Study: Exciting (and Scary) Nonprofit Communications Trends
Does your work in the nonprofit sector excite you? It should. Does it worry you? It should do that, too.
NonprofitMarketingGuide.com’s “2016 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report” highlighted some of the big reasons why—from the positives, like embracing new opportunities and reaching more donors, to the negatives, like financial restrictions and unrealistic workloads.
The report provided further insight into how nonprofit professionals view their organizations and their work—for better and worse.
Here are some key findings:
- Direct responsibility means higher job satisfaction. Of the nonprofit professionals who said they were very satisfied in their current positions, 31 percent said they felt directly responsible for fundraising goals.
- While the work is satisfying for communications staff, turnover is high. Many communication directors (48 percent) and communications coordinators (61 percent) plan to leave their current positions in the next two years.
- The key to retaining communications directors is to build excellent working relationships with them. Just 40 percent of communications directors said they had excellent working relationships with their executive directors.
As nonprofits continue to adapt to the changing communications landscape, the report suggests the advantages of fostering integrated teams, in which marketing and fundraising coordinators work together under the same manager. In comparison to those working on separate teams, integrated teams are four times as likely to feel directly responsible for fundraising and twice as likely to feel responsible for community-building and engagement goals. And, as mentioned above, that type of direct responsibility results in higher job satisfaction.
Click here to download the full survey.
