3 Signs You Need a Messaging Platform
If your communications are like a fully staged theatrical production with costumes, music, and lighting, then your messaging platform is like the script. Messaging provides the essential building blocks that allow you to articulate your value, key differentiators, and vision.
Just as the elements of a visual brand guide (such as fonts and colors) help guide the expression of your visual identity, a robust messaging platform provides a verbal framework for essential communications initiatives.
So how can you tell that the time has come to address your messaging?
You and your colleagues find it challenging to express who you are, what you do, or where you’re going.
One of our clients told us a story about sitting down to write an e-blast to prospective donors and finding herself daunted by the blank screen confronting her. “How can I make a high-level case for support that summarizes our campaign in an email?” she asked herself.
Then she remembered the messaging platform Libretto had recently created for her team. Drawing from key and supporting messages contained in the platform, she was able to create a substantive, focused message that accurately reflected her school’s fundraising priorities.
An effective messaging guide surfaces your key characteristics and differentiators, articulates them clearly and concisely, and provides “blessed” content that anyone in your organization can use to craft communications created for a specific purpose—from a job description to an annual fund appeal. Team members who rely on the platform to help shape that custom content are much more likely to produce communications that complement their colleagues’ efforts.
The platform can also offer inspiration and direction for storytelling by providing themes and ideas that guide the selection of engaging subjects, such as students and donor profiles. One of our higher education clients used the pillars in their institutional messaging platform (“MIssion,” “Campus,” “Community,” etc.) to drive the editorial content for each issue of their alumni magazine over a period of several years.
You want to achieve greater alignment around how your organization talks about itself.
Individuals and groups working independently in admissions, communications, or development often have different perspectives on how to describe their organization and its key initiatives. As a result, they find themselves reinventing the proverbial wheel when faced with producing a board presentation, accepted students’ letter, or web page.
Libretto’s discovery process focuses on conducting substantive, far-ranging interviews with a cross section of stakeholders associated with a particular initiative. By gathering input from participants with different perspectives—and distilling those collective observations into lucid, compelling messages—our platforms foster greater alignment around your core objectives. The shared understanding embodied in the platform simplifies and accelerates subsequent efforts to develop public-facing communications targeted to students, patients, donors, and other constituents.
In addition to the platform itself, there are other activities that can help an organization derive greater value from their investment in messaging. These include message training sessions that give participants the opportunity to link key messages with their personal experience, or the creation of a messaging toolkit with examples of how the messaging can be implemented in correspondence, social media, and other vehicles.
Your organization is at an inflection point.
Every ambitious initiative requires a foray into unfamiliar territory. As you work to raise your public profile or evolve your philanthropic culture, effecting an appropriate balance between authenticity and ambition is critical.
The creation of a messaging platform provides a forum for exploring possibilities, addressing internal concerns, and clearly articulating your priorities in ways that help you present a united front to your external audiences. In the early stages of an emerging initiative, messaging can help you socialize new ideas and navigate unfamiliar terrain.
For example, Libretto recently worked with a respected higher ed institution to develop messaging in support of their long-term goal of making the school tuition-free. Our conversations with key stakeholders—including senior administrators, board members, and thought leaders at other institutions—yielded a framework that’s being used to build momentum for the initiative during the planning stages of an upcoming fundraising campaign. The platform will provide the jumping-off point for subsequent communications developed during the campaign’s quiet phase, such as the theme, campaign-specific messaging platform, and case for support.
Investing in a messaging engagement gives organizations the opportunity to address the existential questions driving their strategic institutional and fundraising efforts, create a “playbook” that virtually anyone can use to develop on-message communications, and share their story with the world in a more compelling and consistent way.
