A social enterprise value proposition clarifies what a customer receives, how the offer operates, and how that activity is intended to connect to social value—without treating purpose, activity and outcomes as the same claim.
A practical guide to briefing brand identity design in Nigeria: define the scope, priority applications, proposal questions and handover your team needs.
Brand positioning is a strategic choice before it becomes a line of copy. Work through a Nigerian example, from audience and offer to alternatives and evidence.
A practical company-profile structure and sample for Nigerian mission-led businesses. Start with one accurate base of facts and adapt the emphasis without changing the claims.
Learn how a mission-led business can test a purpose statement against its contribution, offer, evidence, decisions and public presence.
When programme needs and communications requests compete, compare organisational priorities before choosing channels. Use a simple readiness check and record why one priority comes first.
A practical guide for Nigerian NGOs to distinguish brand strategy, digital marketing, communications and fundraising support before briefing an agency.
Compare an NGO branding agency’s mission fit, scope, evidence and working approach, then prepare a brief for your organisation.
You probably shouldn’t read this blog post until you’ve done one little task: Call two or three members of your team (programme coordinator, social media manager, fundraising outreach coordinator; you decide). Ask them to explain your organisation in one paragraph. Listen to what they say. If they can’t say as much as a paragraph, if they can’t contain all their explanation within a paragraph, or if there’s no underlying convergence across all their explanations, then, you couldn’t have found this post any sooner. Your non-profit organisation has a messaging problem. This is not an easily noticeable problem. However, it matters that your organisation ave a coherent messaging framework because every team member is an extension of the work you do and the impact you see. If their understanding of your organisation doesn’t nestle within the broader understanding, then your organisation is likely to suffer problems extending as far as a lack of a clear public idea of what you are, what you stand for, what you do, who you serve, how you serve them, and why your organisation exists. We call this a fragmented public image. Don’t get me wrong: your team members will likely not have a single explanation of what your organisation is. If they do, that is also a problem (which we will talk about in another blog post). The idea is that even though team members need different messaging assets about your organisation, there should be an overarching framework that governs that each message and connects it back to your mission and organisation’s strategic goals. So, even when your programme coordinator is helping someone decide whether to enrol in one of your initiatives, or the fundraising lead is explaining what each fundraising target helps you achieve, their explanations should stay true to your broader meaning and reason for existence. It becomes strenuous to advance your organisation’s mission when the internal understanding and messaging describe the organisation and its work differently. Say, one promises some services the team does not provide, or your explanation alienates a category of people your programme serves. Although these issues may not be easy to tie together or may be infinitesimally placed within day-to-day operations that your team hardly notices them, they readily chip away at the coherence of the immense work you do. So, when you start to notice instances where a TV interviewer misrepresents the work you do, or the newspaper describes the populations you serve wrongly, it’s good to lash out at how seemingly inept the media guys in the country are. However, it’s also time to start considering the importance of a messaging framework and how it can translate your work into the coherent and sound understanding it deserves. Why Have a Messaging Framework for Your Non-profit? A non-profit messaging framework helps your team agree on the essential messages and adapt them to different conversations you will likely be involved in. The central idea is that at any given time, your organisation needs to communicate with different stakeholders and audience segments, whose questions about the work you do differ, and whose reasons for communicating with you differ, and who might benefit from knowledge about your organisation in different ways. What is a Non-profit Messaging Framework? A messaging framework is a shared document that records the main ideas your organisation needs to communicate, the facts supporting those ideas, and the emphasis appropriate to different audiences. Staff use it when writing website pages, preparing presentations, answering enquiries, being the organisation’s spokesperson, or introducing the organisation in person. While your mission statement explains why your organisation exists, the messaging framework is what develops your organisation’s purpose into messages people can use in specific situations. For instance, a potential participant in your programme needs a more specific answer to their questions about eligibility and the benefits of your programme than a mission statement, impact statement, or similar statements provide. Your key messages within your messaging framework should be internally understood and broadly defined enough to avoid word-for-word repetition in all use cases, but specific enough to provide the answers needed without abstracting as far as your mission or similar statements. Being able to keep your key messages strategically encompassing allows your staff to explain what you do naturally while preserving the broader idea. Thus, developing a messaging framework involves regrouping all of your essential messages within a coherent ecoystem. We recommend a process that starts from gathering the consistent facts, identifying what each audience segment needs to understand about each fact, codifying your message reuse process, testing your messages in everyday use, and iterating based on results. Let’s examine each step further. Gathering Facts before Writing your Non-profit’s Key Messages You need to start with fact gathering. At that stage, you will need to identify and codify the facts that are consistent across different understandings and applications of knowledge about your organisation. This can be a susbatntially demanding endeavor, and it is also easy to lose track of what is codified, what is truly a fact that broadly and consistently applies, and what is merely a message item. Therefore, the fact-gathering stage can benefit from a systematic process where you start with one programme or area of work. In gathering facts and creating a message record for each fact, follow this process to validate the consistency of the fact across different knowledge applications: 1) Collect the current programme description, participant information and any results the team is authorised to share. 2) Compare them with what staff say during any enquiries. For this process, you are looking for differences that would change someone’s understanding of a programme or work area, or possibly change the decision they make about a programme. One thing to note as you go through this process is that some differences are easy to resolve, while others are not. When faced with hard-to-resolve differences, you want to ask if the details being contested qqualify as a fact. If they do qualify, you want to consult with leadership to verify
Decide what your nonprofit About page should explain, with examples covering mission, history, team, evidence and the next step for each reader.