We at The Nonprofit Alliance (TNPA) proudly support the nonprofit sector, including nonprofit organizations, their staff, and beneficiaries. We strongly advocate on behalf of their interests and priorities, from data privacy to charitable giving to threats to funding. We have the flexibility to respond to new and urgent policy fights and utilize our extensive networks for the betterment of our community.

Our members and the broader nonprofit sector are facing many challenges right now, including drastic donor cuts, questions around individual programming portfolios, and unwarranted scrutiny of the sector’s overall role.

Strengthening your messaging and communications about your organization’s role will help reinforce the importance of the incredible work that is being done every single day. Educating the public and policymakers is an important tool to help with some common goals that we share as a community. At this critical time for the nonprofit sector, it is more important than ever to “Own Your Value.”

So what does this mean?

The idea for this initiative is not to tie talking points to an individual policy threat or falsehood but to help guide organizations to own their own worth through the following: strategically shaping messaging for a variety of audiences, including the general public; empowering their staff; and generally helping them showcase the valuable work they are doing in our communities.

The brief framework of suggested issues below can also help enormously with organizational staff in their external communications, which will empower them in their own portfolios, whether it is advocacy, programming, or senior leadership. Data is also key to this initiative, with statistics on employment, beneficiaries, and funding being helpful tools.

Messaging should ideally include:

• Clear and succinct explanation of your organization’s work and role in the community and its impact;
• The longevity of your work and individual programs;
• The number of jobs your organization has created and related impacts (job training, as example);
• The number of beneficiaries served (overall and yearly statistics);
• Where your services fill societal gaps or answer other kinds of external funding constraints for programming;
• External leaders and partners in the community that work with your organization, support its work, and can validate your value (community leaders, faith-based leadership, etc.);
• Funding and scope of donor base, where appropriate;
• Examples of accountable best practices;
• Detail where applicable private partnership relationships exist to strengthen organizational outputs;
• Storytelling from beneficiaries, where appropriate.

See a sample narrative example here. Share your stories within the nonprofit community and more broadly to help others amplify these organizational stories!