Get ready for your year-end communications
We know it’s only October, but it's never too early to start thinking about your year-end communications. To really produce effective communications that tell the story of your organization and its journey - including achievements, successes, what worked and what didn’t - it's best to start early and think carefully because year-end communications matter. Whether you’re simply going to send out a newsletter or communicate offline with your top donors, here’s why investing in year-end communications is critical:
It provides your team with an opportunity for internal thinking, reflection, and learning
It supports fundraising efforts - especially around the giving season
It promotes stakeholder buy-in by demonstrating your impact and achievements of the year
It helps you to recognize and thank your partners, donors and supporters
And often, it boosts team morale by getting your team excited about what you’ve achieved together.
To get your organization ready for this busy communications and fundraising period, your efforts must stand out, be compelling, and inspire.
Here are some tried and tested tips:
Take the time to reflect, listen and learn →
Get your team to provide their input and reflections of what worked, what didn’t, and what the areas of improvement are. This should be your first step in preparing for your year-end communications. Once you’ve done this, it makes the rest of the steps easy to follow.
Rally your communications around a theme →
It's easy to want to highlight all your programs and activities during the end of year to showcase your hard work and achievements. But it is more strategic for you to think of a compelling theme on which to base your year-end communications. With your team, discuss what these captivating ideas would be - for example, should it be around your key interventions around human-wildlife coexistence? Or driving behaviour change through an outreach campaign? Rallying all your communications around a key, exciting theme ensures consistent messaging and aligns your efforts.
Make your stories shine →
The importance of storytelling in conservation communications cannot be overstated. Alongside sharing impressive statistics and reports, remember to include strong stories that demonstrate the value of your programs, work, and impact.
Stories help your audiences connect with your work and organization at a personal level and help deliver messages in a way that resonates and inspires action. From the small to the big, identify the stories that ‘speak’ to your theme.
Stories that move people and inspire action - https://www.sumac.com/blog/nonprofit-marketing/4-examples-of-effective-nonprofit-storytelling/
Quantify AND qualify your impact →
Collect your metrics and measure your annual impact. What have you achieved that will impress your supporters and various audiences? How is this impact helping your organization achieve its overall goals and mission? Demonstrating your impact - accompanied by solid stories as described above - is a great way to set your end of year communications for success.
Be visual →
Now that you've identified your theme, stories and impact, you need to determine the best way to present this information. From professional photographs and videos to infographics, your year-end communications do not need to be boring. By starting to plan early, you can invest in strong, visual tools that help to amplify your work.
Have your audience in mind →
Think about your key audiences and how you can adapt your theme and various communications around them. For example, your top donors will require different communications from your newsletter or social media audiences. Additionally, the partners you work with and have enabled you to succeed in the year might also need a different approach.
Determine the medium →
We’ve seen some of our partners achieve outstanding results by simply sending out a well thought out, year-end newsletter highlighting their successes, challenges and learning opportunities and accompanying this with a series of strong social media posts. Keeping your audience in mind and understanding how they like to receive messages and news will help you determine the most suitable medium to send out your year-end communications.
Learn, and get inspired by others →
Is there an organization that you feel always gets their end of year communications right? Identify what it is about their communications you like, and get inspired by it.
And at the end of this busy end of year period, always remember to review your communications activities, analyze what worked, what could have been improved, and use that information to inform your future communications.
Examples of year-end newsletters by our partners:
Our own 2020 highlights:
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