Let’s take a quick mental tally: In the past month, have you received a tone-deaf email from a colleague and were left to ponder what he
actually meant? A memo so full of jargon that it required two or three reads to decipher? A set of instructions poorly written enough to require its own manual? A rally-the-team note from a manager or the c-suite that fell completely flat because of insipid or vague writing?
If you answered yes to any (or maybe all) of those questions, you’re not alone.
It’s not breaking news that Americans spend
a lot of time communicating at work. But unfortunately, a lot of that time is wasted.
To be more precise, as Josh Bernoff
reported in the Harvard Business Review, 81% of businesspeople say that poor writing wastes a lot of their time. All those vague emails, poorly organized presentations, and jargon-laden reports add up—and take a major blow to an organization’s productivity.
Of course, it’s not just the internal workings of an organization that suffer under a culture of bad writing. Bad writing filters out to customers, clients, partners, and stakeholders, too. It signals a lack of professionalism, lack of organizational self-awareness and integrity, and lack of respect for your audience. We can probably all agree that those are un-good signals to send.
So what’s an organization to do?
Small steps can make a difference, if you’re willing to commit time (and possibly money) to improving your organization’s writing.
1. Make sure you’ve got polished
templates and models for anything your employees routinely produce, such as project reports, slide decks, or blog posts. Templates not only save time, but they ensure that materials are consistent—and consistently well written.
2. Model good writing from the top. Management sets the tone and the standard for team members to rise (or fall) to. Even casual emails from a team lead or a department head (not to mention the ED or CEO) should be thoughtfully and properly crafted.
3. Design your organization’s workflow with the writing process in mind. Make sure that all public-facing communications are adequately reviewed and vetted—for example, by building in a
beta release for larger projects. And if your staffing allows it, consider providing dedicated in-house writing support for those who routinely create communications.
4. Provide training for employees, whether new hires or veterans. Everyone brings different levels of comfort and experience to writing, so it’s crucial to periodically create the opportunity to ensure that everyone is aware of organizational standards and able to use best practices.
5. Bring in
external support when needed. Sometimes an outside perspective helps, both to identify problems, and to conduct the necessary training to get staff up to speed. Experienced consultants can bring fresh ideas to new communications projects or old communications inefficiencies.
Now, go forth and write (better)!
Summer Pleasures
Who is Rich? (Matthew Klam) is messy and manic. And it makes a surprisingly good foil for Conversations with Friends (described in the last books post). Whereas the latter explores the restraints and release of sexual, sensual, or just potential intimacies, the former narrator obsessively—and hilariously—mulls over the extravagant fantasies (on which he sometimes acts) generated by the confines of his marriage, children, and job. The book makes marriage and parenthood a Sartrean prison of love and hate that no one can or really deserves to escape. It’s so funny, but its sharply desperate edge makes it cut way too close to the bone.
One of Us Is Lying (Karen McManus) is for the beach! It’s a YA, epistolary-style narrative in which four high-schoolers (who are a bit more multidimensional than their stereotypes suggest), must rigorously defend themselves after their classmate dies in detention. The book is often compared to The Breakfast Club, but it’s a little closer to American Vandal: It’s an episodic, winking whodunit set in the gossipy milieu of high-school self-seriousness. It’s a bit silly, but it’s also a lot of fun.
The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach) was recommended by best friend of MWS, Katie Levin. Set at a small midwestern college, it connects a handful of key characters through the school’s once struggling but now stellar baseball team. The character-driven book (check out those names!) offers a John Irving-inspired take on multivariant masculinity, represented by Moby-Dick on the one hand, and “The Art of Fielding,” a fictional bible of baseball held dear by one of the book’s nominal protagonists, on the other. It’s a bit diffuse and meandering, but in that sense it capably recreates Ishmael’s narrative (and possibly baseball’s enactment of the futility of strategy in the face of chance).
Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, but, hey, it’s summer! What are you reading?
Communications Plans, Part IV: Messaging
A communications plan lays out a comprehensive picture of an organization’s communications goals and offers executable steps for how to achieve them. It can be created or updated annually to align with the fiscal year, or it can be developed as a companion to a 1-, 3- or even 5-year strategic plan.
In earlier posts, we offered an overview of communications plans, along with information about two crucial components of well-designed plans: clearly articulated communications objectives, and a comprehensive map of communications channels.
In this post, we’re covering another important piece of a communications plan: a detailed breakdown of messaging strategy.
There are many ways to conceive of messaging strategy, but we think of it as a way to generate and manage subject matter for routine—but discrete—communications, such as blog posts, newsletters, and social media posts.
Often, these kinds of high-frequency communications are executed without a big-picture strategy in mind. That equates to a lost opportunity in reinforcing organizational vision—and it also puts the writer in the position of having to routinely scramble to source new content.
As comms managers know, that scramble can feel relentless (“What to tweet about this morning? This afternoon? Next week?” “Who’s got something I can include in the newsletter this month?”). It’s also super inefficient, in terms of brain space and organizational workflow. Plus, it can lead to unwanted repetition and inconsistency.
A lot of these issues can be solved with a messaging strategy. When a messaging strategy is developed as part of a communications plan, you ensure that these routine communications on-brand and aligned with important events and campaigns.
When thinking about messaging, develop general categories that can be mined for content: fundraisers, outreach, personal and organizational profiles, relevant current events or research, calls to action, quotes, thought pieces, etc. In developing those topics, think about your communications objectives: What will resonate with your target audiences? Garner stakeholder engagement? Strengthen your SEO?
From there, topics can be broken down even more granularly, to be scheduled on an editorial calendar*: A future event may be an occasion for multiple communications—an invitation and reminder, a thought piece from the ED exploring how the event reflects the organization’s mission, an after-the-fact report of the event’s success and thank you to everyone involved, links to press coverage, etc. Similarly, a volunteer recruiting push could lead to an ongoing series of new volunteer profiles and an end-of-year report celebrating volunteer-related outcomes.
Creating a messaging strategy takes a bit of up-front work. But it’s ultimately an enormous time-saver that leads to more consistent, more meaningful, and more effective communications.
*If you haven’t yet heard the gospel of editorial calendars—another critical tool that a communications plan sets out—now’s the time to be saved!
(Actually) Write the Grant
But then. Then! After you’ve written the Letter of Intent and received an invitation and RFP to apply, it’s time to actually write the grant.
Surprisingly, the grant writing at this stage is easier and more straightforward (though because it’s longer and more detailed it’s also more work): Not only have you received instructions in the form of the RFP, but you’ve already written your template in the form of the LOI.
In some ways, the grant proposal is the LOI, but more. Whereas the LOI is about 2 pages, the grant proposal is more like 8 to 12 pages. Whereas the LOI provides a snapshot of your organization and its program objectives, the proposal spells out in more (and repetitive) detail your organization’s background, needs, program model, goals and objectives, methods, evaluation and tracking, timeline and work to date, and organizational information.
To write the right proposal:
Proposals can be onerous and overwhelming. Many organizations want to break the project down, assigning various elements to various staff members. Resist this urge! Instead, assign the proposal to your organization’s strongest writer (who, ideally, practices extreme attention to detail), and provide that writer with vigorous support.
And if this is your organization’s first effort, consider spending the money on training your writer in grant writing or on hiring a grant writer. The outlay might hurt your organization’s wallet in the short-term, but the final proposal will pay long-term dividends (even if it doesn’t win the grant) because it will be the basis for future—winning!—proposals.
How to Avoid the Organizational Costs of Bad Writing
If you answered yes to any (or maybe all) of those questions, you’re not alone.
It’s not breaking news that Americans spend a lot of time communicating at work. But unfortunately, a lot of that time is wasted.
To be more precise, as Josh Bernoff reported in the Harvard Business Review, 81% of businesspeople say that poor writing wastes a lot of their time. All those vague emails, poorly organized presentations, and jargon-laden reports add up—and take a major blow to an organization’s productivity.
Of course, it’s not just the internal workings of an organization that suffer under a culture of bad writing. Bad writing filters out to customers, clients, partners, and stakeholders, too. It signals a lack of professionalism, lack of organizational self-awareness and integrity, and lack of respect for your audience. We can probably all agree that those are un-good signals to send.
So what’s an organization to do?
Small steps can make a difference, if you’re willing to commit time (and possibly money) to improving your organization’s writing.
1. Make sure you’ve got polished templates and models for anything your employees routinely produce, such as project reports, slide decks, or blog posts. Templates not only save time, but they ensure that materials are consistent—and consistently well written.
2. Model good writing from the top. Management sets the tone and the standard for team members to rise (or fall) to. Even casual emails from a team lead or a department head (not to mention the ED or CEO) should be thoughtfully and properly crafted.
3. Design your organization’s workflow with the writing process in mind. Make sure that all public-facing communications are adequately reviewed and vetted—for example, by building in a beta release for larger projects. And if your staffing allows it, consider providing dedicated in-house writing support for those who routinely create communications.
4. Provide training for employees, whether new hires or veterans. Everyone brings different levels of comfort and experience to writing, so it’s crucial to periodically create the opportunity to ensure that everyone is aware of organizational standards and able to use best practices.
5. Bring in external support when needed. Sometimes an outside perspective helps, both to identify problems, and to conduct the necessary training to get staff up to speed. Experienced consultants can bring fresh ideas to new communications projects or old communications inefficiencies.
Now, go forth and write (better)!
(Starting to) Write the Grant
Once you’ve identified the right grant, you may want to establish contact with the grantmaking group. Many grantmakers (though not all—be sure to read that RFP!) tacitly assume applicants will reach out. So send an email or make a phone call to gauge their interest in your organization and its work. The effort ensures that both you and the grantmaker views the a grant as a good fit. It also helps open the door to a relationship: As most nonprofits already know, relationships are key to sustainability.
If you’ve established contact and learned more about your target grant, you will also learn about their preferred entry document. Often, this is a two-page Letter of Inquiry. The LOI provides an excellent warmup for writing the grant. It asks you to show off your organization and to succinctly articulate grant-relevant goals. The LOI may feel like a chore (and it is), but by enabling grantmakers to efficiently make a first cut, the letter helps save you from writing a grant you are not positioned to win.
If the grantmaking group offers an LOI template, use it. But if not, create your own LOI according to the following specifications, aiming for two pages in length.
Ideally, your LOI will be accepted and you’ll be asked to apply for the full grant. But that doesn’t always happen. In the weeks after you’ve sent your LOI, follow-up with a phone call, and consider requesting a meeting. Establishing relationships with grantmakers—even grantmakers who don’t ultimately award you a grant—is never a bad idea.
Now, as novice grant writers (also all writers) quickly learn, you need to start earlier, do more research, and write more drafts than you think you do. In the next post, we’ll turn to the writing process itself.
Bookmobile to Print Double Shift Press Titles
We couldn’t be happier to partner with them to print our Double Shift Press titles.
We first started working with Bookmobile back in 2014, when they became a client of ours at Modern Writing Services. Nicole Baxter, Bookmobile’s director of sales, marketing, and publisher services (and all-around excellent person) reached out to inquire about our communications services.
Bookmobile had just gone through a rebranding process and needed help integrating their brand standards with their new website. We provided an extensive edit of the website, along with recommendations and a style guide for their in-house use.
We’ve partnered with them on a number of projects since then, and we always love the work—they’re passionate about what they do, they’re innovative and forward-thinking, and they value good communication. Plus, Nicole has a wicked sense of humor that always makes her emails the highlight of my inbox.
So it was a no-brainer for us to look to Bookmobile for printing and design services when we launched Double Shift Press earlier this year. Bookmobile has worked with over 900 publishers, including luminaries such as Graywolf Press and innovators such as OR Books. If you like to read, chances are you’ve got some of their books on your shelf.
The quality and range of printing and design options that Bookmobile offers far outstrips the print-on-demand services that most self-publishers use. They make everything look stunning, from standard paperbacks and journals to luxe coffee table books and gallery-ready catalogues.
Getting the Grant
In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting a series of discussions on finding, writing, and winning grants. Today, we’re starting at the top: developing a solid search strategy to locate relevant grants.
New nonprofits may assume that grants account for the majority of their funding. But most nonprofits have a diverse revenue stream, and grants usually account for less than 20 percent of funding. Of course, “less than 20 percent” still adds up to a significant sum, so winning grants is essential work.
The first step to landing a grant is conducting an efficient search. While government grants often seem like the biggest and therefore best place to start, these grants require that nonprofits meet minutely specified standards, and they are intensely competitive.
Nonprofits should certainly search sam.beta.gov (the new site for The Catalog of Domestic Assistance) for information on available federal grants and grants.gov to inquire into specific granting agencies.
But nonprofits should also look closely at local government sources (in Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits has a helpful page of links), and they should look even more closely at local and family foundations and corporations.
In 2016, foundations gave almost 60 billion dollars in charitable giving. To identify relevant local entities, start with your board. Board members usually know corporations and foundations with grantmaking power and can provide helpful advice.
Next, identify local grantmakers with interests that align with your nonprofit’s mission and needs. This kind of research starts with board members (and Google), but it should also include searching directories like the Minnesota Grants Directory for information on available grants and point-of-contact staff.
Finally, it can be worthwhile to pay for a subscription service like The Foundation Center. For about fifty dollars a month (Minnesotans receive free access through many county libraries), The Foundation Center provides data (like top-funder reports with aggregated financial stats) to help nonprofits capture grant dollars. The subscription can pay for itself for nonprofits seeking to bring in new money (and sustain recurring grants).
The process of finding, applying, writing, and winning a grant is unending and arduous, but it’s also necessary. In the coming weeks, we’ll help you break it down into a manageable—and remunerative—practice!
How to Make Progress on Big Projects
In fact, the utility of ending the day by planning for the next day should be obvious: it saves time and provides immediate focus when you sit down bleary-eyed in the morning.
This logic also holds true for big projects—especially big writing projects. Projects that require days, weeks, or months can become all-consuming and feel overwhelming. It’s easy to get decision fatigue and lose sight of the big picture, which then paralyzes our ability to make real progress.
But there are some simple, practical tactics to avoid this seemingly inevitable loss of productivity—namely, by ending each day planning for the next.
1. Each day, take quick stock of what you’ve accomplished. It helps to note progress, however slight! (And remember, even discovering roadblocks is a kind of progress.)
2. Check in with the overall project timeline. If you’re off track, what resources do you need to get back to where you need to be?
3. Make that to-do list for tomorrow. Take special note of the first thing you’re going to do when you sit down, so that you can be off and running without having to think about it.
4. Write it all down! There’s something magical about committing your ideas to paper (or screen)–studies have put hard data to the fact that writing down goals makes us more likely to achieve them.
This kind of “parking downhill,” as our writing consultant friends like to call it, works. It helped me finish my dissertation in my graduate school days of yore, and it helps me now when I’m working on big client projects.
Give it a try. It may give your productivity (and your sleep) a boost.
Write to Sleep
But no longer!
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve accumulated more responsibilities, more worries, and apparently more always-firing synapses. I’ve consequently said a reluctant goodbye to an easy full-night’s sleep.
These days, sleep requires more rigorous methods of relaxation. I read of course…although some books put me to sleep more quickly than others. But now, in addition to reading, I’ve also started writing.
According to new research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, writing—and specifically writing a to-do list—can promote sleep (or act as an aid for falling to sleep). Researchers found that people who wrote to-do lists fell asleep faster than people who instead wrote out their day’s accomplishments.
In some ways, it’s totally counterintuitive that writing out the day’s un-done tasks would provide a map to dreamland. In other ways, it makes a lot of sense. Writing has always been a method for imposing order on chaos. And writing a to-do list is often much more satisfying than actually completing any written-down tasks.
If you’re not sleeping either, perhaps your to-do list should include writing tonight.
Getting Bigger? Two Keys to Scaling Internal Communications
Growing your communications does, too.
In many ways, communications don’t scale like other organizational functions. This is especially true of internal communications, which for small organizations may be completely organic. But whereas organic communications processes may be adequate (even efficient) for a team with a handful of people, they quickly become inefficient (even hazardous) when that team grows.
Growing organizations face two big problems when it comes to internal communications: lack of documentation, and lack of formalization.
Because small teams tend to function organically, there’s often little or no documentation of roles and procedures. Team members know each other’s strengths, pick up tasks as needed, and fall into familiar routines. But when too much lives in employees’ heads, an organization can be on precarious footing when it starts to grow.
Ensuring institutional memory by creating and maintaining external records of communications is crucial for future growth.
Similarly, the organic functioning of a small team can hinder the development of formalized internal communications procedures. After all, maintaining a regular meeting schedule or planning and tracking workflow can seem cumbersome when you interact with everyone on your team every day.
But when an organization relies too much on informal communications to keep its wheels turning, it risks those wheels grinding to a halt. By formalizing communications procedures, you create the conditions for sustainable growth.
So what does it actually look like to document and formalize communications?
While the specifics are different for every organization, it means determining and codifying what works. It means finding the right tools—from calendars to trackers to meeting procedures—to accommodate your organization’s growth. And it means creating and regularly updating written documents that detail communications operations in a way that makes them clear and easily adoptable for new team members.
Consciously scaling internal communications is crucial when it comes to organizational capacity-building. It’s a forward-looking task that helps ensure the health of growing organizations.