Five things I’ve learned that have made me better at nonprofit communications
And why most of them have nothing to do with communications
When people ask what I’ve learned from 15 years in communications, they usually expect me to talk about writing.
Or social media.
Or media relations.
These days, AI is often somewhere on the list too.
The funny thing is that very little of what has improved my work has come from learning new communications tactics.
Most of it has come from sitting in meetings, asking awkward questions and watching organisations try to solve the wrong problem.
After fifteen years, I’ve become less interested in communications itself and more interested in how organisations make decisions, where they get stuck and why they so often jump straight to solutions.
These are a few lessons I find myself coming back to again and again.
1. Stop starting with the deliverable
One of the most common requests I get sounds something like this:
“We need a new website.”
“We need a newsletter.”
“We need a social media strategy.”
And sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve started pulling at that thread only to discover the real issue is something else entirely.
A few years ago I worked with an organisation that wanted to update their website. It seemed straightforward enough. Then we started interviewing the leadership team. The problem became obvious quite quickly. Everyone described the organisation differently.
Not wildly differently. Just differently enough that if we’d gone straight into writing copy, we’d have ended up with a website that reflected whichever leader happened to speak last.
Before we could write a single headline, we had to answer a much harder question:
What do you actually want to be known for?
The website wasn’t broken. The clarity was.
I’ve seen versions of this play out with campaigns, annual reports, newsletters and brand refreshes too.
Sometimes organisations ask for a communications product when what they really need is a conversation they’ve been avoiding.
2. The best messaging often already exists
One of my favourite questions when starting a communications project is:
“Who explains this organisation really well?”
Not who’s the CEO. Not who’s responsible for communications. Who explains it well.
Years ago, while developing a communications strategy, someone on the team said, “You should have heard Simphiwe explain this on a call last week. It was the clearest I’ve ever heard anyone describe what we do.”
So I booked an interview. Not because I needed another stakeholder consultation. I wanted to hear exactly how he explained it.
I’ve noticed this over and over again. Communications teams spend weeks trying to craft the perfect message while the best version is often already sitting somewhere inside the organisation. It’s in the way a founder explains the mission to a donor. The way a programme manager describes a challenge. The way someone answers the same question for the hundredth time.
These days, if everything is recorded, I often ask for recordings of meetings where someone is explaining the organisation to the audience they’re trying to reach. Because that’s where the good stuff usually is.
There’s a naturalness to language that disappears the moment people realise they’re helping develop messaging.
Real language is usually better than workshop language.
3. Research feels slow until you skip it
Audience research has become one of my favourite parts of communications projects, which is not something I would have predicted fifteen years ago.
When I started out, I was far more interested in the outputs like campaigns, websites, publications (the visible stuff).
Research felt like the thing you had to get through before you could start the real work. Now I’m not so sure.
I’ve had clients push back on surveys because they seemed too long. I’ve had people question why we’re asking demographic questions that don’t appear directly related to communications. I’ve had stakeholders suggest we skip interviews because surely we already know the audience.
Sometimes they’re right. Often they’re not.
People don’t experience our organisations in neat communications boxes.
They experience them in the middle of work, family responsibilities, financial pressure, community expectations and a hundred other things competing for their attention.
I’ve learned far more from understanding someone’s context than I have from knowing which social media platform they use.
Research takes time.
It costs money.
It can be frustrating.
But creating communications based on assumptions is usually much more expensive.
Research is often the difference between relevance and guesswork.
4. Small details tell you more than big presentations
Some of the most useful insights I’ve gathered haven’t come from carefully facilitated workshops. They’ve come from things people almost didn’t say. A staff member rolling their eyes at a proposed slogan. Someone saying, “That’s not how I’d describe us.” A programme lead quietly pointing out that nobody in the community would use that language. An awkward silence after a question.
The longer I do this work, the more interested I am in what happens around the edges of a conversation. The side comments and disagreements. The things people say before the meeting starts or after it’s supposedly finished.
Those moments often tell you more than the presentation deck ever will.
I think communicators are sometimes trained to look for the big insight.
In reality, the big insight is often hiding inside a small detail that everyone else overlooked.
5. Activity and progress are not the same thing
This one has probably taken me the longest to learn.
Organisations love action. They love new things. New websites, campaigns, logos. strategies and content.
Doing something feels productive.
Thinking feels slow.
Sitting with uncertainty feels even slower.
But many of the biggest communications challenges I’ve encountered weren’t caused by a lack of activity. They were caused by a lack of clarity.
I’ve seen organisations redesign websites before agreeing on their positioning, launch campaigns before deciding what success looks like and refresh brands when what they really needed was alignment.
The work still gets done. People stay busy. The outputs get produced. But somehow the underlying problem remains.
The longer I work in communications, the less interested I am in producing more communications.
I know that’s a slightly odd thing for someone in communications to say. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that clarity creates better communications far more reliably than communications creates clarity.
Clarity creates better communications far more reliably than communications creates clarity.
That’s probably the lesson underneath all the others.
Most communications problems aren’t communications problems. They’re leadership problems, decision-making problems, strategy problems and alignment problems.
Communications just happens to be where those problems eventually show up.
So what do I do differently now?
After fifteen years, I’ve become much less interested in communications products and much more interested in diagnosis.
When a client asks for a website, I don’t start by thinking about websites. I start by asking:
Who is this for, and how will they use it?
The same thing applies to messaging. Before I facilitate a workshop, I want to hear how people naturally describe the organisation. Before I write audience personas, I want to talk to actual audience members. Before I recommend a rebrand, I want to understand whether the challenge is awareness, understanding, trust, behaviour or something else entirely.
Not because it’s a communications question. Because it’s usually a clarity question.
When people can’t answer it, we often discover that the challenge isn’t the website, report, strategy or campaign. It’s that nobody has agreed on the purpose.
I’ve found that question cuts through an astonishing amount of organisational noise. It surfaces assumptions. It exposes disagreements. It forces people to think about audiences as real people rather than abstract groups. And it often gets us much closer to the actual problem we’re trying to solve.
The longer I work in communications, the less interested I am in the thing we’re making.
And the more interested I am in who it’s for and what we want them to do with it.
Everything else tends to get easier once you know the answer.
I still create strategies, reports, websites and campaigns.
That’s part of the job. But I’ve learned that the quality of those outputs is usually determined long before anyone opens a Word document or a design programme. It’s determined by the questions we ask at the beginning.
And perhaps that’s the biggest shift in my own work.
I used to think my job was helping organisations communicate more clearly.
Now I think a big part of my job is helping them think more clearly first.
Interestingly, this is where a lot of my work starts these days.
People often call me thinking they need a communications strategy, a workshop or a new communications product.
Sometimes they do.
But quite often what they need is a couple of hours to think through who they’re trying to reach, what they’re trying to achieve and whether they’re solving the right problem.
It’s one of my favourite parts of the job.