There's trouble brewing.
That's what I took away from a presentation by one of
Canada's best economists, Don Drummond. A former banker and ex-civil servant, Drummond
was the leader of the recent omnibus review of government finances in the
Province of Ontario. The Drummond Report, like many others in many other
jurisdictions in Canada, the US and the UK, tells pretty much the same story.
Governments are awash in red ink. Economic growth is slowing. The answer is to
cut spending. A lot of spending. Drummond says that when it comes to making the
world a better place governments will increasingly only do the minimum. The
rest of it is pretty much up to communities to figure out for themselves. And things
will not get a heck of a lot better for some time.
In short, we’re on our own.
This is not new. We’ve seen this message play out in the UK
with the Big Society. In the US, many state governments have said the same.
Government is becoming less and less of a player in our work. More precise,
government funding will be an uneven and challenging way to pay the bills for
many non-profits in the foreseeable future.
The knee-jerk answer for many non-profits is to simply slash
and burn. The first target is usually marketing and communications. Hold
spending and cut jobs, many non-profit leaders will say. But this is exactly
the wrong thing to do.
In this new environment one thing will separate winners from
losers – results.
The non-profit that can show it does the best job will win.
But there’s a catch. How do you show success?
Here’s where marketing and communications comes in. Success
has to be public. If your non-profit tells its success story to three
government mandarins than you will surely fail. You need the politicians to
know. And your stakeholders. And the entire community. The one who is the tells
the most people how successful they are will survive. To do that they will need
the best communications possible. And you can’t do that if you just laid off
your communications people.
There’s more. Most non-profits I know have poor
communications to start with. They don’t connect well with their stakeholders
and they rarely connect with the community. So, keeping the status quo for them
isn’t an option. More of this kind of communicating won’t save them.
So, what needs to happen is an investment in new
communications. Don’t blow the budget on ads or fancy new logos. Just get a
plan together that tells your story and then figure out a way to go and tell
everybody as cheaply and effectively as you can.
In these troubled times, non-profits have to communicate
more, not less.
