Is it time to reboot your communications strategy?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner at Big Duck. Today, we’re going to ask the question: Is it time to reboot your communication strategy? And I am delighted to be in conversation with Kivi Leroux Miller. Kivi has been on the podcast many times before and we love to talk with her about the latest nonprofit communications trends and how to build strong communications teams. Kivi uses she/her pronouns and is the founder and CEO of Nonprofit Marketing Guide where she’s the lead trainer and coach for hundreds of nonprofit communicators. She’s also the award-winning author of three books on nonprofit marketing and communications used in many university and certificate programs. And she’s a cat lady, just like me. So Kivi, welcome back to the show.

Kivi Leroux Miller: That is right. I am so happy to be here with you, Farra.

Farra Trompeter: So, I am excited to talk with you today about the 15th annual nonprofit communications trends report. And we often have this show with you where we say it is called “What are the latest nonprofit communications trends?” Which is what we’re going to talk about today, but we’re lifting up some higher themes and ideas. And before we get into that, just for those who may not be familiar with the report or are going to wonder who is this report among? The report compiled insights from a survey taken by 463 people who spend at least 50% of their time on communications or marketing work at nonprofits. With 79% of participants in the US, 11% in Canada, and the rest from other nations around the world. So many of us are really looking forward to this report every year.

Farra Trompeter: And the theme of this year’s report is Control Alt Reflect, where you encourage marketing and communication staff and nonprofits to first Control: recognize and focus on what’s within their sphere of influence. Alt: adapt to stay effective as the communications landscape rapidly evolves. And reflect: learn from the past but stay grounded in the present. So I love that theme and I want to get into it, so let’s start there. Let’s talk about this theme and why nonprofits may need to reboot their communication strategy.

Kivi Leroux Miller: Alright, let’s do it. So we are recording this in early 2025 and we just came off of an extraordinary election year in the United States. Extraordinary in a lot of different ways that we don’t have to rehash for everybody. But I do think presidential years have a way of really magnifying a lot of the changes that are happening in the communications world: how messages get out, how messages are received. And we definitely saw that in 2024 and I think it’s time for the nonprofit sector to reflect on how they fit into those themes and how they don’t. And lots of times, frankly, we don’t.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about the messages, but also the messengers: the people, the communications channels, right? We’re going to get into all of that in this conversation and this idea of rebooting, right? The computer’s not working anymore. Before we call the IT department or get on the phone with any kind of customer care, shut it off and on. Like, reboot.

Kivi Leroux Miller: Just restart.

Farra Trompeter: That’s, that’s a helpful analogy to think about in this moment. I might just need to like really reboot it. Some things I might have to drastically change, some things I just may need a little refresh or reset. So I’m excited to see you take that theme and I really appreciate how in the report you break down your findings in those three categories. We’ll talk about where you can get that report. Well spoiler, nonprofitmarketingguide.com, we’ll talk about it again as we go. But as we were preparing for this conversation, I was particularly interested in some of the bigger-picture shifts that you highlighted.

Farra Trompeter: I know that you asked a question this time around in the 15th annual report that you asked 10 years ago. You asked the same exact question around the biggest problems people were facing. And folks were given the same choices and the responses were almost identical, with the problems ranking from top to bottom as: lack of time to produce quality content; lack of budget for direct expenses; inability to measure effectiveness; and lack of clear strategy. So, you know, why has nothing really changed? In particular to the role of being in nonprofit communications? The nonprofit sector? Or is it something else? Where is that change or that stuckness or maybe some might positively say steadiness, where is all that coming from? Why are we seeing the same problems as we were 10 years ago? And what can we expect to see in the future? Or what maybe should we even try to change? What’s within our control to do?

Kivi Leroux Miller: Right. Well, I think the first two, the time and the budget are sort of endemic problems in our sector, right? The nonprofit sector is just never fully funded or fully staffed. Doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it, but I think those are much harder issues to tackle. The third and fourth ones about being able to measure effectiveness and having a clear strategy are totally within our control. Doesn’t mean they’re going to be easy conversations or easy decisions, but there are certainly things we can do about that. So I really want to encourage people to embrace that idea that they do have some agency. And, frankly, you have agency over your time, too. I think a lot of people give up way more of their time to their colleagues than they probably should for a variety of different reasons. But really learning how to say “No” to other people, not be, not being so people pleasing, certainly being kind, but you don’t have to, you know, put your schedule at the whim of everybody else. You know, take control of your workday.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, I appreciate that. And I remember last year we spoke a lot about the idea of saying “No”, that was a big thing in the last report and you wrote a great blog about that, all of which will link to our show notes from the last conversation and to things that you’ve shared about that. And it’s interesting because I also think this challenge of time and budget also does connect to strategy, because when we have a clear strategy, when we know the goals of what we’re trying to do, who we’re trying to engage, where we should really be spending that limited time, then it helps address so many of these problems. I know that your team, our team, do a lot of work around communications planning and you know, the whole goal of that, you can’t anticipate everything that’s going to come up, but giving you a roadmap of things you should be focusing on. And again, so much of this work if we can, is about saying “No”, is about honing in on what is going to have the most impact. So, just echoing that approach.

Kivi Leroux Miller: Absolutely. Absolutely. You just can’t do everything, today. I mean, I know we’ll talk about social media in a second, but just look at the number of potential platforms that you could be on right now. It’s insanity, it really is, to think that, you know, one or two or even three people in a communications department in a nonprofit are going to manage six or seven social media channels. Let alone email, print, the website, everything else. So you’ve got to choose.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, well, we definitely will come back to that because we always want to talk about channels, but I want to first talk about the teams themselves. I want to stick with this idea of staff, the challenges they’re facing. One of the things that you also found was that many people were the first people to be directing communications at their organization, representing brand new roles or maybe the first time that they had a director-level role. You also found that the number of people whose communications teams grew, or were expected to grow, in this year were down from last year. So we’re seeing both, you know, this trend where people are finally getting to be in this director-level role, but they may be new, may not have support, the teams are either staying the same or shrinking and this just feels like it supports that perhaps nonprofit leaders and organizations are not budgeting enough for communications, or that they don’t fully recognize the importance of the function. Why do you think that is?

Kivi Leroux Miller: I think there is still a great deal of work for us to do in the sector to understand that communications and marketing is a truly strategic function within nonprofits to help you achieve your mission. Too many people still think it’s this kind of “nice to have”, optional thing. Or they associate it with more like IT or HR where it’s an operational function within the organization, instead of a strategic way to fulfill a mission. And I’m always so thrilled, I just talked to a woman today on our mentoring program and she was saying, “Oh, I have great support. My director really thinks strategic, you know, communications is essential to the success of our organization.” And those conversations are way too rare. Most people are still, kind of, pigeonholed off somewhere. Or they’re seen as the people that just make the things pretty and sound better. Their roles are considered optional, you know, sweet to have but not required for mission success. So I think that’s a huge problem.

Kivi Leroux Miller: And then like you said, we have a lot of people, again, it’s still a very young profession in the nonprofit sector where two out of five people are the first person to fill that role. So not all are they trying to do the job of creating all the content, setting the strategy, they’re building basic foundational work within their organizations. What is an editorial calendar? What is a target audience? What are workflows when you have to have somebody, you know, 10 different people look at a piece of content before it can be published? They’re making all of this stuff up from scratch at these organizations. So it’s really hard work, and I think it can be fun work too, but it’s really hard work.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, come on Kivi, we want to encourage people to want to take these jobs.

Kivi Leroux Miller: I know, I know, but it’s fun work, right? It is. I think it is. But it’s hard and people are not set up for success, I think, because of the problem with not really thinking of it as strategic.

Farra Trompeter: No, a hundred percent. And, I often talk to folks too about if they have someone managing or leading communications, are they on the leadership team? Or do you make all these decisions then tell communications to do it and then hold them accountable for the thing that happened that they weren’t even in the room to help decide to do? You were just asked them to execute it. And that’s a challenge we see in a lot of organizations, too. And we’ve talked about it before on the podcast. You know, one of the things that I’m thinking of as you’re talking is again, this idea, we always say our work at Big Duck is to help you use communications to achieve your mission. That is totally, when we are doing work on branding, we’re doing fundraising or outreach campaigns, we’re helping organizations with a plan, or we’re assessing their team, we’re doing workshops, it’s all laddering up to that and we’re always coming back to mission. And I think that is essential for people to understand, and if they don’t understand that we’ve got bigger problems. And that’s one of the first battles to fight for folks.

Farra Trompeter: So let’s talk about communication channels. We know everybody who’s tuning in for that and it is essential for folks to really engage with their community and show up where their audiences are. The survey that you ran also asked folks: Which channels do they find most effective? And I was intrigued to find that in-person events, email, and LinkedIn, which some might argue are old or traditional––they’ve been around for over 20 year––(in-person events, certainly a lot longer than that!) but those ranked as the top three and were above Instagram, website, and Facebook. So I’m curious what came up for you when you saw that finding and if there were any other kind of nuggets of information as you dug through that data?

Kivi Leroux Miller: Yeah, so I think part of this is just the basic fragmentation that we’re seeing across all communications channels. And there were a number of really interesting things in there, especially the rise of LinkedIn. We saw a hint of that last year and it really is very clear this year. I think one of the problems with LinkedIn is people show up on LinkedIn as their professional selves and not as their personal selves. So I think it depends on your organization and how you’re trying to communicate to people. Would you communicate to them in their sort of work life or are you just trying to communicate to them in their personal life? LinkedIn may not work for you there, even though people really are seeing a lot of great engagement there. So that’s one thing.

Kivi Leroux Miller: You know, Facebook is always the love/hate and, of course, we use the terms effective, ineffective, not do you love it or do you hate it? But Facebook was basically equal in nonprofits that considered it effective and nonprofits that considered it ineffective. No doubt, Twitter/ X, whatever you want to call it, is really on the deathbed in our nonprofit sector. The only people I know who are staying there are folks that they feel like they really have to communicate with elected officials and elected officials are not on some of the newer platforms at the same rate right now. But I really do expect Twitter/ X to be pretty much dead to the sector. Facebook could very well be next. I think with, like I said, half of nonprofits thinking it’s effective and the other half not, that’s a pretty precarious place for Facebook to be.

Farra Trompeter: I don’t think you probably asked about it, though it’s been around for I think three years, Bluesky, which was started as a project from Twitter and then became its own channel but then really has seen a rise in people using it since election day.

Kivi Leroux Miller: We did actually ask.

Farra Trompeter: Oh, you did ask about Bluesky?

Kivi Leroux Miller: We asked about Bluesky, we asked about TikTok and the reality is, is that the sort of penetration into the sector just isn’t there. The numbers were, you know, in the 2% and 3%, which sort of falls off the chart.

Farra Trompeter: I’ll be interested to see next year.

Kivi Leroux Miller: It’ll be interesting next year, exactly, how much, you know, some of these things do not change like email effectiveness has always been a really high number, but it’ll be really interesting to see, again, if LinkedIn continues its ascent and I’m assuming that Bluesky will probably be higher up in the chart. Actually make it onto the chart next year. We’ll see.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. And in the spirit of Control, Alt, Reflect, like we cannot control, we see almost now daily some politics and policies around these social media channels changing, which can impact where your audience is. We can spend a moment to say, “Look, this is evolving, where is our community now? What makes sense for us to have a presence given our mission? Where are we actively cultivating a community versus maintaining an account and perhaps broadcasting content?” And then, of course, reflecting on where really should we be, given our mission and given our community. So, I think these numbers are a helpful place. Of course, every organization needs to look at their own work and mission and decide what should they lean into more and what should they try.

Farra Trompeter: And I’ll just highlight LinkedIn, I think has been interesting, they’ve built a whole LinkedIn For Nonprofits, they are trying to do more with the nonprofit sector. Again, LinkedIn was built for––Kivi and I remember the days when people used to talk about Rolodexes, and maybe even had a Rolodex––but Linkedin was built to be a place for people, for job seekers and for people for professional networking. It has become more than that and there is more happening there. And if you haven’t taken a fresh look at your LinkedIn approach, I would encourage people to do that this year. I think it’s interesting when we talk about thought leadership, we talk about positioning staff in a certain way. We think about your brand. So, we did a podcast on LinkedIn a year or two ago. We’ll link to that in the notes for people who want to wrap their minds around that, but LinkedIn For Nonprofits, check it out. Last plug on that.

Farra Trompeter: Alright, now one thing we discussed last year, and I know continues to be on people’s minds is artificial intelligence or AI. And I’ve talked to lots of nonprofit leaders about it. There are still concerns about how to use it, when to use it. Some organizations are creating policies, some are still holding back and have lots of concerns about privacy and equity. I’m curious, how did AI show up in this year’s survey results? How are nonprofits using AI and what are you seeing?

Kivi Leroux Miller: So we believe that everybody’s using it, whether they think they are or not, just because, let’s be honest, it’s been integrated into every piece of software that we all use and to the point that you really have to actively opt out in a lot of cases. So I think everybody’s probably using it. So instead what we asked is “How are you using it?” And we got a pretty good diverse list that you can see in the report, of all the different ways that nonprofits are using it.

Kivi Leroux Miller: I’m more interested in what you just said about the policy question because I do think it’s essentially like having another staff person in a lot of ways. This person is potentially making decisions for you. They’re certainly writing copy for you, designing things. So who’s supervising that new staff member and who’s taking responsibility for that? So I think you, you’ve got to have a policy. And so we did ask a question about that and we did see some movement in that with 15% saying they have a policy now, as opposed to 4% just last year. But, of course, we’d like to see that well over half, if not everybody, ideally. Just really talking about, I think the key issues are, you know, who’s, who’s going to have oversight over the content regardless of what you’re asking it to do for you? Which human being is ultimately going to be responsible for saying, yes, we own this, or no, we don’t? Just like you would have to with any editorial assistant or any graphic designer on your staff, at some point somebody has to take responsibility.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, and I would just shout out and share that NTEN, who is an organization you and I are both members and active in that community. NTEN put out a helpful resource last year, a resource hub with a framework for AI for an equitable world. We’ll link to that in the show notes. You can always get great content on these issues of overlapping communications and tech and nonprofits at NTEN.org. As we close things out, in the spirit of your report, let’s take a moment to reflect. So, what are some questions that you encourage nonprofit marketing and communication staff to ask themselves?

Kivi Leroux Miller: I would really focus on what you think you can control and maybe it’s something you think you can’t control, but I’m encouraging you to second guess that and think about what you really can control, like your time. But there, you know, there’s so many things we can’t control. We can’t control what Zuckerberg, or Musk, or Trump are doing. But we can certainly control our time. We can control the things that we focus on and what we leave aside. Like we said, really trying to just focus on a few things rather than all the things. Focusing on maybe two social media channels and not all of them. And, you know, none of these decisions are made in stone.

Kivi Leroux Miller: I think one of the really important things that we saw is that people want to be able to measure and want to be able to experiment and grow. And that means you have to be willing to try different things. So maybe you lean in really hard on LinkedIn for the first quarter, or second quarter, or third quarter. See how it works. Maybe back off a little bit, lean in somewhere else. But really try things, experiment, learn. One of the things we close within the report is we encourage you to play “NP marcom games”, where if you really take a gaming approach to your work, then you’re going win some and you’re going to lose some. But you’re always going to be learning and you’re always going be playing the game better next time. So really get into that mindset, figure out where you can move the needle, where you can actually make some change, and go for it.

Farra Trompeter: For some reason, as you were talking, I just want to share, I had a little, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em”, a little Kenny Rogers, “Gambler”.

Kivi Leroux Miller: Yes, we can do that too.

Farra Trompeter: Whatever song comes to mind for you. Well, it’s time to wrap things up. I really encourage folks to download the report and dive into it for yourself. Go to nonprofitmarketingguide.com/trends. You can also access resources, get training and coaching, and more at nonprofitmarketingguide.com. Download their app, join their free community and so much more. Of course, you can connect with Kivi on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Speaking of those communications channels, we’ll make sure to hotlink to those profiles if you would like to find Kivi there. Kivi, thank you so much for joining us. Before we go, anything else you’d like to share?

Kivi Leroux Miller: You know, if you know me, you know, I’m not really giving off cheerleader vibes, but at the same time, we do really think of ourselves as cheerleaders for nonprofit communication professionals. We want you all to stay in the sector, do your best work to really change the world for the better. And so we really want to encourage you to stick it out, work through these issues and dammit, go make a difference in the world.

Farra Trompeter: There you go. All right, everyone with that, download the report, stay in it to win it. And thank you so much, Kivi, for being here today.

Kivi Leroux Miller: Thanks, Farra.