Being dedicated to your mission means far more than adding a mission statement to your website. That is not enough to truly connect with an audience in 2022 and beyond.
Even if you’re upholding your mission, consumers and non profit supporters expect far more from organizations. It’s vital to create a clear strategy for communicating what you do, how you do it, and how your audience can help you with your mission.
Your Mission Statement Fuels your Marketing (not the other way around)
What you want to avoid is having a mission statement that is completely disconnected from the rest of your brand. Your mission should be fueling all of your communication efforts. This is especially potent for nonprofits who want to make their mission louder but have so much going on that content often falls by the wayside.
Infusing your mission into your marketing ensures that you’re relating new offers and campaigns back to your larger mission. It may seem repetitive but it’s important to restate and reintroduce your mission statement regularly on all of your communication channels. This keeps folks engaged and helps solidify the work you do with your audience.
Ensuring your marketing reflects your mission is why a holistic marketing strategy (like ours) is so tremendously helpful! We build strategies that allow organizations and businesses to hit their marketing KPIs while communicating their mission.
Use your content as a tool to back up your work and show that you’re always working towards your mission.
Product Brands Choose the Right Nonprofit Partners
We are proponents of ensuring that everything your business is doing can be related back to your mission and identity. This does take some higher level thinking.
We recently spoke with Urvashi Bhatnagar on our podcast, EnvironMental, the author of a new book called the Sustainability Scorecard. (Stay tuned for that episode in August of 2022). In the book, she talks about how sustainable and conscious brands should seek out nonprofit partners that work directly with material or environments directly affected by their products and production. This makes your charitable donations a lot more relevant! It also gives you a lot more valuable material to add to your story and share in your content.
Don’t Fall Into the Greenhush
The green hush is a phenomenon where businesses don’t talk about the good their doing. This is often out of fear that it’s not “sustainable enough” or out of fear of being perceived as greenwashing. The green hush is damaging to brands that are fighting the good fight for sustainability. Greenwashers out there are shamelessly tricking sustainability-minded folks into supporting them while actual sustainability-focused brands are staying quiet!
No brand is perfect, but by not talking about the good you’re doing you’re leaving a lot to the imagination. Unfortunately this creates a disconnect between your mission and your marketing. It’s okay if your mission is big and you haven’t fully achieved it yet! Let it be something you work towards. Your mission statement should be the guiding light that keeps you moving in a positive direction.
If you’re feeling that disconnect or that you’re struggling to communicate about your mission and the work that you’re doing, schedule a time to chat with us! We’d love to help get you back on track and feeling more positively about your mission and your marketing.
