That quote was delivered by Allison Fine last night at a presentation by Fine and Beth Kanter about their new book The Networked Nonprofit.
Her point was that nonprofits should keep it simple. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Concentrate on what you do best and partner for the rest.
I had occasion to quote her at today’s Marketers Making a Difference meeting. Our featured nonprofit had been telling us about themselves for about 15 minutes and we still didn’t know what they did. So we spent the rest of our time helping them craft a new mission statement.
By the end of the meeting they had a vastly improved one-sentence mission statement and a short list of key concepts to flush it out. They were thrilled with the progress but also frustrated that they were still struggling with how to describe themselves after a year of working on it.
Sometimes a group of strangers can be better at describing what you do than you are (especially if they’re all marketers). Still, speaking with your target market is even better. I suggested they continue to refine the mission statement until they were comfortable with it and then run it by a few teachers (their target market).
The truth is, short and simple is not always easy and it takes time and effort. Can you tweet what you do?
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1 comment:
Karen,
You make an excellent point that personally I struggle with. It's very hard to put together your "elevator speech." You get so embroiled in the depths of your company or your life that it's virtually impossible to "see the forest from the trees."
It would be an interesting exercise to have a gathering, if nothing other than over the phone, where one could explain "what their company does" and have somebody else feed back to them, in a sentence or two, what they heard.
Think about it.
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