We recently did a short survey asking our community to let us know how important each part of our mission statement was to them personally.
At Nonprofit Marketing Guide, we are here to help nonprofit communications pros:
- Learn Your Job: Getting training and coaching no matter your experience level with nonprofit communications and marketing.
- Love Your Work: Getting understanding, support, and community to help you feel confident and happy in your work.
- Lead Your Team: Learning how to lead your team the CALM not BUSY way for maximum effectiveness and results.
Overall, our community put these three elements in the same order of importance that we do, which is good!
But we do see some interesting differences based on how long they’ve been working in the field.
Not surprisingly, those who picked “Learn Your Job” as their first priority tended to have 3 or fewer years in the work. But we also saw a big bump in those with 11-15 years in the work saying it was the top choice too. I suspect that’s because when you reach that point in your career, you are more aware of “knowing what you don’t know” and you may be more interested in filling in some of the gaps and trying to keep up with all the new things (and there are a lot of new things all the time in this work).
Those who picked “Love Your Work” as the top choice? Most of them have been working in nonprofit communications for 1-6 years. Again, this makes sense to me. They are relatively early in their nonprofit comms careers and trying to decide whether this work is right for them long-term. We try very hard to encourage talented communicators to stay in the sector, even when the financial rewards aren’t so fabulous.
Those who selected “Lead Your Team” as their top choice were more evenly distributed across all of the experience levels, which confirms that you don’t need decades of experience to be considered for team-leading roles.
