Five resources to help you put more strategy into practice at your nonprofit

With clear strategies in place, organizations are better equipped to make smarter communications decisions and navigate just about everything—from how to respond to a new opportunity or break down a lingering problem to charting a path forward to the future.

When the word “strategy” gets thrown around, it’s often on fuzzy terms, lacking clarity around the fundamental concepts or practical applications for nonprofits.

Big Duck defines strategy as the practice of defining what you want to achieve and identifying the best ways to achieve it, and throughout the years, we’ve devoted a ton of thinking to it. Here are some of our favorite resources for putting strategy into practice:

• Our free ebook, Achieve more: Putting strategy to work for your nonprofit, defines commonly misunderstood terms like goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics, shares examples of nonprofit communications strategy in practice, and includes a free worksheet for you to get your own strategic wheels turning.
• 6 key questions to ensure your communications strategy aligns with your strategic plan, a blog post by Ally Dommu, Big Duck’s Director of Strategy, will help you surface whether your organization’s new strategic plan means making significant shifts to your communications strategies as well. If you answer “yes” to the majority of these questions, you may have some communications work to do.
• Strategist Laura Fisher’s blog Using your strategic plan to make better communications decisions outlines how your strategic plan can help you navigate the perpetual cycle of breaking news. This insight will help you ditch reactive tweets, emails, and other external statements by turning organizational goals into communications priorities—so the next time news breaks, you’ll have an answer to the question, “Should we respond to this?”
• Why is it so hard to raise awareness? is a podcast in which Sarah Durham, Big Duck’s CEO, unpacks her blog post Eight ways your attempts to raise awareness will likely fail.
• 7 Signs Your Communications Strategy Isn’t Strategic is a blog post by our friend and CEO of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, Kivi Leroux Miller. She surfaces common red flags found in ambiguous strategic communications plans and offers suggestions to build in more clarity around goals, audiences, measuring progress, and more.

Creating and applying clear strategy is a vital practice for all nonprofit communicators and leaders. From deciding how to approach the biggest, most imposing organizational challenge to the smallest every day project, clear strategy will help you take stock and proceed effectively. Want to talk strategy for your nonprofit? Contact Big Duck.