BY KATIE (M.K.) RAINEY
It’s January in Arkansas, so the weather is anyone’s guess. But today the cold snaps as the city prepares for an impending snowstorm, which is rare in these parts. Bread and milk disappear from the grocery shelves as if all we need to survive is tres leches in mass quantities. But on the screen, my colleagues talk of actual snowstorms they’re enduring up north as we check in before diving into our 2023 Communications & Engagement Planning session.
I think a lot of folks are familiar with strategic planning in nonprofit organizations but while a communications plan can look a lot like an organizational one, there are some key differences and a strong strategic plan is essential to any good communications department. For Creative Generation’s Communication & Engagement team, our process starts like the organization itself: with our values.
Flowers, Weeds & Seeds
For those who don’t know me, I am a big gardener. I have several raised beds in my yard I’ve built out of found wood from pallets and I can’t walk into Home Depot without spending an arm and a leg on vegetable plants and seeds. Because of this, I tend to think about my work in terms of gardening. So, while it may not yet be planting season in Arkansas, it is exactly the right time to start sowing the seeds for an effective communications plan.
We used a teaching technique I’ve been using in my classroom for years: Flowers, Weeds & Seeds. When I reflect on art-making with my students, I use flowers, weeds & seeds to think about why we create in a holistic way.
We first look at our flowers—our highlights and successes from 2022. We used hard data from our website and social platforms to measure success, and it was reassuring to see that the energy we put into the work was receiving substantial engagement with our community. Consistency was something we poured a great deal of effort into and it was heartening to see our engagement grow from it. Additionally, as a team, we felt we’d been successful with delegating, sharing the work and power, and being transparent with one another and our community as a whole.
Of course, we did have our weeds or growing edges in 2022. We realized that many of our challenges we were able to identify, however, centered around our audience and how they interact with Creative Generation and what they’re looking for in our resources. Primarily, it was a challenge to track our audience in order to understand what they most need from us. These growing edges, however, led to the big picture thinking about our goals and what seeds we could plant to meet those in the coming year.
And let me tell you, the team at Creative Generation has no shortage of seeds!
Who, How & Why
Our next step was to explore our audience deeper. We know that we have four target audiences at Creative Generation:
Young Creatives,
Educators & Teaching Artists,
Higher Education & Researchers, and
Nonprofit Organization Leaders.
Given the large differences at times in these audiences, we discussed our tone and access to resources, and how those elements can invite different audiences into important dialogues. One of our key goals pertaining to our audience this year is understanding better and becoming more familiar with them and the dialogues they wish to drive locally and globally.
What we know is that we provide our audiences with new perspectives, overview of work that is radical in approach, and efforts to connect people with research and resources relevant to their work and communities. Thinking about this and our audience’s needs, we identified areas where we need to update our platforms and make access to resources more attainable.
So in this coming year, you will see some major changes to our website that better reflect who we serve, how we serve them, and why we do this work. We also aim to have our website reflect the diversity of voices that make up our community, which includes both those who work in the collective and those we reach.
Finalizing the Vision
As we began to close out the first draft of our communications & engagement plan, we distilled our seeds into five concrete goals.
Grow our Community
Create an ongoing Dialogue with our community
Build Trust with our community
Diversify the Voice of the organization
Provide more opportunities for Engagement with our community
We have established evaluation and assessment methods to ensure that we meet these goals, many of which center around growing and supporting our audience. And I’m proud to say that this process felt genuinely collaborative, every member had a hand in sowing these seeds.
Our 2023 Communications & Engagement Plan is a living document we will revisit once a quarter to make sure we’re staying true to our message. In keeping with our values, we want to make our strategic plan transparent and open to our community—you.
2023 Communications & Engagement Plan
2022 Evaluation Summary: In 2022, Creative Generation’s Communications & Engagement team expanded to include a Director of Engagement, a Director of Communications, and an Associate for Communications & Engagement, each who collaborate with each other and all members of the Collective, but regularly with the Managing Director as well as the Manager of Community Knowledge. By January 2023, this team had been working together for approximately five months on creating a solid structure for Communications & Engagement to work from in the coming year. This team defined the organization's current Communications & Engagement Plan as adaptive, reinvented, having potential for growth, consistent, and intentional.
The team defined success in 2022 by the level of engagement across social media, website traffic, and newsletter opens and clicks with resources Creative Generation provided to our audience. The level of output on the organization’s end was consistent and transparent from September through the end of the year. This was in large part due to a strategic delegation of work as well as consistent tracking of all resources shared in our 2022 Communications Plan. Additionally, this team worked strategically on Creative Generation’s appearance and voice shared with our wider audience, focusing on making the collective more personable to the rest of the world and sharing not only resources, but personal stories and events where members of our collective presented or participated.
Some of the challenges that occurred in 2022 were around tracking demographics and meeting unique needs of specific subsets of our community.While Creative Generation is clear on the audience it targets (Young Creatives, Educators/Teaching Artists, Higher Education Faculty/Researchers, Nonprofit Organization Leaders), those groups are broad and the organization’s messaging has not necessarily reached specific groups within those audiences. Additionally, the organization’s social media has mostly been one-way and static, rather than engaging our audience to interact with our materials. Finally, one of the organization's growing edges last year was in the transition of responsibilities when a new team came on board. There weren’t necessarily many concrete onboarding processes in place and it took a few months to get into a good rhythm.
2023 Communications & Engagement Goals: Coming out of the January 2023 Planning meeting, our Communications & Engagement team identified key areas and goals to target in the coming year. These goals center around the themes of dialogue, building relationships and trust, deepening our community work, honing in on the tone and voice of the collective, and providing more opportunities for our audience to interact with the organization. The following are five key areas we aim to target in the coming year. For specific measurements of success in each category, see evaluations below.
Grow our Community
Create an ongoing Dialogue with our community
Build Trust with our community
Diversify the Voice of the organization
Provide more opportunities for Engagement with our community
Challenges: The team discussed potential challenges to our goals for 2023. Most of these challenges come back to our values as an organization. For instance, a concern is how we buck up against the typical nonprofit structure while still getting the work done. Some key questions that came up are:
How do we diversify tone?
How do we build trust with our audience?
What systems can we create that help us remain on message and in line with our values?
How can these systems support the team so that we spend more time on voice and strategy?
Audience: Who is Creative Generation? The Communications & Engagement team decided that 2023’s strategic focus would center around our audience/community and its needs. The organization’s theme of the year is Intergenerational Collaboration, so our focus will be on targeting each group in our audience and finding ways to overlap and provide avenues for collaboration within each. CG defines its target audience as:
Young Creatives,
Educators & Teaching Artists,
Higher Education Faculty & Researchers, and
Nonprofit Organization Leaders.
Key Messaging: The key messages in Creative Generation’s communications are:
Access to new perspectives
Radical approaches to difficult problems
Connection between people and the resources relevant to their lives
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Rainey, K. (2023, March 16). GENUINE COLLABORATION: Strategically & Collaboratively Growing Communications & Engagement. Creative Generation Blog. Creative Generation. Retrieved from https://www.creative-generation.org/blogs/genuine-collaborations-strategically-and-collaboratively-growing-communications-and-engagement