Guest Post by Frank Fredericks
Frank Fredericks is the founder of World Faith and Mean Communications. After graduating from NYU,
Frank worked in the music industry, managing artists such as Lady Gaga.
In 2006, he founded World Faith, a youth-led interfaith organization
active in 16 countries. Frank has contributed to the Huffington Post,
Washington Post, and has been interviewed on Good Morning America, NPR, and New
York Magazine. He is a Fellow alumnus of IFYC, Soliya, AMENDS, and
YouthActionNet.
Being the founder of a startup or social business can be
overwhelming. While you founded the organization to counter violence, end
hunger, or promote human rights, you’ll likely find yourself staring at balance
sheets, quelling tensions between team members, and recruiting new volunteers
and supporters, not to mention endlessly fundraising. Often times at the bottom
on the list, if there at all, is building and implementing an effective
communications strategy.
Yet communications impacts everything. Whether it’s how your
website reveals your organizational values, how you measure impact, or guiding
the way that your donors speak about your work, communications impacts
everything.
Reaching this realization was not an overnight transformation for
me. When I founded World
Faith, I thought I would magically be “granted” the
funding necessary and hire a staff to manage all the organizational work, and I
would be globetrotting starting interfaith projects fighting poverty and
deincentivizing violence. This was not the case. I struggled between building
an unstructured but quickly growing nonprofit while worrying endlessly about my
own financial stability. It was a stressful, humbling, and truly
beneficial process. Even today, when World Faith is now active in 16 countries,
I still spend at least half my time on organizational manners. None is
more important than communications, and I’ve learnt so much over these past
years, that I’ve begun working as a communications consultant for other
nonprofits. Through both World Faith and my consulting at Mean
Communications, I’ve discovered some key lessons I’d
like to share with you.
You are your organization’s Communicator in
Chief.
Never forget that. You must be willing to become a walking, talking,
representative for your mission. Whether in the office or out with your
friends, on camera or buying groceries, you never know when you might meet
someone who can be your newest volunteer, donor, or beneficiary. Always
be ready. The best way to do that is to:
Tell your story. There is a reason
you decided to launch your initiative. You already know the components of
your story; where you came from, the journey to where you are, and the ‘aha’
moment along the way; but perhaps you haven’t rehearsed it enough to support
your organization. If you get good at it, you should constantly be doing
two things. First, you should make it obvious that you are the person
born to be leading your initiative. People support people as much as
ideas. Secondly, your organization isn’t about you, you are about your
organization. Your story should illuminate the greater story of the
organization. If you do this well, you’ll actually be inviting your
audience to connect to your organization’s story through your story, in an
empathetic impulse. This is because:
Nothing is more important than a
relationship. You can show people the studies, quote statistics, have
your elevator speech ready, and even craft your story, but if you aren’t
willing to emotionally invest in others, and more importantly, be humble enough
to accept the emotional investment of others, then you are likely to not
achieve what you need to. At the end of the day, the relations you have,
whether with funders, donors, partners, the media, or your beneficiaries, are what
you are truly cultivating. Speaking from experience at World Faith, we’ve
never received a donation from someone who hasn’t either met me first, or
knew an existing donor or supporter.
These are three things you can do now, without even turning to a
communications plan. It’s free, fast, and forever rewarding to your
organization. Sure, you have plenty excuses why you don’t have time to do
it, but the question is, what’s holding you back? Are you representing
your work at every opportunity? Telling your story and building
relationships? If not, you might not be able to afford not
investing some energy into building yourself up as the communicator your
organization needs. They say we are called human beings. So
we must be before we do. We must be better communicators
before we can ever do communications, and that starts with you.
