I used to serve on a nonprofit board whose mantra was “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid” (Basil King). One of my personal mantras is “Live your life in draft.” (I’m not sure where I got that one.)
But I’ve mashed up these two sentiments into another piece of advice for nonprofit communicators: “Try boldly and try again.”
We share a lot of marketing strategies and tactics that we believe will have the greatest likelihood of success for nonprofits. But any particular nonprofit won’t know if those ideas are truly “best practices” for their organizations and communities until they give them a try, gauge the results, and then try again.
You can’t fear failure in marketing. It will make you too conservative in your decision making. You’ll end up being just another one of thousands of good causes who struggle to survive and never truly thrive.
Instead, you have to be bold and you have to be willing to experiment. You won’t always get it right the first time and maybe not the second time either. But you’ll be learning. What’s important is that you try new ways to reach out and to grab hold of people’s hearts and minds. When you do, they will come to your aid.
What might this look like at your organization?
I’ve got a new worksheet to share with you to get your mind thinking in the right direction: The Trying Boldly and Trying Again Worksheet.
You can download it as a Word doc or as a PDF.
