decision makers with information. It does not work. And in fact it often produces the unintended effect of pushing them away and causing them to disengage. As you know from your own experience, we are all drowning in information. There's so freaking much information coming at us 24 7, it's all we can do not to just scream at it to stop. And so instead of screaming, what we do is we simply shut down.

15:45 We stop taking it in. It's out of survival. Human beings are not built to drink from an information fire hose, 24 hours a day. So for a conversation with the decision maker, where your goal is to move them toward taking a specific action that you need them to take, engagement is the name of the game. And you don't engage someone by reciting messaging points to them. You engage someone by pulling them into the conversation. So you have to teach that part too. And demonstrate what that looks like. Show your team how you would weave your messaging point into a conversation with the decision maker.

16:28 What your team members ultimately need to be able to do when they become good at this, is to mix and match from the entire messaging ecosystem for the organization. To pull together the set of messaging that's most likely to be effective given where they are in the conversation. Where they are in the relationship with the decision-maker. What they already know about how aligned that decision maker is or not. But we also have in our mind, all the messaging around the counters to the objections and all of that. So that if the decision-maker surprises us and says something we didn't expect them to say, we have a way to engage them around that that uses our messaging and moves them toward our eventual desired action.

17:10 To do that, your team members need to do some very specific things with all of the messaging you've developed already. They need a way to learn it so that it is fully integrated in their brain. And is accessible to them in a conversation. And they have to not only learn the messaging, they have to learn what it's for and when to use it. I'm going to offer you a mental image that I think is extremely helpful for this. And that's good old flashcards. Basically, your messaging structure is really a series of flashcards, when you think about it. It's messaging points that were designed for a specific purpose where each one is designed to accomplish something with a specific audience.

17:51 And so if you can organize your messaging according to that, It will be much more usable by your team. And what I find very useful as an initial tool is to create a matrix that outlines your messaging in a way that facilitates that kind of cross referencing. You set it up with your four main areas of messaging. The problem you solve and why it matters, how you solve the problem and why your solution is unique in some way, the impact of your solution and the value of that impact. Then you break out your main types of framing, which typically are around how it affects the individual and their family, how it affects the community and society, and cost benefit analysis.

18:35 And then you layer in the issues you often run into with decision-makers. Which no matter what niche you're in, tend to fall into three categories. Common misunderstandings. Common objections. And beliefs that would get in the way of agreement or getting to yes. So having all of that in a matrix overview can be super helpful as a map of your messaging ecosystem. But beyond that you need something to help your team, get their hands dirty and work with these components to learn how to use them. And this is where creating some version of flashcards is so helpful. So people can mix and match and play with pulling together a messaging approach for a given conversation with a given decision maker at any given time.

19:21 And one of the fun ways you can do this is you can set up a bunch of scenarios. And then the task for the team is to put together the flashcards that go with that scenario. And say, okay, this is the messaging we'd want to use. Here's what we'd want to be communicating, given the scenario. Here's the messaging we would use. Now let's build that. It's a super helpful way for people to play with this, have fun with it and not only learn how to build messaging. But to integrate some of your core messaging so that it is firmly in their brain and accessible at any time. So I want to say. As you give me the side-eye here and say, I don't have time for this.

20:01 You don't have to be the one to create these flashcards. Have your team create them. Which again will help them dig into the messaging matrix and begin to integrate it. And then if you want to bump up the value one more level, then you go and you have them do the work with the scenarios. Your messaging structure is complicated. You've got a lot to talk about, and you've got a lot of different types of decision-makers you're working with. And you want different actions from different ones. And those different types of decision makers tend to have different sets of understanding of the problem and different objections to your ask and are swayed by different kinds of things. To help your team navigate that incredible complexity when they're first learning how to do this, you got to give them a lot of support and a lot of ways to learn it.

20:50 The more you can break this down into manageable bits, the more easily they're going to be able to learn it and integrate it. And get busy using it, which is what you want. This sounds like a lot and it kind of is. But the time and care you invest upfront into helping your team fully integrate your most effective messaging and become adept at using it will pay enormous dividends for years to come. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.