By Just Pen, Creative Commons

Ever ask the question — what’s wrong with this picture? A communications audit is the way to find out.

For alumni associations, fundraising organizations and advancement offices striving to cultivate more effective engagement and support, a communications audit will help you assess your staff structures and the effectiveness of your communications programs. What’s more, you can act on the answers immediately, recalibrating to enhance branding and relationship-building.

Audits let you know how your customers — internal and external — see you, in no uncertain terms. Is your staff organized appropriately for the need? Are you leading them effectively? Are your messages and materials truly advancing your relationships with your customers, or are you wasting your time, energy and dwindling budget dollars?

The data produced by a communications audit also tends to be quite persuasive — and justifies making important adjustments in the way your team conducts its activities. A thorough audit places a laser-like lens on an organization’s marketing strategies, activities, processes and, importantly, behaviors. And then it sets a new course for the future.

Keep these criteria in mind as you consider a communications audit:

• Audits that ask the tough questions provide a big picture assessment of strategic communications operations.
• Audits challenge assumptions that may have been driven your activities for a long time and provide hard data that can be measured, managed and foster alternatives.
• Audits are creative. They surface new ideas and innovative approaches because your staff and internal external colleagues help define what will work better for them.
• Audits are more than SWOTs. Through interviews, questionnaires, surveys and materials review, they yield information and connect the dots, leading to strategic communications structures and plans based on analysis, evaluation and goals.

To launch an audit, know what you want to accomplish and measure even if you don’t know how to get there. Keep the end in mind. What is the outcome you seek? And how open is your organization to implementing the findings and willing to make some tough decisions? How can you move the dial to make an audit successful and gain leadership support for necessary changes?

Moving forward toward the outcomes you seek, yet working with less, means applying new and streamlined ways of advancing your staff’s mission to engage the market. A communications audit can put you in position for new connectivity and engagement with your constituents and customers, stronger internal communications partnerships and measurable ROI.

“I spent four years researching the history,” she said. “All the historical facts in the book are true – it is fiction based on fact.”  While Allende’s books often are published first in Spanish (she writes in Spanish), the hardcover edition of Island Beneath the Sea in English occurred last year, coincident with the massive earthquake in Haiti, focusing an unusual lens on the story. ”The people of Haiti have been betrayed by everyone throughout history,” she mused. And, not only everyone but everything, it would seem, including the dire forces of nature.

In answering questions about her process, Allende confessed that she “got very sick” while writing this book. “I don’t have a plan for a book. It sort of moves here and there. I’m told my getting sick is psychosomatic, but I was very sick for two years — I couldn’t sleep lying down. So now I know when I’m going to write, I’m going to get sick.”

A former journalist, Allende was 39 when she started her first book, the absorbing novel of magical realism, The House of Spirits. “It started as a letter…The things that have happened in my life happened by chance.  In fact, all the plans I’ve made have never materialized. So if you are open to risk…” Her prodigious output is now 16 novels and nonfiction volumes, with the next about to be putblished in Spanish before its U.S. release in 2012. And she is quite a multi-tasker. While writing Island Beneath the Sea, she also worked on her memoir, The Sum of Our Days. That book, too, was unfolding in real time. “I write a letter to my mother every day, so I go into the closet for the letters my mother returns to me every year.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Allende speak; I had interviewed her in the late ’80s when I was I was editor of the “Personalities Page” in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine. She was one of about 400 celebrities I’d interviewed about their creative passion each week for the magazine page between 1986 and the early ’90s.

Now Allende lives in San Rafael, California, not far from Book Passage and is a generous participant in Marin County, lending her name and energy to artistic and humanitarian causes. One of those is her foundation supporting women and children, begun 16 years ago in honor of her daughter Paula, who died suddenly and tragically in 1992. The book Paula is a moving personal and family memoir. Gifts to the foundation go directly, she said, “to the organizations we support.”

Typically lobbying state and federal officials is the role of government relations experts, who work in external affairs, public affairs or university relations – and they are pros. With education funding an extraordinary challenge in the current political environment, the job is intense and requires strategic focus on institutional messaging, timing, politics and relationship-building. Given the stakes, it’s not something you unwittingly want to hand over to amateurs. Well-meaning people you can’t control in their well-meaningness may go off script and do more harm than good. 

It’s also understood that university lobbyists would automatically call on those in their immediate field of vision – presidents and administrators, students, faculty and staff — who can make an impassioned showing in state capitals. Often alumni are in the mix but not always in focus. While there’s a long tradition of alumni advocacy on behalf of higher education going back to the 19th century, these activities are considerably stronger when they’re part of a comprehensive institutional strategy.

Things are changing, as I’ve chronicled in this new advocacy whitepaper and best practices summary. The opportunity to engage thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of alumni to build support for their institutions is nothing to scoff at in a competitive global marketplace for talent. What’s more, alumni represent what education actually achieves and why the investment is right – in state capitals and local communities they are putting their education to work on behalf of the economy and the quality of life for everyone. In their five-year strategic plans, the University of Tennessee Alumni Association and the University of Minnesota Alumni Association have joined the growing number of alumni organizations making advocacy a priority initiative aligned with institutional goals.

Dozens of other public universities and their alumni associations have joined for visibility in state legislatures through thoughtful, well-designed programs and collaborations between alumni relations and public affairs. As one government relations director told me recently, “we have the strategy and the position papers, the alumni association has direct access to the alumni we need to get involved with us.” Curiously in California, where the University of California faces $500 million-plus in cuts and has organized various advocacy activities, only the University of California-Berkeley – one of 10 campuses in the system — has positioned advocacy prominently on its alumni association website.

Private universities also are promoting advocacy through economic impact studies and other project-based efforts. Through a broad constituency campaign that included alumni, DePaul University recently succeeded in convincing Illinois state legislators to restore funding for a financial aid program that, if lost, would have put college out of reach for a large number of its students. Describing the campaign at the recent annual conference of the Public Relations Society of America’s Counselors to Higher Education section, DePaul vice president Cheryl Procter-Rogers said. “We’re focused on outcomes. That means creating a leadership position, developing a strategy and building collaborative teams.” 

Generating enthusiasm and support for the institutions that higher ed’s PR counselors represent is PR at its essence.

In our experience, alumni communications offices miss the big picture because they are typically understaffed, underfunded and stretched thin with tactical responsibilities for promoting events and pushing out information. Often they are middle managers who have the will but neither the budgets, the time or the strategic experience to offer the 35,000-foot view. 

However, just as strategic development communications became more central to fundraising campaigns a decade ago, alumni communicators are rising to senior positions as part of advancement leadership teams in forward-looking institutions today. This takes both vision and investment from senior leadership.

In our recent alumni association strategic planning project with The Napa Group, we defined alumni communications best practices and provided a roadmap for strategic investment. We’ll talk about this at the CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders on July 18 in New York City. Check out our presentation, Reenvisioning Alumni Associations for the 21st Century.

One popular assumption that needs to be challenged early is that the rise of social media makes effective communication “free” of cost. While new technologies have provided more online options and relieved print budgets, it’s people who are going to get the job done. And their time isn’t free. In fact, they are busier than ever because they have more tools at their disposal and are expected to use them all appropriately — sending emails to chapters, updating websites, managing social media, creating print materials and advancing institutional goals.

These top trends in ”best practice” alumni communications provide the foundation for the “case for support” for enhanced investment:

• Strategic planning: Alumni associations recognize that they must prove their relevance in the face of all other groups competing for their constituents. The savvy associations are reshaping themselves to deliver market-focused programs through strategic planning.  Increasingly associations, like UCLA Alumni, are rebranding themselves as the lifelong link between alumni and the university, shifting perceptions that position the association as a major contributor to the institution’s overall success.  
• Market research: Alumni associations have used various forms of market research to (a) identify their key value to their alumni and (b) reinforce that value consistently throughout all forms of communications – including print, online, social media, personal visits and events.                               
• Website portal: As lifetime links between alumni and the university, associations are converting their websites to information services to inform and engage alumni in the university’s life, not just the association’s. Coordinated with institutional websites, alumni websites connect alumni to the university’s story while fostering relationships among alumni.                                       
• Strategic communications: Alumni communications professionals are rising to strategic leadership in overall advancement operations, just like their development communications colleagues began to do a decade ago. They are advising their institutional colleagues and coordinating efforts to reach and engage alumni in targeted ways.                                 
• Communications leadership: Such higher-level leadership roles also require that alumni communicators measure the effectiveness of traditional and emerging communications, including the realignment of print, electronic, online and social media for strategic outcomes.                              
• Social media networks: The rapid rise of new technologies, such as social media and mobile communications, are powering alumni networks. Alumni communicators must understand how to apply these tools as part of the overall marketing mix.

A communications audit is an excellent first step to launch this strategic approach because it delivers unvarnished facts, needs and opportunities from staff and alumni audiences – and creates a roadmap for the future.

What are the key elements of your alumni communications “case for support?”

I brought this up the other day with an MBA graduate and trustee of a university planning a new capital campaign. His reply: “In the business world, we say, ’you don’t get what you don’t ask for.’…People are scrutinizing their philanthropic choices more than ever before. I don’t know anyone who isn’t looking more carefully at these decisions.”

In this economy, with greater competition for less money, many fundraisers are seeking coaching in sales skills for more focus, faster results and higher yields. Not only that, but another article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy says that people skills are no longer enough for fundraisers to be successful. The market is calling for fundraisers with multiple talents to compete for donations in a changing marketplace.  Note the use of the word “compete.”

As a fundraising marketer, and, yes, that’s what I admit to, my job is to persuade donors and potential donors to invest in the causes I represent. A donor I interviewed at another institution a few months ago made it very clear that he would rather have a business plan than a so-called case statement. Why? Because development writing has earned a bad rap as a ”feel-good” document designed to tug at emotional loyalties rather than also sell a product.

That soft style is not going to cut it any longer, as economic discipline has forced more rigor in fundraising. Increasingly donors want to hear about an organization’s strategic plan, its technology infrastructure and the other administrative pillars as proof that the institution is going to operate like a business and manage and invest philanthropic dollars smartly and strategically.

Today’s fundraising case for support must develop the business case for investment. I thought Sally Patterson nailed it well last fall in “Creating a Case for Sustainability” in Advancing Philanthropy. She wrote that the case statement must convey that an organization has all the essential elements to survive — and that it has taken steps to ensure its long-term viability.

Donors have competing demands for their time and their money. They are often loyal to many organizations. They are bombarded with social media, email, get-to-know-you breakfasts and high-level dinners. Their time is valuable and they don’t have a lot of it. These donors have many options today, and they need to be sold. Case statements must anticipate the arguments that fundraisers must have when they are meeting face-to-face with prospects. Such documents are useless if they are merely internal wishlists or descriptions of what you do. Nonprofit consultant Tom Ahern made that “case” this week at the annual Association of Fundraising Professionals conference.

Fundraising is one of the most visible marketing tools an institution has — and the case for support must provide the persuasive roadmap. The best case statements are market-focused — credible and logical, realistically assessing current challenges and providing an aspirational vision of future possibilities. They give donors the information they need and they speak to the values they hold.

Too many case statements simply don’t make the case in this competitive fundraising environment – and waste time, money and, ultimately, opportunity. 

Vision, implementation and change — these are the themes of a nonprofit’s case for support in a post-recession economy. So let’s not be timid about talking business. Donors who truly want to make a difference expect nothing less.

It’s time to end recession thinking with the official close of winter — and spring forward with marketing for the economic recovery. Several of my nonprofit, small business and independent consultant clients have spent the last weeks of winter taking the 3 critical steps to rebound their activity in activity in 2010:

• Focus
• Focus
• Focus

Communications activities suffered badly in the recession, although communicating value was never more important. Yet stretched budgets, reduced revenues and decreased fundraising income often left little choice. Survival thinking took a toll on creativity and caused everyone to think small, reminding me of the “lizard brain” paralysis described in Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin.

Last year found many small organizations getting stuck in the churn. Getting unstuck can take two paths, both driven by “focus.” One is to understand your value proposition and do it better than your peers and competitors. The other is to carefully differentiate between a brand problem and a business problem. Once that’s resolved, reviewing and perhaps repositioning your marketing is the logical next step.

The latest research confirms that customers are tired of hearing about the recession, paving the way for tapping into consumer optimism. Stepping back to take a good look about how you are positioning your business is a timely exercise that can put you on the leading edge as the recovery heats up. It’s the core of a communications audit.

Is your message buried in your materials? Have you truly leveraged your business concept in your marketing? Are you trying to pursue too many audiences and none of them with full attention? Have you listened to your customers recently, and what are they saying? Do the people in your organization have the tools to be your messengers and ambassadors, whether it’s you, your small staff, your volunteers?

I’ve developed this “Spring Forward Bootcamp” as a cost-effective half-day program to refocus and rebound marketing communications for community nonprofits, small businesses and independent consultants to refresh your marketing with impact and momentum. We’ll roll up our sleeves together to (1) clarify and target communications goals, (2) review and assess messages, materials and systems and (3) focus your story and map out strategies into a communications action plan for 2010.

What I know today about marketing I learned in the first half of my career in journalism. The basics are the same – who? what? when? where? how? — and, most importantly, why? With these fundamentals, you can truly focus your marketing outreach:

• Who are you?
• What value can you provide me?
• When, where and how do you make it happen?
• Why should I do business with you? Why should I donate to your cause?

I’ve been applying this thinking to my own “spring forward” value proposition – helping you map out the framework to strengthen your story, develop the strategy and implement your communications roadmap to take advantage of the rebound in 2010.

What steps would you add to this “rebound your marketing” plans?

In my whitepaper last year on “Communicating Value During the Economic Downturn,” I cited Duke’s early wins at keeping alumni informed and thus generating credibility, understanding and greater support. The recessionary spiral, the whitepaper argued, became “a timely chance to communicate more and focus a lens on the organization’s value while donors, alumni, volunteers, employees and those receiving services are seeking facts and assurance.” 

A year later in Duke Magazine’s November-December 2009 issue, “Sizing Up a Smaller Duke,” the university followed through with more details of its challenging financial realities and, importantly, its proposed remedies. Duke kept the faith with its constituents by focusing a lens on difficult, yet thoughtful, steps to scale back its ambitions due to to decreased endowment and fundraising revenues. Institutions build greater trust and buy-in when they share their realities with us, especially through comprehensive approaches that are more sustainable than knee-jerk cost-cutting occurring at many higher ed institutions. 

In his last year as president of UVA, John Casteen is carrying a similar message around the U.S. in his regional tours. Speaking to alumni and parents in San Francisco in January, he talked about the belt-tightening in a context of continued growth and progress in the university’s $3 billion campaign. And with his 20-year view as president, Casteen previewed the university’s continuing challenges and ongoing recalibration with declining state support. (That visit, by the way, was followed up with a personal note from Casteen to every attendee.)

Today UVA’s 2008-2009 annual President’s Report arrived by email in a stunning high-tech electronic format with links, videos and slideshows — and a clear message from the president: “Using new technology allows wider circulation with lower production costs. For the first time, we can now send the report to every member of the University faculty and staff, as well as all alumni.” The contents contain lengthy financial details along with a forward look at “imagining our third century.”

While alumni associations ask, “do we still matter?,” Duke and UVA are offering some solid answers through their communications strategies. And what they are also letting their supporters know is that university strategic planning is once again on the front seat as institutions rethink how best to balance mission and market. UVA’s 2020 plan is already in process.

Purmal, who has her own firm — Kate Purmal Consulting – works with start-ups, emerging ventures and small businesses to launch and implement strategic initiatives and coaches clients on thought leadership and sales skills.

The term “thought leader” was coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor in chief of Strategy and Business – one who is a “futurist” or is recognized among peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.

Why position yourself as a thought leader? The advantages are clear, Purmal noted:

• Establish yourself as a credible source
• Showcase the breadth of your skills
• Deepen your role as a trusted advisor
• Create more exposure and generate more leads
• Build and elevate your brand
• Raise rates and increase revenue when you develop supporting collateral, such as a book

Thought leaders establish their positioning in various ways. Some thought leaders are trend-spotters (Faith Popcorn), others are provocateurs (Timothy Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek). Some have a unique voices while still others are curators of ideas and aggregators of thoughts, but applying them in fresh ways.

Working with clients to develop and promote their own thought leadership, I’ve found that it often takes a particular lens and outside perspectives to identify and put shape to what’s potentially “thought leadership.” That can apply to personal and small business marketing, as well. It’s smart to bounce your ideas off others and work carefully to refine a succinct message. But that shouldn’t mean paralysis-by-analysis either. Here are other ways Purmal advises to get started or continue the thought leadership journey:

• Don’t be afraid. Take a stand.
• Pick the most valuable thing you do and use that as your calling card, at least to get in the door.
• Craft a compelling and credible bio.
• Convert your area of expertise into a thought leadership platform that you can use in a variety of ways.
• Find the hook — and apply it in blogs, whitepapers, email newsletters, presentations and social media posts (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn).
• Believe in the value of improvisation, innovation and the “art of possibility.”

Feeling whiplashed by 2009, many of us have been talking about a sudden flurry of activity as 2010 opened. Pushing uphill with ferocity the first week of the new year, a university colleague mused, “I think we’re just doing more with less.” Had the economy suddenly improved by leaps because the year had turned? “Clearly there are signs that things are better,” a nonprofit recruiter noted as she posted a surge in new positions for several clients, ”and organizations have decided they can’t keep demanding too much of their existing staff if they want to move forward once again.”

Years ago I wrote regularly about “What’s Hot, What’s Not” trends in columns for Knight-Ridder Newspapers (which moved from the “Hot” to the “Not” column all too quickly as a newspaper chain that disappeared in recent years). So I’m reprising that Hot and Not snapshot with 5 top trends with broad implications for marketing communications for higher education, nonprofits, small businesses — and personal marketing — in 2010:

Hot: Growth/Not: Survival

Hot: Reinvention/Not: Relapse

Hot: Mobile/Not: Wired

Hot: Fresh content/ Not: Disregard for usability

Hot: Managing social media/Not: Letting social media manage you

What are your top picks for 2010?

These two wise approaches set a wise foundation for your rethinking  about a rebalanced 2010 — Zen and the Art of Twitter and Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious Marketing Trends.

Now’s a good time, too, to consider a brand update – without overinvesting in unnecessary change or cost during this still somewhat transitional time.

Entrepreneurs who have small businesses and start-ups as well as solopreneurs and independent consultants often have one bad habit in common — we try to do everything ourselves. Yet, as one of my new Virtual Assistants recently told me, we need to know when to get out of our own way and focus our energies on the activities that make money. In my case, that focus is university marketing and communications, alumni and development communications and nonprofit and small business marketing.

Where to concentrate among all the things that come up each day is not always a simple equation — each of us must assess the tasks for maintaining or ramping up productivity in our business. However, as independents or entrepreneurs, we most juggle many things, aren’t particularly good at delegating, have a tendency to micro-manage and are reluctant to pay for something we know we can do even if it distracts our attention from what really matters.

Yet what I’ve come to learn as I study where I’m spending my time is that using VAs frees up my time to invest in my own knowledge work – the communications strategies I develop and implement for my university, nonprofit and small business clients. In other words, it takes a village!

What is a Virtual Assistant anyway? Technically a VA is an independent entrepreneur providing administrative, creative and/or technical services, according to the International Virtual Assistants Association. “Utilizing advanced technological modes of communication and data delivery, a professional VA assists clients in his/her area of expertise from his/her own office on a contractual basis” is how the IVAA describes the role.

Some of the most popular categories of VAs are those skilled at organization and maintenance (a host of clerical duties), project/meeting/event coordination, customer service and relationship building and personal assistance.  Others may have very specific expertise, such as graphic design, online research, webinar oversight, newsletters and press releases, website updates, marketing and growth management activities and social media management.

In this economy, professionals whose businesses have tanked or who have lost their jobs are becoming VAs pay the bills, stay busy and market themselves for new and more sustainable work. They are also entrepreneurs who are augmenting their own small businesses, professionals desirous of only part-time work and others otherwise known as “freelancers” or “consultants.”

Daria Steigman, whose Independent Thinking blog I follow, recently wrote about VAs for the International Association of Business Communicators. I also consulted Katie Gutierrez, founder of Assistant Match, which specializes in small businesses that are experiencing rapid growth and workload bottlenecks. Assistant Match finds the VAs and prescreens them, that in itself a major time-saver.

Here are some tips for expanding your team with VAs:

• Start with your own self-assessment. What are the priorities for your time? What are the things you can do but could delegate? What are the time-eaters that aren’t making you money but are part of doing business?
• Try out one or more people. Your VA has to be a good match with your temperament, processes (such as meeting your deadlines) and bring enough value that she/he is invaluable to maintaining and/or growing your business. It may take a few tries to find the right relationships so be prepared for that.
• Set up a time-limited test assignment to analyze the VA’s work and your investment.
• Don’t try to force fit all your needs into one VA — hire two or more for specific tasks if that makes sense to your needs, the specialties required and your operating style.
• Create a budget for your VA support, understand the parameters clearly and reevaluate the arrangement monthly. VAs typically are paid hourly, and if they are managed by an agency, billing will likely occur in 15-minute increments. Administrative support tends to be less than specialized skills such as graphic design and social media management.
• Establish performance expectations at the outset, just as you would with any professional providing a business service.

And communicate often! Out of sight does not mean out of mind in the virtual office. Employee development expert Marla Rosner has some very wise recommendations about long-distance delegation. Managing a VA is no different from managing any other assistant and requires professional courtesy, input and support, collaboration and feedback.

With fewer distractions and more efficiency, using VAs allows you to right-size your business and refocus creativity and time on what you should be doing to be successful.