How can a language guide help your nonprofit?

Ally Dommu: Hello and welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. I’m Ally Dommu, director of service development and worker-owner at Big Duck. I’m really excited to be here today with my colleague, Ryan Gerhardt, to talk about language usage and language guides for nonprofit organizations. This is all about taking a step back and being intentional and consistent with the words and language your nonprofit uses, in its communications and its day-to-day work. So that’s what we’re talking about today. But before we start chatting, I just want to share a little bit more about Ryan. He’s joined us on our podcast before. So Ryan is Big Duck’s copy director, and he is a fellow worker-owner. He’s been on our team for five years, just celebrated his five-year anniversary yesterday, actually. And prior to joining Big Duck, he worked across an array of communication settings from book publishing and article writing to for-profit agencies and in-house marketing for nonprofits. Welcome to the show, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining me today.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Yeah, thanks, Ally. It’s good to be back.

Ally Dommu: Great. So just starting off big picture, why do you think, and I know you’re a copywriter, you care a lot about words and language and all of that, but why do you believe aligning around language use is so important for nonprofits, especially those focused on social impact?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Yeah, I think even if words aren’t your favorite or you think that people can be sticklers picking one thing or the other, agreeing to and aligning around shared language for your communications is really important actually for a lot of reasons. But the top two for me are just being clear and reducing harm, right? So in terms of clarity, being able to hold a distinct place in your audience’s minds, having them understand what you do, these are just really crucial to creating social impact regardless of what your organization does. Since there are many different ways you could talk about that, whether you’re describing the work itself, the impact you can have, what you do personally at the organization, it can become really confusing for audiences to get a clear idea of who your organization is and what you do if the messaging is constantly changing, right?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: And I mean, the other piece in terms of harm, again, we at Big Duck are really always trying to think about how can we best minimize the harm done to those around us and support people to be represented in an accurate, positive way, right? We wanna really be inclusive and think about not just what we’re saying, but how we’re saying it, and really what it’s gonna be the ultimate outcome from that. So since language is frequently shifting, right, our understanding grows, words and phrases that folks maybe used a decade ago, you know, we recognize today caused different types of harm. We try to align around those shared messages and terms to ensure that we avoid doing this as often as we can, right? And that we’re people are speaking with and about feel warm and welcome, feel safe, and included in the messaging with us.

Ally Dommu: Great. So clarity and yeah, reducing harm. It’s interesting, we always come back to this as a lesson we learned as kids that, you know, “Sticks and stones could break your bones, but words are powerful.” Even as adults, communications at nonprofit organizations, we sometimes need to be reminded of the ways that our word choices can come across, and maybe it’s unintentionally caused harm to our communities, which is obviously the opposite of what we’re trying to do here in the social change and nonprofit space. For a language guide, so, this is something that you’ve worked on before, we’ve actually collaborated on, we’re gonna go into a little bit of a, a work we did with one of our former clients, but can you explain for our listeners what is a language guide? And how is it different from a brand guide that a lot of nonprofits might have in their toolkit?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: The thing to keep in mind here as well, different organizations are gonna use different phrases, right? Some folks might call it a language guide for other people, it’s a messaging guide. There are different types of copy documents, but I think a brand guide is maybe something most people are, are more familiar with. So when we’re thinking about a typical brand guide that’s a little bit more straightforward, and it’s kind of “Dos and don’ts”, right? Like, “This is exactly what our mission statement is word-for-word. These are our brand colors, and when you use them, these are the different typefaces, the different variations of our logos.” Right? They cover almost all of an organization’s identity elements and are just a good reference point to ensure those cohesive standards are upheld.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: I think for us, a language guide is, while ideally still being clear, still being easy to understand, right? It’s a little bit more about the high-level guidance, like, what are those messaging best practices and approaches? There might be some more of the straightforward “Dos and don’ts, use this word instead of that word, you know, this word we found resonates better with the audience.” But overall, a language guide is more so meant to showcase how are we gonna construct and build this language, right? Not every single direct message you might ever need, because again, like I was saying before, language changes, language grows, right? It’s never gonna be maybe exactly the same year over year, but if we can provide those different approaches that are inclusive, are equity-centered, right, are simple and avoiding common business jargon, that really will then provide the setup for success in terms of, of what a language guide is and what it can do.

Ally Dommu: Yeah. So, can you share a little bit about like what would be some components that might live in a language guide? And I’m thinking about, you know: How are we talking about the communities that we work with? How are we talking about the region? Are we talking about gender, race, ethnicity, things like that? Can you build on that a little bit and maybe just share a little bit of, you know, some examples of things that might be included in one of these guides?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Yeah, I mean, you kind of just hit on a lot of the examples there of what might be included, right? We often find that folks are looking for guidance around those different identity terms and how we’re addressing those. But certainly depending on the organization, it expands into, like you said, how we’re reaching people with accessible geography, language translation, all those different pieces. For me, while each language guide is structured a little bit differently, common traits that they all have in mind are, you know, how are we setting this up for the people who are using the guide to understand this is the first section, this is why this section is included, right? These are the things that we’re looking to address. These are the problems that we’re seeing as an organization, and this is why we want to set this outline for folks to use.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: And then after that, it can take a couple different turns, right? Like we did mention there are the words we do use and the words we don’t, right? Those might be a little bit more straightforward list. Use this word instead of that word, where it applies and where those things are known. But otherwise, it’s really more so setting put for folks: Here’s how you might approach a situation, right? I need to write about X, Y, Z topic. These are the things that I want to keep in mind when I do that, right? I want to make sure that I use this type of language because it’s more simple. I want to make sure that if we are talking about someone we’re working with, we have, if possible, taken the opportunity to reach out to that person and see how do they want to be mentioned? How would they like to be involved? Do they not wanna be involved at all? Right? So again, a lot of it is kind of those more variable, here’s how we approach the situation based on the organization. But again, I think pretty common across all of them, just to set up with, “Here’s why we’re doing this. Here are the “Yes and no” kind of categories. And then here are, kind of, the more custom pieces.”

Ally Dommu: And we work with a lot of different nonprofit organizations. Some of them have these language guides set up. Sometimes they’re a little bit more informal. Sometimes it’s something that organizations feel like they need, they just haven’t had the opportunity to work on it yet. What have you seen, or what have you noticed are some challenges that organizations face when they don’t have this kind of guide in place? Like, what are they running into, and what kind of risks are posed to them?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: One of the things we talk about at Big Duck, especially when we’re starting right at the beginning with brand strategy, the two things that we really want to keep in mind are: What are the goals of your communications? And who are you trying to reach? Because as a nonprofit organization, connecting with your audiences is really one of your biggest needs. And without clear, consistent messaging, and you know what a language guide would help you attain, organizations really run the risk of being unable to connect with those audiences. They fail to set up their team to communicate consistently. And oftentimes, a language guide can provide that kind of shared starting point or reference. And without one, people might choose words or phrases that the organization wants to move away from. They might choose words or phrases that, again, their meaning has evolved. They might just say it differently and again, start to create some of that confusion. So without a language guide or something similar, it really leaves open the potential for inadvertently alienating a key audience or using language that just causes that general confusion that we want to avoid.

Ally Dommu: We’ve touched on this a bit, but the process of creating a language guide, whether an organization is partnering with an agency like Big Duck, or they’re taking this on in-house, one of their staff members is leading this, what are some of the key steps that nonprofits should take when working on one of these language guides? What is the journey that you recommend?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: The first step is usually recognizing that need, right? Do your communications lack a certain cohesion? If the same person isn’t creating them all the time, do you frequently find that people on your team or people outside the organization have the same consistent question about “What do you mean?” Or how something is coming across? Maybe you’ve had a recent moment, unfortunately, where you did have a piece of communications that did not land correctly with your audiences, right? There are a mix of things that might signal the need for a language guide, but really, again, that first step is figuring out that we need to take on this work.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: The second step is typically figuring out which areas, right? You and I had spoken a little bit, previously, about what might be part of this language guide. Identity pieces frequently come up. Different pieces about accessibility. But while there are kind of those common best practices, socioeconomic status is another one, organizations can sometimes benefit from doing a little bit of research around what most confuses your audience in your communications or where you struggle to talk about the people or the work that you provide.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: So, after you kind of recognize that need, figuring out what areas do we need to focus on? And then again, from there, it’s either finding the right partner or doing the work yourself. In either case, there’s a number of different ways to go about that, whether it’s starting to comb through, there are some great public guides out there, learning about different topics and where language is today, but really making that decision and course of action that’s gonna be best for your organization moving forward.

Ally Dommu: Awesome. Yeah. In the show notes, we could post to a couple of those more public messaging language guides that Big Duck has referenced and we think are really solid. I want to share a little bit about our experience working with one of our past clients, and recently you posted a blog on Big Duck’s website where you interviewed our former client from the Women’s Enterprise Development Center, otherwise known as WEDC. We had an opportunity to work with this great organization on their language guide, and we will link to this post as well in our show notes. So can you just walk our listeners through, you know, who is this organization? A little bit about their process in identifying the need for a language guide, and what was developed, and how was it impactful?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Yeah. So WEDC works with entrepreneurs in Westchester and in the Hudson Valley. They helped them build successful businesses, provide high-quality training programs, advisory services, capital, you know, anything you might think an entrepreneur would need. And so they were really just looking to support their communications with more inclusive and consistent language to really resonate both with their audiences, but also staff, right? And any new folks who come on board. So the Big Duck team conducted some research that included reviewing their existing messaging and organizational documents, but then also branching out and thinking about “What are we hearing from a focus group that we did?” We did some supplemental one-on-one interviews, really just, again, trying to figure out as many ways as possible we could round out the things that we’re hearing about the organization. And again, our approach resulted in some key findings about the way WEDC writes and speaks about their community, different business jargon that was showing up a couple of different areas that we could really focus on to make things more clear for these folks.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Ultimately, we’ve spoken with them since they’ve had an opportunity to implement it a little bit, and the guide has helped to really streamline the tone across messaging platforms. And while it’s still a work in progress, it really is much more in line with what they do and how they want to be seen in the community, right? So again, the thing we often stress with folks when we’re talking about language guides or messaging, in general, is just that we are not changing what you do as an organization that’s kind of on a deeper level with any decisions you might make there, but it’s really more about communicating with folks what it actually means for them. And so again, language guides can really help with that clarity piece.

Ally Dommu: Yeah, and I remember one particular challenge we were trying to solve with the language guide was related to how they talk about who is served by the organization. This is an organization that’s called Women’s Enterprise Development Center. “Women” is in the name. However, they provide services and support to people of all gender identities who are entrepreneurs starting businesses in this New York region that they work on. But everyone that we talked to, people had different impressions about that. Some people thought they only served women, some people talked about that “It’s open to all”, but then the name was women. So we helped them through the language guide really pinpoint in how they could be consistent with explaining that they do have a strong mission focused on supporting women entrepreneurs, but it’s also, and they have services and programs that are open to people of all identities. So even just, kind of, nailing that and then socializing it internally was part of the process as well.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Yeah, honestly, that’s a great point for other folks listening as well, because the knee-jerk reaction might just be, “Oh, well, if women is a potential point of confusion in the name, why don’t you just change the name?” But a lot of nonprofits will understand changing the name is a big deal, right? And so creating, to your point, that consistent way to talk about or to explain anything that is a current hurdle without having to make that massive change is something that can be helpful to a lot of organizations. Because again, the name change is a big decision that oftentimes it’s just not even on the table for folks because of various requirements.

Ally Dommu: Exactly. What advice would you give to a nonprofit or one of our listeners who’s hearing this and saying, “Oh yeah, this kind of tool, this language guide, this would be really useful. We need this at our organization.” What advice would you give for someone to just, kind of, get started thinking about this? What is a helpful first step?

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Yeah, I mean, when we were thinking about the steps of how to go through it, and that first one being you need to recognize a need. I would say it’s just really easy to get stuck in kind of a holding pattern with your communications, right? Copying and pasting something you previously used, or you know, potentially having to rewrite it because you don’t have anything to reference. Just the same thing day after day, even if it’s maybe not returning the exact results you’re looking for. And that makes sense, right? Nonprofits don’t usually have an excess amount of staff. Folks aren’t having so much time that they can really spend extra on this because they have to work on programs, they have to provide these services, do all these extra things. So we definitely get it. But that process of creating a language guide is actually a great way to just take a step back, assess what you’re putting into the world, and maybe make things easier on yourself in the future.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: You know, you can ask yourself if what you’re putting out there now matches across your communications, start to ask if it actually reflects what you do. And again, hopefully, by approaching this and trying to create those more cohesive pieces in the future, you won’t have to spend as much time working on it. Because maybe there are more places you can kind of copy and paste because you know that’s what works for the organization. So I would just say a language guide can really help the brand remain current because again, you gotta make that assessment really resonate with your audiences and hopefully be just as inclusive as possible.

Ally Dommu: Thanks so much, Ryan. So we’re gonna link to that blog that we mentioned with our work with WEDC, some of those other additional resources that have come up. That’s all available to you in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today, Ryan, thank you for joining me.

​​Ryan Gerhardt: Thank you, Ally.