Listen

Communicating is an active process made up of three continuous and mutually reinforcing actions. It starts with listening, but involves equal parts learning and sharing. Doing all three well requires intentionality, focus and time.

Once your organization has realized its brand, embraced its culture and weighed its strategic choices, you are ready to lean into the most active stage of the communication process.

That process starts with listening — something organizations must do in order to truly understand the context in which they will be communicating. Those who listen best are very intentional about opening their organizational ears to try and understand the nuanced environment in which their words and actions will be received.

Good listeners listen to understand, not to respond. Until you establish consistent methods for listening to, and truly hearing, what’s going on around you, there is a high likelihood that your outbound efforts — proactive communications — may miss their desired target.

Listening can take many forms: paying attention to news cycles, participating actively in social media, running regular focus groups or opinion polls, routinizing evaluations and self-assessments, convening stakeholders, or even meeting donors over coffee for advice. Online data gathering tools like SurveyMonkey offer quick, inexpensive options for tracking the pulse of your stakeholders or customers, while resources like the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Reports provide deeper, more focused methods for understanding how your actions, choices and methods are landing with grantees.

As the first step in the listening/learning/sharing cycle, listening also takes time. It is not something you do once, or once a year. It is not a box to be checked so that you can get on to the “real” business of talking. Think instead about how you can build listening tools into every communication action you take. Invite feedback and reader comments on your website. Share staff email addresses so people know where to find you. Follow up with grantees after they submit progress reports. And so on. The key is to be inquisitive, receptive and responsive in all you do.

by the numbers

74%

Percentage of nonprofit leaders who named fundraising as a challenge to their personal and professional effectiveness in the Meyer Foundation’s Executive Director Listening Project.
SOURCE

1

Organizations’ rank of the importance of communication and listening skills compared to other skills.
SURVEY

3000

The number of marketing messages an average American is exposed to each day.
SOURCE

125-250

The number of words per minute the average listener is capable of hearing. By contrast, we think at 1000 to 3000 words per minute.
SOURCE

tips and insights

Dimensions of listening include: attention, empathy, memory, open mind, respect, and responsibility (Brandt and Emmert).
SOURCE

Organizations who employ social listening strategies can identify and engage with new donors, manage their online reputation and get in front of crises as they happen.

Four tools nonprofits can use to monitor social media and web mentions of their brand include: Google Alerts, Moz, Twilert, and Mention.

Voices

So many of the issues we work on are stuck because the dominant narrative is wrong, and that doesn’t change just by doing good grantmaking that gets results. To leverage those results, to create new narratives, takes strategic communication.

COMMUNICATION LEADER Private Foundation

Persistence is a problem in the philanthropy world. For all the talk about we’re in it for the long haul, there’s a certain amount of ADD behavior in philanthropy.

EXECUTIVE LEADER Private Foundation

Tell me one major, successful social change initiative that did not have very strong communications as part of its success.

COMMUNICATION LEADER Private Foundation

Exemplars

exemplar

Ford Foundation Seeks Questions, Not Answers

The Communications Network

The Un-Survey — “instead of us asking you questions, we want you to ask us” — invites people to ask anything at all about the foundation. All questions are fair game.

exemplar

If You Don’t Know, Test

Chip Giller for the Communications Network

“People don’t always do what we think they’re going to do.” That’s why, he adds, “testing is crucial in every business, including communications.”

exemplar

The Art of Listening

John Christian De Vera and Braelan Murray

Social Media Toolkit for Nonprofits

exemplar

The 2013 Millennial Impact Report

Achieve & The Case Foundation

For the 2013 Millennial Impact Report, Achieve gathered information from an online survey distributed to Millennials through 14 research partners, as well as conducted usability testing of nine nonprofits’ online presence [website, social media pages (Facebook and Twitter), emails, and mobile]. For this study, Millennials were defined as anyone born between the years 1979-1994.