Mastering Nonprofit Communications: Insights from Nancy Cossio

Good morning. Happy Friday! This week, I chatted with Nancy Cossio, the Chief Communications Officer at dream: success. We talked about the good, the bad, and the growth that comes along with nonprofit communications. Here are the most insightful reflections from our talk. 

Background and Role

1. Can you tell us about your journey in nonprofit communications and how you came to be the Chief Communications Officer at dream: success?

It’s actually been so long since I started with dream: success ten years ago that I barely remember my start in the organization. I do generally remember volunteering and attending every meeting as a volunteer for a while, until I eventually got invited to serve on the leadership team for Charitable Crusaders, which was our former name (under Charitable Crusaders, we helped under-resourced families and individuals in Dallas-Fort Worth). 

From there, I think my first role was Chief Marketing Officer, which was fun and challenging. We later realized we needed a Chief Development Officer, so I moved over to that role and focused on fundraising for a few years. 

Then, we changed our mission to bringing kids around the world education and rebranded to dream: success. From there, we reevaluated our priorities as a new organization and communications was at the top of the list. We spent a LOT of time making website after website, trying to hone our brand personality and how we wanted to talk with our supporters and the world across all communication channels. 

Personally, education, reading and writing are the three loves of my life, so it’s been beyond gratifying to imagine the dream: success persona and see it come alive before me. To know we can help children around the world learn and grow makes our work eons more special.

I have always (proudly) been a HUGE nerd and literally told my mom that my first day of Pre-K was the best day of my life. Of course, I had no idea that all my classmates would speak English, and that I would be the one student in the class that only spoke Spanish, since I lived in Mexico until I was three(-ish) years old. Despite the language barrier at the beginning, I adored everything about school and was never happier than when I was learning. 

When I was learning to read and write English in school, I also wanted to start learning Spanish outside of school. I convinced my brother to teach me behind my mom’s back, since she was worried I’d get confused learning both languages at the same time. I gladly told my mom I already knew how to read and write Spanish, six months later when she thought I was ready for her to begin teaching me the mechanics of Spanish. She still cracks up at that story these days and says nothing has changed.

I often reflect on my education and I realize I was right — my education was the best gift I’ve ever received. I am so grateful I had that life-changing opportunity so early, and that so many angels in my life came together to nurture my curiosity. I want to help every child have a first day of school so wonderful they never stop learning, long after they leave the classroom. 

As an organization, dream: success has a “Why Education?” page that we created; it advocates that education is the single best investment we can make for a better world, in a factual way. Across everything we put out, I also make a conscious effort to share my “Why Education,” without ever writing my personal story — because it’s not just my story, but rather a universal story so many other students and lifelong learners can share in. So many of us have been beneficiaries of kind people who poured into us unconditionally, whether it’s our parents, an aunt, a sibling, a school teacher, or a generous scholarship donor. At least one person along the way believed in most of us and we have a duty to pay it forward to kids around the world, who are just as brilliant and deserving! It’s amazing to meet the children we serve and see how our community rallies for them all, day in and day out. 

2. What are the primary responsibilities of a Chief Communications Officer in a nonprofit organization like dream: success?

At a high-level, you’re crafting a cohesive story across every touchpoint, with the intent of reaching someone and inviting them into your community. A Chief Communications Officer’s (CCO) responsibilities include developing the brand personality to define what the organization does and doesn’t say — translating it over to what it does and doesn’t do. Whether it’s writing website copy, e-mails, board toolkits, supporter toolkits, or social media posts, everything must be unified to feel like the same living, breathing entity. It took years and years of iteration and lots of learning for us to hone who dream: success was, but it’s been beautiful getting to know the brand and having any hand in developing it. 

 Strategy and Planning

3. How do you develop a comprehensive communication strategy for a nonprofit? What are the key components that should be included?

I think you should start by thinking about your mission —  what exactly do you do and what do you want to achieve? It’s okay to keep reworking this; we finetuned it countless times. From there, hash out your audience and what appeals to them. Here’s where you have to imagine the best way to convey who you are, what you do, and why you exist to your audience. 

Then, you can go on to develop important brand assets (think brand name, logo, color palette, taglines, and icons), which will begin to show your brand’s personality. For dream: success, we chose an aspirational name that reflects how education changes absolutely everything. The various shades of blue and yellow, along with the playful sans serif font for our logo show our brand is young and bright-eyed, much like the kids we serve. Our taglines, like “education changes absolutely everything” are optimistic and bold to meet our target audience’s understanding that education is life-changing and that they can pay that gift forward today. The lightbulb in our logo and the iconic lightbulb emoji we sprinkle everywhere both show how education brightens minds and the road ahead for future generations. 

After your team has these basics, you can begin thinking about how your brand “speaks.” This is a HUGE aspect of communications, but it is more sensible to build out the brand personality after the aforementioned foundational brand assets, since you now have more of an idea of who your brand is. 

The next component is a sizable undertaking and can be overwhelming: how does your organization talk? What words will it always use and which words will it ABSOLUTELY NEVER use? If you learn best through experience like us, you could get straight to it and slowly but surely tackle every communication channel (website, fundraising widgets & e-mail sequences, e-mail, and social media) you leverage for your organization. 

For example, take our website. We prioritized our site first, since we know charities receive most donations online, producing the most significant ROI for dream: success. Ryan tackled the design components of the site and we tag-teamed the copy at first while we learned the ropes of copywriting (we had written copy before, but never with such a narrow scope for our mission). Eventually, Ryan niched down to design and I niched down to copywriting. We iterated many, many times throughout the years (yes, it really took us years to get a website we loved). 

As we made our iterations for the website, we crafted a mental (meaning we stored it only in our brains) communications guide in parallel. Yes, we really didn’t write it down anywhere for years, but would instead have excessively anal conversations where we deciphered what was appropriate for dream: success to say and not say. It was not practical, to say the least. Over time, we narrowed down how we explain what dream: success is, why education changes absolutely everything, what our monthly giving community is, how we work with local partners, etc. A lot of this fine-tuning really happened through unscripted conversations within our team, as well as one-offs with friends and strangers who took the time to let us talk our hearts out — maybe without knowing it, everyone served as a guinea pig for us to understand what questions we need to answer and what appeals are most effective for our target audience.  

We also thought about what dream: success’ tone should be for explaining topics we must discuss with delicacy, like how the kids & communities we serve lack access to education and the dire impacts of the global education crisis. We concluded our tone should be respectful, yet honest. We use language mindfully, meaning we will never say things like: “third-world country, poor, needy, impoverished, deprived, underprivileged, at-risk youth, etc.” Unless we need to tell our team and other nonprofit leaders not to use this kind of demeaning and judgmental language, of course. 

From here, we realized the ever-growing list of do’s and don’ts was exhausting to keep up with mentally and FINALLY developed a brand style guide with boilerplate language that has everything I mentioned and more (it’s still a work in progress at the moment, compared to the nerdy CCO Dreams I have for it, but it’s still infinitely better than Ryan and I asking each other what we say again for the billionth time because it is documented nowhere). 

If you’re like us, you may need to just jump head first into your communication channels and start copywriting to figure out the brand’s personality. Iterate a ton until you like the feel and sound of the words for who your organization is and what it does, while minding who it serves and its target audience (who your likely supporters will be). Of course, research is KING and like Ryan has mentioned previously, we looked to copy icons, like charity: water and Nike, for inspo to create a positive, bold, inspiring, and energetic tone for dream: success. 

It’s not a linear process to answer the question of “who your organization is” and develop a comprehensive communication strategy for a nonprofit. If you’re still reading, I’m sure you relate to our trial-and-error experience. It’s hard enough for us humans to develop our identity as we grow up, so crafting one for a non-living entity and making it feel human, as we’re learning the world of communications and its (small but mighty) intersection with nonprofits, is no easy task. So, don’t feel so down in the dumps if you have a hard time with this and it maybe takes you 5+ years to really nail your brand personality (speaking from experience). There’s hope —  keep going! 

My best advice for actually creating a fancy “comprehensive communication strategy for a nonprofit” is to write as your charity, over and over. For every channel, one at a time and piece by piece. Break every project into bite-size chunks you can actually manage to complete — as the saying goes, you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time. For example, if you need to build a website, wireframe the high-level pages you need and then break each page down into sections. Write one line of copy at a time —  before you know it, the website will be done. Then, tackle fundraising widgets & email sequences, e-mail, and social media, etc., the same way. Simply stated, take it one line of copy at a time for every project, ever. Make your brand style guide in tandem; adjust it often based on the latest and greatest guidance for yourself and your team. Don’t worry so much about it being cute, at least for now; prioritize usefulness and make it something you want to run to for answers when you get stuck. 

Good things take time and once you hit a groove, you’ll see the progress was worth every draft and every iteration that you’ll trash along the way. There will undoubtedly be more iterations for all of us, including our team, but we must imagine ourselves like a happy Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill for all eternity. And perhaps we will look back at our really-nailing-it version of today with embarrassment tomorrow, but that means we developed a better communication strategy along the way and we never stopped pushing happily (or miserably, on occasion —  communications is hard sometimes, admittedly) through the challenges. There’s a lot to be said for the painful joy of putting that much effort into anything and finally reaping the fruits of your labor, even if it’s just eventually being proud of the results. Or better yet, seeing support skyrocket for your cause manifesting for your charity to score big as you hone your strategy!

Finally, I just want to invite you to think long and hard about how you can make your organization feel friendly and familiar, so it can help the world more — that’s the secret sauce for any CCO or hat tip acting CCO (who also wears 88 other hats). At the end of the day, we have only succeeded if we can look beyond all the communication rules and guidelines to write a cohesive story that transcends the screens to touch hearts. Our greatest goal is to show the humans behind the organization —  the team, the supporters, and most of all its beneficiaries —  and connect to the human on the other side, hopefully bringing out their most benevolent and giving self. We are quite literally selling the most valuable good: a better world! 

Find your angle to share how your community can create a brighter future, together. Perhaps start with asking why you joined it first and speak from the heart every time you write…that’s what I do!