It is back to school season, which means notebooks, calendars, and fresh starts everywhere you look. It is also a good time to go back to basics on something every nonprofit depends on: communication.
Good communication is not complicated. It is a habit. After 20 years working with boards and staff leaders across the nonprofit sector, I keep coming back to the same handful of habits. They are simple. They are also the first thing to slip when a team gets busy.
Say thank you, specifically. When a donor gives a gift of any kind, a generic thank you note gets read once and forgotten. A specific one gets remembered. Name what they gave and how it will be used. “Thank you for the twenty laptops, our students will use them in the after-school program starting this month” tells the donor their gift landed somewhere real. That specificity is what turns a one-time gift into a repeat one.
Do not let things go quiet. If a donor, board member, or partner is waiting to hear back from someone on your team, and that person is waiting on someone else, the silence lands on the person outside your organization. They do not see your internal process. They just feel ignored. I have watched strong relationships cool off for no reason other than a slow internal handoff that nobody communicated outward.
Use simple, honest phrases. “I will get back to you by Friday” or “I want to think about that before I respond” are not brush offs. They are respectful, and they buy you time without leaving anyone hanging. I use both of these constantly in my own client work, especially when someone asks me a question I do not want to answer off the cuff.
Close the loop even when you have no news yet. A short update that says “still working on this, expect an answer by Tuesday” does more for a relationship than silence followed by a late answer or apology. People forgive a delay. They do not forgive feeling forgotten.
Match the medium to the message. A quick logistics question fits an email. A sensitive update, a piece of hard news, or anything that could be read the wrong way in text deserves a phone call or a face to face conversation. I see this go wrong most often when a board chair sends a difficult message by email to save time, and the tone lands harsher than intended.
Over communicate during any transition. This is a lesson I have learned again and again through my work helping boards and staff through leadership changes. During a transition, people fill in gaps with their own assumptions when they do not have real information, and those assumptions are usually worse than the truth. You cannot communicate enough during a season of change. Say the same thing more than once, through more than one channel, even when it feels repetitive to you.
Follow up important conversations in writing. After a hard conversation, a hiring decision, or a board vote, a short written recap protects everyone. It gives people something to refer back to, and it prevents the quiet confusion that comes from two people remembering the same conversation differently.
None of these habits take extra staff or a new system. They take intention. Pick one this month and practice it until it becomes automatic. Your board, your donors, and your team will notice the difference before you do.
Hat Tip to Your Success,
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