How Do You Talk Your Walk?

Years ago, when I was at the Community Foundation, my supervisor and mentor had a sign in her office that read “DWYSYWD.” Do What You Say You Will Do. It reads like a folksy reminder from a simpler time about the value of personal integrity and follow through, but it still makes headlines as the number one desired leadership trait, as found by research-practitioners Kouzes and Posner. And it’s still damn good advice. But I’m increasingly interested in the part about how nonprofit leaders actually say what they do.

Communication has always been a crucial competency for executive directors. They are, typically, not only the foremost spokesperson and external ambassador for their organization, but in many cases the primary fundraiser. They must be able to speak and write compellingly about their nonprofit’s work. And with the information technology revolution that has handed us each own publishing platform, marketing and communications is no longer the exclusive domain of mad men, but part of all leadership jobs.

For nonprofit leaders, especially those running small and mid-sized organizations, who live and breathe all aspects of the work, from the mission to the minutiae, communicating about that work to outsiders can sometimes prove surprisingly difficult. They get so immersed in walking the walk, it’s hard to take a step back to think about how to talk the walk.

I’ve recently seen this play out in two specific ways.

Having had the opportunity to read through a movement organizing group’s planning documents, I had a near out-of-body experience trying to grasp the meaning behind the pages of ideas and ideals. Sure, I could grok at a basic level the principles of empowering people to build a more peaceful and equitable world, but their good work was obscured by language that traded almost exclusively in abstracts. For groups trying to do no less than change the world by transforming how we interact with one another, it may seem reductive to ask: But what do you actually do? Or What do you mean when you say this? But to advance even the highest ideals and ambitions, communication must help bring them down to earth enough for the rest of us to hop on board. One way of doing this is to focus on stories: Can you describe the difference you’ve made for one person? Or how success has manifest itself in a specific instance? Tell those stories. Use concrete examples to show us how you make the sublime achievable!

Another organization had a very different challenge. They were so adept at branding and marketing that they seemed to have forgotten that communication is a two-way street. Organizational identity is vitally important for nonprofits and knowing one’s special niche in the landscape is key. But thinking you can cook up and deliver meaningful solutions in isolation from the larger system can be a recipe for disaster. Communication isn’t just about notifying community partners and other stakeholders of your strategies or priorities after the decisions have been made, it’s about letting them in on the challenges you face or the opportunities that excite you and inviting them into a dialog about the implications in context. Take time to listen—not just talk. And when you talk, don’t try to “sell” a point of view, be transparent. Yes, the competitive nature of the nonprofit funding model, being so dependent on “winning” grants and contracts, makes it difficult for organizations to let their guard down with funders and other partners. But that’s precisely what’s needed to craft systemic solutions and solve our biggest problems. You can’t make that kind of impact alone, and communication is key to getting there.

Take a moment to think about how you say what you do…then go back out there and get it done.