In the last few weeks, several nonprofit communications directors told me their programmatic teams are growing, but their communications teams are not. Let’s look at five ways to make the case for growing your communications team.
Plan for Growing Your Communications Team Now, Even Without an Agreement to Hire
Nonprofits often need to plan for hiring new staff over a couple of years as they work the new position into the budget. However, we also see many instances where nonprofits are growing rapidly in response to various external factors, including the pandemic, a renewed emphasis on social justice, and new funding availability. With that rapid growth often comes additional investment in communications teams.
When you get word that growing your team is possible, BE PREPARED! We strongly recommend that you create a plan for what another person (or two) would do now. Project what kind of work products your organization can expect from that growth. Be ready with at least a basic job description for those new positions so you are prepared to jump quickly on any opportunities.
If you wait until you are sure there is funding to begin your planning work, don’t be surprised when someone else in your organization swoops in and snags that funding for another purpose.
If your leadership doesn’t understand that the communications team should grow with programmatic growth, focus on the following arguments!
Emphasize the Return on Investment and What Becomes Possible with a Larger Team
What can your organization expect to happen if you expand your team? It’s usually some combination of
- creating more content (especially around new programming!),
- increasing your communications frequency,
- adding new communications channels or more intensive strategies with existing ones,
- or reaching out to new audiences.
For more specifics about how these changes often roll out as teams grow, see Growing Your Communications Team: How Much More Work Can You Do? In that post, I share how the workload and communications team expertise change with each additional full-time hire.
If programmatic growth will require additional communications work, tie those changes together! Though many variables go into the equation for right-sizing your communications team, we recommend a ratio of 1:5 as a default, especially in smaller organizations. That means one communications team member for every five programmatic team members who might need communications support.
Emphasize Workplace Wellness, Employee Satisfaction, and Preventing Burnout
If your nonprofit’s leadership cares about the wellbeing of its employees and is genuinely interested in building a happy, healthy workforce, then you may want to emphasize how growing the team will reduce the stress on you and prevent you from burning out and leaving. (Unfortunately, that is a big IF in the nonprofit sector.)
Few executive directors understand the stress level involved in nonprofit communications and marketing work. They woefully underestimate the time it takes to do good work and the increasingly technical nature of the job, which requires using numerous kinds of software every day. Educate them about the realities of your work. Tell them what you need to succeed in your work and be satisfied as an employee.
Emphasize Growing Your Communications Team to Create Space and Time for Strategy
Overworked communicators are doing, doing, doing all the time. There is so much to do. But in all that activity, you crowd out the time you need to think, solve big problems, and be strategic. You need breathing room to do all of that. Growing the team allows you to make strategic decisions so that the “doing” has meaning and produces results.
Emphasize How Building Internal Capacity Creates CALM (Collaboration, Agility, Logic, and Methods)
If your organization is farming out a lot of pieces of the communications workload to freelancers, it may make sense to build some of that capacity in-house instead. There are certain situations where hiring outside expertise makes sense, but if you are outsourcing core communications functions, odds are that work is taking too long or isn’t quite on point. By bringing that work together in-house, you can create focus, consistency, and expertise that is hard to reach with freelancers. That, in turn, results in better decisions and work products because it creates more opportunities for internal collaboration, agility, logical decision-making, and smoother workflows and methods.
What’s worked for you in building your nonprofit’s communications team? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.
