Is development a kind of communications? When community organizers do one-to-one meetings, are those a kind of communications?

Well, yes and no. Of course they are “communication”–when you get right down to it, no part of our work gets done without communicating, right? Even if some of us have a little pronoun trouble (fair warning, if you follow this link you will waste 6 1/2 minutes on a wildly un-p.c. Bugs Bunny cartoon). It’s worth raising because one of the first problems in nonprofit communications is how to define or ‘bound’ our work.

At the Workshop we define communications as the process of developing specific messages and disseminating them to specific audiences via a range of mass media techniques; nonprofit communications is a specialty all its own that is typically less concerned than for-profit communications with the selling of goods and services. Public relations, media relations, outreach and marketing, internal communications, publications and web site development, and other on-line strategies are all examples of common nonprofit communications strategies.

We’re reflecting on this because a recent survey we did raised the perennial question, why don’t nonprofits get more news coverage?

We came up with some new, and slightly more fleshed-out than before, answers.

First, this will come as little surprise to many readers, two-thirds of us have no communications staff! Given that limitation, we actually do pretty well as a sector, at least here in our region: nearly half of us do get some news coverage, anyway.

The data come from a recent survey by the Workshop of 212 grantees of The Chicago Community Trust as part of four workshops for their grantees across the region. What we found reinforced what we’ve learned from two years of baseline studies of participants in workshops and conferences, and we think it sheds some light on nonprofit communications work. We found that:

• Only one in three nonprofits surveyed said communications, marketing, or outreach staff handled communications for their organization;
• About 40% listed recent news coverage as a significant communications success from the past year; learning to better reach journalists was rated the highest priority out of four typical communications strategies for those surveyed;
• Some 96% of nonprofits surveyed had a Web site and 75% had a printed brochure
• Some 42% reported using one or more of Community Media Workshop’s services; 37% were familiar with but had not accessed the Workshop, and 21% had never heard of the Workshop.

Download the whole survey report here.